Click to see a larger view of the Guantanamo force-feeding kit. Dinner. Mmm.

Here’s my weekly update on my new cartoons.

The most recent one is this riff on the famous Norman Rockwell painting, “Freedom from Want.” I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose American values at the dinner table with the dinner table at Guantanamo.

(Added 5/5: OK, from my e-mail box I see that I need to explain this cartoon a bit further as, apparently, it has gone over some readers’ heads. The idea of the cartoon is to show that juxtaposing traditional American values at the dinner table with the “dinner table” at Guantanamo is obviously ridiculous, making the visual point that force feeding the Gitmo prisoners, who are hunger striking and holding the prisoners indefinitely without charge is inconsistent with American values. I can have some fun with injustice, that’s what cartoonists do. Lighten up, people.)

I was intrigued to find that force-feeding the hunger-striking Guantanamo inmates has its own Wikipedia page.  That is a picture of the force feeding kit on the right.

I think Ensure is funny too. It is all the food anyone needs to eat; elderly people, who don’t eat enough, drink yummy Ensure – so, like adult diapers and funeral expense insurance, Ensure is advertised extensively to the geriatric audience on Fox News and CNN. The elderly are the only ones left buying newspapers, and reading editorial cartoons too. Maybe my audience doesn’t think Ensure is so funny.

The previous cartoon, below, was this one about Texas Governor Perry and that big fertilizer plant explosion. Perry is a vocal champion for cutting regulations – and it turns out that more regulations were sorely needed in the case of the exploding plant.

Cartoonists have been clucking about this issue because Perry complained about one Perry bashing cartoon, demanding that the cartoonist be fired for being insensitive to the people killed in the explosion.  In fact, many cartoonists jumped on this bandwagon drawing similar cartoons that Perry would have objected to if he had read more newspapers – like the two below by our own Pat Bagley and John Cole.

…  but I digress! My previous cartoon this week was another Syria red line cartoon.  There have been a heck of a lot of red line cartoons this week, but they are getting lots of ink so I thought it was time for another one. I used a real crayon to draw the red lines.

I also noticed, after I drew this, that I put John McCain’s big eye on the wrong side – his big eye is really on our left, his right.  This got me to thinking, I drew the face that McCain sees when he looks in the mirror, and he’s the only person who sees that face – so he might think this is the only caricature ever drawn that actually looks like him.  That thought makes me smile.