Hi folks.
I came up with this political cartoon the other day, after reading Markos’ incisive comment about Obama seeking this elusive thing called bipartisanship the way Ahab sought his white whale.
However I thought a Star Trek theme would be much more fun, and I couldn’t pass up the delicious possibilities involved with the color schemes in the crew attire from the original show....
A few more original political cartoons below the fold.
Yeah, I had so much fun with that one that perhaps I'll come up with a few more panels in the further adventures of Captain Obama of the USS Starship America, who finds himself suddenly beamed down to a strange, rocky-yet-gaseous planet, where the waters are uncharted, and a sense of foreboding hangs in the air like gnarled ribbons of fog, and the future is uncertain.....
For now, I’ll let your imagination fill in the rest.
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I drew several political cartoons just before the Election, but never actually published any within a diary -– just in a few Open Threads now and then. So here they are, just for the record. It’s weird how this past election was barely a few months ago, and yet it already seems so concretized in the past.
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I have to give credit to the inimitable Grand Moff Texan for the Lee Atwater line -– I needed McCain to be saying something more than just a big "WTF...!!!", so he recommended popping that line in to show the arc of Republican dirty tricks and hate-mongering from Atwater to Rove to GWB, and its inevitable bottoming out with someone like Palin.
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This one is called "Tied Together Forever".
Ah, the great gnashing of teeth that is the demise of the Republican Party as we know it.
Good Times.
This one accompanied an article written by Eli over at firedoglake, but was not published here at Dkos.
The image alludes to John McCain's previous plane losses, and general hubristic recklessness. In the military, in order to be officially classified as an "Ace", one has to destroy five enemy planes. But in the case of John McCain, his war buddies gave him the nickname Ace because he managed to destroy five of his own jet fighters.
The numbers wafting in the smoke indicate the dates of the respective crashes.
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Here are a few more in my series of penguin cartoons, also from right around the election -– you might well remember the themes alluded to in the cartoons.
I’ll add a couple of the old ones in the mix for good measure, for folks who have not yet seen this little series which I am happily beating into the ground until I finally annoy myself (and others) with it.
A few of these ran on the Front Page a while back, though I don’t recall which ones.
Just to round things out, here’s one from way back, during the primary season, in early 2007. I knew somewhere in the back of my tiny brain that I had previously done a caricature of McCain, and found this one.
Here’s Rudy, Mittens, and Maverick Cadaverick McCainiac (long before the days of "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.....", and the now infamous blob-of-cottage-cheese-on-green-jello speech, and before he was bestowed with the Native American name of "Yells At Clouds").
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Last but not least, another one from the blogospheric time-machine..... Back in the ancient days of the summer of 2006. This one was from my first diary that made it to the Recco List here at the Kos.
I haven’t had a teevee for over a decade, so I don’t really know what the new politicians look like. But I googled around and found a couple of images of this young guy with the weird name -– keep in mind, this was mid-2006, when there was barely a fraction of the images available then, compared with the man who would become President of the United States two-and-a-half years later.
I had been living in Saint Louis in the two years previous, and had done canvassing and phone-banking for the Kerry campaign in the areas that border Missouri and Illinois. I had my clothes-pin firmly in place on my proboscis, truth be told, because I was no fan of Kerry. However I was struck by the ebullience of the volunteers just over the border who were working on the senatorial campaign of that guy with the weird name.
Anyway, my very first attempts at political cartooning were centered on mercilessly attacking that scummiest of pusillanimous hypocrites, one Joseph I. Lieberman. And I’d heard that Joe was assigned as the official Congressional "mentor" to the neophyte with the funny name who had this charismatic effect on everyone from those young volunteers in the East Saint Louis area to my Pop back home on Long Island, who had watched that pivotal key-note address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, and told me later, "I think this guy is gonna be President some day."
Here the seduced and corrupted Senator Lieberman (who does indeed look hauntingly like the actor who played Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars flicks...!) fruitlessly tries to work his dark magic on that little-known freshman Senator.....
It was one of my first efforts at political cartooning, and I’d like to think I’ve honed my craft considerably since the days of those simple pencil-and-pen drawings. I suppose my free-fall into the depths of political junkitude during the Bush Regime, and then joyfully discovering the netroots, propelled my desire to play my own little role in stickin' it to da man.
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All artwork created by David Ravenwood (aka Dave the Rave).
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