Current Democrat and Republican Mascots were created in a cartoon caused by the press lieing?

PR Log (Press Release) – Nov 04, 2008 – The Democratic Republicans have no Mascot we have figureheads!

While the other parties use an animal to show what they represent.  One chosen by my cousin Andrew Jackson because many called him Jackass instead of Jackson is only a monument to the tenaciousness of my cousin Andrew Jackson.  Our Party views President Jackson’s choice for Mascot rejected because there is no logic in it except to mock those that have already passed on. This symbol of the party was born in the imagination of cartoonist Thomas Nast and first appeared in Harper's Weekly on November 7, 1874.
An 1860 issue of Railsplitter and an 1872 cartoon in Harper's Weekly connected elephants with Republicans, but it was Nast who provided the party with its symbol. Oddly, two unconnected events led to the birth of the Republican Elephant. James Gordon
Bennett's New York Herald raised the cry of "Caesarism" in connection with the possibility of a thirdterm try for President Ulysses S. Grant. The issue was taken up by the Democratic
politicians in 1874, halfway through Grant's second term and just before the midterm elections, and helped disaffect Republican voters. While the illustrated journals were depicting Grant wearing a crown, the Herald involved itself in another circulation-builder in an entirely different, nonpolitical area. This was the Central Park Menagerie Scare of 1874, a delightful hoax perpetrated by the Herald. They ran a story, totally untrue, that the animals in the zoo had broken loose and were roaming the wilds of New York's Central Park in search of prey. Cartoonist Thomas Nast took the two examples of the Herald enterprise and put them together in a cartoon for Harper's Weekly. He showed an ass (symbolizing the Herald) wearing a lion's skin (the scary prospect of Caesarism) frightening away the animals in the forest (Central Park). The caption quoted a familiar fable: "An ass having put on a lion's skin roamed about in the forest and amused himself by frightening all the foolish animals he met within his wanderings."  One of the foolish animals in the cartoon was an elephant, representing the Republican vote - not the party, the Republican vote - which was being frightened away from its normal ties by the phony scare of Caesarism. In a subsequent cartoon on November 21, 1874, after the election in which the Republicans did badly, Nast followed up the idea by showing the elephant in a trap, illustrating the way the Republican vote had been decoyed from its normal allegiance. Other cartoonists picked up the symbol, and the elephant soon ceased to be the vote and became the party itself: the jackass, now referred to as the donkey, made a natural transition from representing the Herald to representing the Democratic party that had frightened the elephant.  --From William Safire's New Language of Politics, Revised edition, Collier Books, New York, 1972.
Source: www.gop.com

The now-famous Democratic donkey was first associated with Democrat Andrew Jackson's 1828 presidential campaign. His opponents called him a jackass (a donkey), and Jackson decided to use the image of the strong-willed animal on his campaign posters. Later, cartoonist Thomas Nast used the Democratic donkey in newspaper cartoons and made the symbol famous.


Nast invented another famous symbol——the Republican elephant. In
a cartoon that appeared in Harper's Weekly in 1874, Nast drew a donkey
clothed in lion's skin, scaring away all the animals at the zoo. One of
those animals, the elephant, was labeled ““The Republican Vote.””
That's all it took for the elephant to become associated with the
Republican Party.

Therefore we are not using animals made by a cartoonist from 1874 but humans.
Yes humans.  Not even an eagle or falcon which are the fastest creatures on earth.  Which humans?  Seven real men that shaped our country through upright ideals and visions for where this country was to go well centuries past their deaths. Visionaries!                                  

They are (in no particular order):
Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Andrew Jackson.

Why do we pick these men?  As it was already written, these were the real men that molded this nation into being what it was.  They had an understanding of how to deal with real problems.
Just study their history to find out why we choose to have figureheads instead of mascots.