CSotD: More Cartooning Controversies

I’m surprised and a bit disappointed that more political cartoonists in Britain haven’t jumped on Robert Jenrick’s heartless order to paint over and remove welcoming cartoons for refugee kids at processing centers.

It’s not simply that Jenrick has no pity on children. He’s apparently not even able to pick them out of the crowd.

So good on Ben Jennings for this one, which combines the removal of the cartoons with Jenrick (and Suella Braverman)’s continued attempts to stop desperate migrants from crossing the Channel.

As noted here before, Guy Venables received a large response from his suggestion that cartoonists replace the destroyed artwork, though — as he explained in a radio talk show segment — he quickly figured out that the immigration authorities were not going to allow anyone to do that.

But the group is planning other ways to help refugee kids, within the restrictions of the Immigration Ministry, which means that there has been a positive outcome from a cruel event.

Also on the positive side, Alan Moir gets a laff for this summation of Putin’s current status as he works to re-establish his image in the wake of the scare brought about by the semi-attempted-whatever-that-was.

While on a substantially grimmer note, David Rowe offers this illustration for the Financial Review, which echoes Moir’s suggestion that Putin is not feeling all that invulnerable at the moment.

Elsewhere, it’s been a tough few weeks for cartoonists and cartooning. In addition to the issues covered by DD Degg, we’ve now seen Patrick Chappatte come under fire for this cartoon, which was intended to note India now having more people than China.

As he writes,

I depicted a cheerful, overcrowded Indian train overtaking a somewhat gloomy Chinese bullet train. Unfortunately, my train collided with some sacred cows, among them Indian nationalist pride, in fierce competition with China, and the place railroads seem to hold in the country’s national psyche.

It’s not hard to provoke the Modi administration, though this seems like a silly matter. But, silly or serious, Chappatte outlines the rest of the pushback he got.

The solution is to avoid commenting on those who you know will raise hell no matter what you say and no matter what you intend.

Which is what they want: Either give us absolute praise and adulation or keep silent.

Which brings us to the ongoing case of Iranian cartoonist Atena Farghadani, once more imprisoned in Iran for having tweaked the noses of the mullahs.

This isn’t the first time Farghadani has been in trouble, and in prison, and I covered her previous dust-up in 2015. It’s worth clicking this link because other cartoonists jumped in to comment on her cause.

In that case, she had used a popular parable to criticize the powers that be and was sentenced to 12 years in prison, though she got out and has now apparently given them yet another dose of sass.

This time around seems more serious. She is getting moral support, in addition from Cartoonists Rights, from the Committee to Protect Journalists, but a recent report from Cartooning for Peace said she had been transferred to the prison hospital and “admitted to intensive care on 21 June 2023 after being assaulted in prison and going on hunger strike because her food had been poisoned.”

Her situation, and her stubborn courage, make cartooning issues elsewhere seem petty.

Still, even petty issues like facts and fairness matter. Steve Kelley (Creators) starts off with personal insults and unproven conspiracy theories about the president, combining them with the fact that Hunter got an exotic dancer pregnant and she carried the child to term and has been getting child support. As one would expect.

Somehow Kelley and others have decided that the outcome of this nearly-anonymous one-night stand is that the child should be welcomed into the Biden family circle. This is a farcical suggestion and an unworthy smear.

It would be interesting to know how many unacknowledged children of Congress members are out there, and how many rabidly pro-life legislators have quietly paid to make others go away prior to birth.

And how conservatives really feel about men who have sex with strippers.

Mike Smith (KFS) accurately forecast the response to a small bag of coke someone dropped in a public area of the White House. It was in a heavily trafficked area, the President was out of town and Hunter was nowhere near the place, but Trump announced that it was theirs, and his sycophant chorus has joined in.

Never mind the unlikelihood that it had anything to do with the Bidens, and never mind the long, substantial history of drugs finding their way into the White House.

These partisan attacks are so clearly illogical and fact-free that they amount to lies, not spin.

Mike Lester (AMS), for example, offers an attack which somehow suggests that there is no investigation of the drug, which is clearly not true, coupled with the assumption that it might be Hunter’s, though, as noted, he wasn’t present.

Lester does have a point, in that Biden has acknowledged his son’s addiction, which I suppose means he should have called the police, assuming he’d actually found cocaine in his son’s possession.

So the point is that he is not Lucius Junius Brutus, who condemned his own sons to death, and who would be forgotten if there’d been many fathers like him who put patriotism ahead of parenting.

Touché, I guess.

I’m not sure Ed Hall’s response is any more high-minded, but he’s right in that there has been rampant speculation about Don Jr’s hyped-up videos and whether his excited speaking style suggests a little chemical enhancement.

For that matter, Don Sr.’s lack of normal sleeping hours have given a boost to rumors that he’s misusing Adderall.

Hall, however, makes a fair point by mocking Trump’s “a lot of people are saying,” because the phrase is a clue that the speaker is spreading — perhaps starting — a rumor for which he has no proof.

There’s even a book called “A Lot of People Are Saying,” inspired by Trump’s trend towards spreading ungrounded theories. As the Intelligencer explains in its review