DarylCagle.comSince we have so many devoted readers with as many opinions about politics as our cartoonists, I thought it would be cool to do an open thread tonight and let you all have at it LIVE during tonight’s Presidential debate.
To start the discussion, here’s my pre-debate cartoon (don’t miss all our great Debate Cartoons):
Who do you think will win? Are you rooting for anyone? What do you hope they discuss? Comment away below!
Recently, I spent two weeks embarking on a speaking tour of India on behalf of the U.S. State Department (check out all my blog posts here). Although the schedule was busy and sometimes hectic, I did manage to find some spare time to do some sketching of my trip:
The main thing most American’s notice when they arrive in India is the poverty. When I arrived in Mumbai and Delhi, the crowds of beggars were impressive, with newborn babies pressed against the windows of whatever car I was in as the desperately poor pushed through traffic on the streets. They followed me down the street wherever I walked in Mumbai and Delhi – but not in Kerala.
Probably the second biggest impression for me, and for most Americans in India is the crazy traffic. The disregard for traffic laws is awesome – combine with driving on the wrong side of the road there is a constant sense that my car is hurdling toward a head-on collision. India’s traffic is wonderful drama. I’m still shaking.
I gave speeches at schools all over India, and they all had a funny, common sequence of events. First, I would be invited for a cup of sweet tea with the Dean of the school or teachers, while a room crammed with students waited patiently until we were quite late for my talk. Then it would take ten to fifteen awkward minutes, after we’re already late, to set up the projector for my Powerpoint presentation.
After my presentation the students rush up to the front of the room, asking me to do sketches, which I’m usually happy to do. Sometimes I’d be given more tea, groups of girls would tell me about how they all knew my work already, because my cartoons appear in their high school textbooks in India (something I’d like to see). The college talks in India were great fun.
The food in India was wonderful – I think I was steered to the best places to eat, and the food was truly great. I can’t get used to eating with the fingers rather than a knife and fork, though.
I thought about eating with my fingers at a local favorite India restaurant here in California after I got back, just to show what I had learned, but my local manners got the better of me.
We have an extensive collection of cartoons archived here on Cagle.com, and from time to time, it’s fun to take a look back at how our cartoonists covered events in the past.
With the first big Presidential debate approaching between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, I thought it’d be fun to look back at this collection of cartoons about the Presidential debates in 2008 between Obama and Arizona Senator John McCain.
Click the image below to view the full collection of 2008 Debate cartoons!
I was inspired to draw this cartoon by President Obama’s recent television ad campaign in Pakistan, designed to quell the riots that seemed to be in response to a video that some nut posted on Youtube. I thought the ad campaign was ridiculous, and Obama’s constant, never-ending re-affirmations of his respect for Islam are as tiresome as they are ineffective in making the Pakistanis love us more. Considering the president as the source of the message and considering our cultural differences, this simply isn’t a message that will work with the Pakistani audience – that is the point of the cartoon.
It seems our readers’ comments focused more on my Obama-bashing, and the fact that I gave the president boobs. Yes, Obama is indeed dressed inappropriately to be promoting Islam, again, that’s the point. Our conservative cartoonist, Gary McCoy sent this comment:
“Intended or not, very interesting social science experiment, Daryl. You do a rare “conservative” cartoon, and though you get swarms of negative feedback, none of it contains the kind of hateful vitriol your usual left-leaning pals reserve for Eric Allie and me. Kudos for stepping out of your comfort zone though. Oh, and thanks for getting me hate-posts on a day when I didn’t even do a cartoon. I was feeling lonely there for a minute.”
The mail and the comments seemed pretty angry to me; here are some examples …
Steven Dinero: Nope, doesnt work on so many levels. Sorry.
JaJa888: I thought Mr. Cagle was a liberal. I really hope that this is sarcasm, because otherwise the propaganda is getting to him…
Kevin Mystic-Rose Rosenthal: Pandering to the radical nut jobs. Is that your intent?
Cora Elizabeth Mason: I do not like it. It is insulting to the POTUS, not good at all, and why make him breasts?
Lissa Albert: Dems will hate it (as is evidenced here) and many will see the caustic humoreality of it. I happen to think this is brilliantly edgy!
Susan J Frary: I find it offensive. I also think it is not based on any facts, but on false perceptions. President Obama is working hard to develop peaceful relationships with many in the Middle East – failing to offend them is not easy. That is why it is called DIPLOMACY.
Rob McGrath: Not sure why his boobs are bigger than his ears.
Diane Hargreaves Talbot: You’d waste your chutzpah on this tripe? Really? Cagle? Who are you and what have you done with Daryl Cagle? Totally incendiary and inappropriate and wrong. Yuck.
Sue Hulett: Maybe you should go read his UN speech again. You seem to have misread it, or else you really are just an ass hat.
What do you think? Comment below, or drop us a line on our Facebook page.
Things aren’t looking too good these days for Mitt Romney’s campaign. Gaffe after gaffe has led him to dig a deep hole he now has to try and climb out of…
If you tune into conservative media outlets, they’ll tell you the bad polling data is a liberal media plot to keep Republicans from voting…
Meanwhile, Romney is still on the hook for telling fundraisers he thinks nearly half the people in the country are “lazy” and feel “entitled” to government benefits, despite all the other taxes they pay…
Romney hasn’t convinced critics that his comments don’t represent his real opinions about the 47 percent. Instead, he tried to piggy-back on the outcry over an old video of Barack Obama talking about “redistribution” of wealth, but that only distracted voters for a short amount of time…
Unfortunately for Republicans, Romney’s personality is about as warm and inviting as plants that grow in the heat of the desert…
Anyone who purchased the iPhone 5 last week (check out all our iPhone 5 cartoons) came away saying one thing – the Apple Maps app stinks! To their credit, Apple CEO Tim Cook apologized Friday for the glitchy program, telling consumers the program “fell short.” Even our Apple-loving cartoonists were angry about the rare misstep.
Mike Keefe decided to go after Apple Maps and the so-called “geniuses” that work at Apple…
If the NFL hadn’t made a deal with the referees, Ottawa Citizen cartoonist Cam Cardow had the soultion to get rid of those pesky replacement refs…
Columbus Dispatch cartoonist Nate Beeler remembered back to the time when Apple really did create innovative products…
While John Cole of the Scranton Times-Tribune just felt betrayed…
Every Friday, we collect the best political cartoons of the week and stuff them into one big, glorious slideshow.
So just relax and catch up on a week’s worth of news with our Best Cartoons of the Week slideshow.
Last week, my daughter Susie Cagle, a journalist and cartoonist, sat down with Cartoonist Rights Network International’s Executive Director, Robert Russell, to discuss how she was wrongfully arrested twice by Oakland, California police. In fact, a charge from her first arrest, failing to leave the scene of a riot, has never been dismissed by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.
Susie also talks about the state of media, and how paid reporters who have been laid off have been replaced by citizen journalists, individuals who are personally passionate about the topics they’re covering and documenting, which allows police and government officials to ignore their rights as journalists.
“The mayor of Oakland in February or March, called them fake journalists, fake media, and we need to figure out a way to separate them from the real journalists,” Susie said. “It really goes to show a deep misunderstanding of what’s happening in media right now.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZVjE-lH6HM]
And here are some of Susie’s drawings. To see more, visit her Web site or follow her on twitter @susie_c.
I was so rushed with the end of my India trip that I neglected to do a post about my visit to Hyderabad, the huge, hi-tech city in the middle of India. The Hyderabad cartoonists were great, and I enjoyed drinking with them through the night in the backyard of the Press Club, where I had some particularly hot Biriyani that made me sweat and shake, to the amusement of my colleagues. I especially enjoyed meeting renowned, veteran Hyderabad cartoonist, Mohan, who moved on from being a local, Telegu language political cartoonist for the huge Sakshi newspaper, to running his own animation studio.
The US Consulate put on a lovely show of my work in cooperation with the Muse Art Gallery at the Marriott Hotel in Hyderabad – they did a great job. I was impressed that they included my more edgy cartoons that would have gotten me thrown in jail, if America suffered the same, poor press freedoms as India.
I gave speeches at the Sri Venkateswara College of Fine Arts and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and at each a bunch of girls ran up to me after my talk to tell me how they have known my work for years because my cartoons appeared in their high school textbooks, which was fun.
There has been a lot of talk in India recently about banning some cartoons from high school text books, in particular, this one (below right).
This textbook cartoon controversy was much more interesting to the Indian cartoonists that I met than the brouhaha about the jailing of Aseem Trivedi, which was raging at the time. The cartoon was the subject of debate in the Indian Parliament, where it was described as racist, for showing former Indian Prime Minister Nehru, supposedly whipping Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a lower caste politician who is riding a snail. In fact, Nehru is not whipping Ambedkar – both Nehru and Ambedkar are whipping the snail, because they want the process of writing India’s new constitution to go faster.
In America we have idiots who fight to take evolution out of science text books all the time, so the idea that the Indian cartoonists were so invested in this debate, when one of their colleagues was thrown in jail for drawing their Parliament building as a toilet, seemed to be misplaced priorities to me.
I was very impressed by the colored pencil work of Shri Shankar Parmarthy, the staff cartoonist for the Sakshi newspaper, who did this great caricature of me standing in front of Hyderabad’s historic Charminar (top right).
I’ve posted Shankar’s brilliant Mother Teresa and Dalai Lama caricatures below. Impressive stuff.
Recently, Mitt Romney has been harshly criticized in the media over his comments to a group of fundraisers labeling 47 percent of Americans as “lazy” and “entitled” to government support (view all our Romney gaffe cartoons). In an attempt to sidestep criticism, Romney recently called out President Obama for his desire to “redistribute” wealth, something of a dog-whistle to conservatives convinced Democrats are modern day socialists. Here is my cartoon:
I thought the classic phrase “the Emperor has no clothes” worked well visually for the point I was trying to convey, but it occurred to me afterwards that by drawing Romney naked, I omitted something important that is at the core of his beliefs – the religious “garments” he wears as underwear.
For Mormons, these temple “garments” are a special piece of clothing worn to represent a symbolic gesture of the promises they have made to God, and are seen as either a symbolic or literal source of protection from the evils of the world.
There’s a long tradition among editorial cartoonists of drawing politicians in their underwear, but not religious underwear like this. For instance, many cartoonists illustrated President Clinton’s sexual dalliances by drawing him with his pants around his ankles and wearing boxer shorts with a pattern of little hearts.
The same underwear treatment is given to serial adulterer politicians like Newt Gingrich, Arnold Schwarzenegger and too many members of congress to list. Even Batman and Superman wear their underwear on top of their tights. As an editorial cartoonist, I cherish my right to draw anyone I want in their underwear.
Here are a couple of cartoons I’ve drawn featuring Romney wearing his Mormon “garments.” I have gotten a bit of flack from readers about drawing the mysterious underwear on Romney, but not as much as I expected:
Sipa news agency is reporting that French police have detained a man who is suspected of threatening to decapitate Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor-in-chief and cartoonist of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, after publishing naked caricactures of the Prophet Muhammad.
According to the report, the 43-year-old man is suspected of making the threat on an Internet forum, allegedly writing, “The essential thing is not to let him live in peace.”
Speaking about the cartoons, White House spokesman Jay Carney said the Obama administration believed the cartoons “will be deeply offensive to many and have the potential to be inflammatory.”
“We don’t question the right of something like this to be published,” he said. “We just question the judgment behind the decision to publish it.”
Charbonnier, who goes by the pen name “Charb,” defended the cartoons to the AP in part by telling reporters that Muhammad isn’t sacred to him.
“I don’t blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings,” he said. “I live under French law. I don’t live under Quranic law.”
He also said he doesn’t regret publishing the cartoons, nor does he take responsibility for any violence that may ensue.
“We’ve had 1,000 issues and only three problems, all after front pages about radical Islam.”
Watch the video from the AP here:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-059HXuW1E]
Previously: France Closes 20 Embassies Over Naked Muhammad Cartoons
Related: Cartoons about the reaction to drawings of the prophet Muhammad
Every Friday, we collect the best political cartoons of the week and stuff them into one big, glorious slideshow.
So just relax and catch up on a week’s worth of news with our Best Cartoons of the Week slideshow.
