👋“Saying Goodbye” Edition

Congress returned to Washington this week, proving once again that America’s most exclusive retirement community still occasionally conducts legislative business. With Mitch McConnell’s health dominating headlines and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle aging faster than the Capitol dome, voters are left wondering whether they’re electing representatives or choosing the cast for The Golden Bachelor: Senate Edition. Experience is valuable. But eventually, so are annual physicals.

Washington’s most important committee may no longer be Appropriations. It’s Geriatrics. Every legislative session now comes with a side order of medical speculation as lawmakers disappear from public view, staff insist everything is fine, and the rest of the country wonders whether the next vacancy will be filled by an election or an obituary.

If Congress keeps aging at this pace, C-SPAN may have to add a medical correspondent.

Rick McKee - cagle.com/mckee

Jack Ohman - Substack and Tribune Content Agency

Clay Bennett - Tribune Content Agency

Lalo Alcaraz - Andrews McMeel

Clay Jones - Substack and Claytoonz

Nick Anderson - Tribune Content Agency and Substack

Bill Bramhall - Tribune Content Agency

Speaking of goodbyes, the editorial cartooning profession lost a giant Monday with the passing of Pat Oliphant at the age of 90.

There are very few people about whom it can honestly be said they changed an art form. Pat Oliphant was one of them.

"I think he was the best cartoonist of the last 100 years," remarked Edward Sorel, a famous magazine illustrator and friend of Oliphant. "There hasn't been anybody like him."

His drawings weren’t merely clever. They were fearless. His pen had the rare ability to slice through layers of political spin and expose the uncomfortable truth hiding underneath. Presidents feared him. Politicians dreaded opening the morning newspaper. Readers stopped to study his work because every line served a purpose, every caricature revealed character, and every cartoon demanded a reaction.

Oliphant once said the goal of a political cartoon was simple: “Make people write letters to the editor. Get mad.” He succeeded better than anyone of his generation. His cartoons didn’t comfort readers. They challenged them. Whether he was skewering Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Donald Trump, no one escaped his scrutiny. He didn’t pick sides. He picked targets. Usually the powerful.

His influence on editorial cartooning is impossible to overstate. Every cartoonist working today—whether they realize it or not—draws in a profession he helped redefine. His sparse compositions, devastating caricatures and uncompromising independence raised the standard for everyone who followed. He proved that a single drawing, executed with intelligence and courage, could say more than a thousand-word editorial.

Perhaps what we admired most was his refusal to become part of the club. He famously avoided friendships with politicians because he believed cartoonists shouldn’t socialize with the people they were supposed to hold accountable. That independence wasn’t an affectation. It was a philosophy. Satirists don’t exist to make the powerful comfortable. They exist to make them nervous.

Ironically, Oliphant’s eyesight began failing just as Donald Trump emerged onto the political stage. Friends said everything in his remarkable career had prepared him for a figure like Trump, but glaucoma and macular degeneration robbed him of the chance to chronicle that era as fully as he deserved. Even so, his body of work remains one of the great visual records of modern American politics.

Political cartooning is an endangered profession. Newspapers have shrunk. Syndication has withered. Newsrooms have concluded they can do without the one person whose job was to make everyone equally uncomfortable. Through it all, Pat Oliphant remained proof of what the profession could be at its very best: fearless, original, intellectually rigorous and wickedly funny.

There won’t be another Pat Oliphant. His pen is finally still. The rest of us are fortunate we got to watch it move.