Usually, my cartoons come out of ideas, not outrage.  But this time, I felt both, and felt I needed to say something about this trend of attacking women’s rights and health care. Ever since the last election, when the House turned red, some in the Republican party have been attempting to chip away at these issues. It just seems like we are going backwards, or rather we WOULD go backwards if some members of the right wing GOP had their way. Contraception?  Vaginal probes?  What next, feet binding? The Republican party is heading so far to the right that yesterday Maine Senator Olympia Snowe announced that she was going to call it quits. She can’t take it anymore.  I don’t blame her, it must be hard to be a moderate in her party. And, on that note, what’s new with Rick Santorum?

I drew this cartoon after I heard the phrase used by a pundit, something about being pulled into another’s rhetoric. This is what politicians do. They repeat and repeat until we believe them. They say what the pollsters think people want to hear, and drill it back to them.  They take opponents words out of context and quote them so often, that it seeps into people’s consciousness. “Mitt likes to fire people” is one such example of a phrase taken out of context in the recent New Hampshire primary circus. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t (he probably does)–but it is an idea/phrase that will stick in some people’s minds, even if they know it was used incorrectly.

Not that it matters at the moment, for it seems Mitt will be the GOP nominee. But maybe we will hear Obama using a version of that phrase. Let’s hope he comes up with some new rhetoric, I am ready to be wowed.  I’m sure his people are working on it as we speak.

If I were a Republican, I would find Mr. Huntsman very attractive. It’s not news that he’s classically handsome, and if I were a Republican, I would find it difficult not to gravitate towards him. If only for his looks. What else is there to go on? Why not make a choice based on looks? Heck, at this stage of the game, they are all not telling the truth anyway.

The lukewarm attitude towards Mitt reminds me of a cartoon of mine that The New Yorker published in 1983. You can just insert Mitt Romney’s name in the fortune cookie caption.  It’s about the Democratic Presidential nominee Walter Mondale, and the cartoon reflects the tepid feelings towards Fritz by the Democratic party. I don’t recall there being such a circus back then as we have now, however. Also, parenthetically, this cartoon was my second sale to The New Yorker, and my first political cartoon for them.