Rx Against COVID Memory Fog

Senator Randy Paul (R-KY) led a star chamber hearing this week aimed at trapping Dr. Anthony Fauci into somehow committing perjury. Even if only about the color of his tie. 

So today's Graphical History Tour offers a little reminder of what the world was going through a mere six years ago.

March, 2020

We first heard of this novel virus as a problem in far-off China and aboard cruise ships. The Trump Administration responded by trying to quarantine cruise ship passengers, naming Vice President Mike Pence in charge of addressing the health threat, and calling communicable disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci out of retirement for his expertise.

March, 2020

In the days between my drawing this cartoon and its publication anywhere, hairdressers — and just about every other public service industry — were closing up their shops. The nation hunkered down, stopping first to empty store shelves of toilet paper.

April, 2020

Within the first weeks, everybody was working from home except doctors, nurses, emergency responders, and grocery store employees. Schools tried to figure out how to teach students remotely. Senior citizen homes closed their doors to visitors. Afternoon and late night chat shows shut down immediately; the halting of other television and movie production would take a while to affect viewers. Major League Baseball played to empty stadiums.

Meanwhile, bodies piled up in makeshift morgues.

March, 2020

We didn't know much about the corona virus, which was all that much scarier for everyone. What little we were learning did not inspire confidence: it could spread through the air, the body had no natural defense against it, and any vaccine or cure was yet to be found.

Donald Trump soon discovered that by going on live television to brief the nation about the pandemic, he could command the media's undivided attention. It did not matter at all whether he had the slightest idea what he was talking about; he could just make any shit up as long as it fed his bottomless ego to be on TV.

He even boasted about getting bigger ratings than the Superbowl.

March, 2020

We didn't see much any more of Vice President Pence, supposedly the nation's COVID Czar. I guess he went back to his previous job as the president's golf caddy and Ambassador to Televangelistan.

For his part, Trump promised that the pandemic would be over by Easter, then by Mothers' Day, then by Flag Day, then by summer. Operating without a medical license, he prescribed disinfectant, horse deworming medicine, and shining bright light up one's rectum — none of which treatments had any basis in scientific fact.

April, 2020

When Kim Jong Il, Supreme Leader of North Korea, disappeared from public view for several weeks, there was speculation that he might be dead (he isn't). When dark humor is all a cartoonist has to offer, well, the darker the better.

May, 2020

Despite reports of COVID tearing through church choirs before The Shutdown, it didn't take long for the religious right to complain against social distancing. Not being allowed to pack the pews severely impacted the health of brick and mortar evangelists' bank balances, so Trump told the nation to reopen all the churches.

December, 2020

2020 dragged on. Every time we thought there was an end in sight, COVID cases spiked again. 

October, 2020

After a few months, the television networks decided against giving Donald Trump free air time to tout quack cures and predict COVID's miraculous disappearance, and Trump gave up taking a daily position behind the podium where he might be asked uncomfortable questions. Dr. Fauci became the public face of the government's response to the pandemic, delivering a frank, honest, and un-sugar-coated medical advice.

July, 2020

But by summer, the trolls and conspiracy mongers of the internet, egged on by Fox Noise and the rest of right-wing media, were hard at work promoting their own hare-brained fantasies about where the virus came from. Conservatism being opposed to anything associated with promoting the common good, they complained loudly that masks and social distancing infringed on individual rights.

September, 2020

They came up with the idea of publishing "face mask exemption cards," although the things carried no legal, scientific, medical, or practical authority. One was supposed to present the card at any office or business that had a policy mandating the wearing of masks, as if the business had some obligation to honor the card.

July, 2020

Until vaccines were finally developed roughly a year after the virus was first identified, the rest of us had to manufacture our own defenses.

AYBOTYWFYA

Most of my Graphical History Tours of vintage cartoons take us back a hundred years, occasionally fifty. When I dig through my own work, we go back forty, thirty, twenty, and ten years.

But the Big Question facing us today is this: Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?

In no presidential election year since FDR has the answer to that question been so stark.

Perhaps you remember March of 2020.

I have very personal reasons for continuing to be upset by the advent of COVID-19: after cancelling regular visits to my parents out of concern about potentially exposing them to the virus, I soon reversed that decision when Mom's cancer returned, and she chose to forgo further treatment.

Waiting in vain for the outside world's crisis to end, we had to postpone her funeral for month after month after she passed.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2020

There are a million other such stories out there, but now you know where I was coming from.

At first, Vice President Mike Pence was put in charge of the U.S. government response to the coronavirus pandemic. The Center for Disease Control's Dr.  Fauci, well-known in the LGBTQ+ community as one of the early responders to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980's, became familiar to millions of Americans as a leading authority on how "novel viruses" spread and what is involved in creating a vaccine.

for Q Syndicate, March 2020

By the time this cartoon appeared anywhere, hair salons were already shutting down. As were schools, houses of worship, movie theatres, bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, late night talk shows, and — at the height of the presidential primaries — campaign rallies and polling places.

So too was Q Syndicate. Its client publications, dependent on advertising from businesses that were shutting down, suspended publishing, meaning there was nobody to whom to sell my cartoons. 

Turning now to the sports page:

March Madness (the NCAA basketball version) was cancelled five days before the games were scheduled to start. Major League Baseball cut the pre-season short and put the regular season on indefinite hold. (When the MLB season finally opened in July, games were played at first to empty stands and later to cardboard cut-outs.)

Daily newspapers had no news for the sports section other than speculating what teams might have won or lost if they hadn't sent everybody home. I don't know how ESPN, Fox Sports, and all the Tennis/Golf/Soccer/NASCAR/Poker channels managed to fill 24 hours of air time every day; even the ten minutes allotted to sports in every local TV news program seemed a lot to compose.

But they managed to do so anyway.

In spite of having no publisher, I kept drawing cartoons, if only to keep in practice.

And to vent. Venting was vital. It still is.

Gun nuts weren't the only people stockpiling.

Anticipating a breakdown of the nation's supply chain, Americans stocked up on whatever was rumored to be on the verge of short supply — a self-fulfilling prophecy. It started with toilet paper and quickly moved on to bottled water, hand sanitizer, PPE masks, flour, yeast, and even bicycles.

Vice President Pence more or less disappeared from view once Donald Trump started taking the podium at the nearly daily announcements to the media and the nation on the pandemic. The problem with that, of course, is that Trump seems to believe that anything he wants to be the truth can be true if he but says it aloud.

So he stated firmly that the pandemic would be over in time for Easter. "Like a miracle."

Reporters would then ask questions of the health experts standing beside him, who had to come up with ways of telling the nation that the President didn't know what he was talking about without saying that the President didn't know what he was talking about.

What mattered more to Donald Trump was that, while he was starved of the adulation of adoring crowds at campaign rallies, he could crow on Twitter that his press conferences were "a ratings hit" with "'Monday Night Football' numbers."

The pandemic was not under control by Easter. People who still had jobs were still working from home. People whose jobs disappeared couldn't go out in search of new employment. Assisted living facilities closed their doors to all visitors. Soon only hospital emergency rooms were busy. And morgues...

We all remember it, don't we?

Don't we?

There Will Be No Math

Gosh, it's difficult not to pick on Florida so much of the time, but apparently its Department of Education has banned 41% of proposed mathematics textbooks because, um, Critical Race Theory, or Don't Say Gay, or, I don't know, because it makes Florida Man feel bad?

2020 in Masochistic Review

As is my wont on Circumcision of Our Lord Day, I pause to reflect on the headlines and cartoons of the year gone by.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?

Sounds like an attractive plan of action this time around.

Q Toon: Auld Lang v. Syne

Extending 2020? Doesn't everybody think it was more than long enough?

Well, not a certain occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue desperate to find some way to keep January 20, 2021 from happening.

Adding more months onto everyone's least favorite year might not win him any new fans, but you can bet his legions of Trumpster cultists would suddenly be agitating to observe Undecember, Duodecember, Tredecember, ad infinitemcember all the way to 2025 and beyond. 

And it isn't any more ludicrous than any of the other frivolous lawsuits filed on the Donald's behalf.

When L. Lin Wood, Jr. filed one of those suits with the attestation that:

...it was surely a Freudian slip of epic propecia. Proportions!

I only hope that nobody on the Team That Couldn't Sue Straight sees this cartoon in time to take this argument to court.

Q Toon: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

I started to get the idea for this week's cartoon driving to work the other morning when "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," sung by Topsy Chapman, came up on the iPod playlist. And I ended up learning something about the song I had never noticed before.

LGBTQ+ wags have had fun with the "Make the yuletide gay" line since Paul Lynde was a pup, and in a quarter century of drawing cartoons for the LGBTQ+ press, I'm sure I must have at least alluded to it once. I thought, however, that this particular verse had resonance for 2020. 

Later, when I went on line to get the lyrics for pitching the idea to my editors, however, the words didn't seem as a propos as I had thought they were in the car.

I thought about changing the words, but that would have required changing the cartoon to excuse my bowdlerization. Then, when I looked up the writers of the song, I found that there have been a number of revisions of the lyrics, including this particular stanza.

"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is from the Judy Garland film, "Meet Me In St. Louis." In case you haven't seen it, Judy sings this song to her little sister, who is upset that the family has to move away from the titular city right before Christmas.

Years later, when Frank Sinatra wanted to sing the song on a Christmas album of his, he complained that the line "Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow" was too much of a downer; so he got the line changed to "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough." 

That was the line I found when looking up the lyrics. It really doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the context of the stanza, but I'd never really noticed that there was more than one version of the verse before.

If Frank didn't like the muddling through stuff, he would have hated the original first verse:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas:

It may be your last.

Next year, we all may be living in the past...

Garland, co-star Tom Drake, and director Vincent Minelli certainly hated those lyrics, and practically had to twist Hugh Martin's arms and screw his thumbs before he finally agreed to "let your heart be light" instead.

If he hadn't given in, that's one Christmas Standard none of us would ever have heard.

It All Comes Down to This

Screengrab of a message from the Trump campaign

 Yeah, that about sums it up.

QToon: In Fairness

Today's cartoon quotes from a tweet by Republican Senator Susan Collins over the weekend:

The danger in drawing about something because it didn't happen or wasn't said is that while you're waiting for your syndicate to send the cartoon out and newspapers to print it, that thing that didn't happen or wasn't said might just get itself happened or said.

But Senator Collins has racked up such a long history of raising the hopes of liberals and moderates only to dash them when time comes for her to act, I thought there was every likelihood that she would knuckle under to Republican Party Orthodoxy in the end.

So yesterday, Collins did say that she wouldn't vote for whomever Trump nominates.

The catch to what Collins said yesterday is that she hasn't — yet — said how she'd vote on a Trump nominee after November 3. She's merely against voting before the election. Voters in Maine may wish to know how she intends to vote, especially if Joe Biden were to beat Donald Trump, before they decide whether or not to vote for her.

The handful of Republican moderates in the Senate may recognize their ethical dilemma, but they are vastly outnumbered by doctrinaire Republicans who have been salivating at the prospect of a permanent Republican majority on the Supreme Court for over half a century.

Doctrinaire conservatives still have difficulty coming up with a coherent explanation why refusing to give any consideration to President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland nearly a year before the next presidential inauguration was a matter of constitutional principle, and so is confirming whomever Trump nominates with just a month and a half until the next election.

As recently as July, Sen. Chuck Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee back in 2016, told reporters that if he were still the committee chair this year and a Supreme Court vacancy occurred, “I would not have a hearing on it because that’s what I promised the people in 2016.” Now that it's September and that vacancy is reality, he's content to let Mitch McConnell and current committee chair Lindsey Graham have hearings and a confirmation vote if they want.

Sen. Ron Johnson, whose position in 2016 was, "In the politicized atmosphere of an election year, you probably shouldn't even nominate someone. It's not fair to the nominee, it's not fair to the court," now claims that having a Senate majority of the same political party as the president has de-politicized the atmosphere this year. Or something like that.

Sen. Ted Cruz was on CBS This Morning yesterday morning and offered the idea that since the 2020 election might go to the courts, it's imperative that it not be possible for the Supremes to split 4-4. He didn't offer any explanation why that possibility was acceptable in 2016.

Here's what other Republican senators were saying in 2016:

“I don’t think we should be moving forward with a nominee in the last year of this president’s term. I would say that even if it was a Republican president.” — Sen. Marco Rubio.

“I think we’re too close to the election. The president who is elected in November should be the one who makes this decision... Our next election is too soon and the stakes are too high; the American people deserve a role in the process as the next Supreme Court justice will influence the direction of this country for years to come.” — Sen. Cory Gardner, interview on KNUS radio

“I believe the American people deserve to have a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court Justice, and the best way to ensure that happens is to have the Senate consider a nomination made by the next President.”—Sen. John Cornyn, official statement

“We will see what the people say this fall and our next president, regardless of party, will be making that nomination.”—Sen. Jodi Ernst

But the poster boy for principle whiplash is Sen. Lindsey Graham, who said four years ago:

“I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.”

Turns out there's a simple explanation why you shouldn't use Lindsey's old words against him, though. Those nasty Democrats were mean to Brett Kavanaugh over some silly old sexual harassment allegations, so naturally, Lindsey's panties have been in a wad ever since. 

And after Republicans were so polite to Merrick Garland!

Toon: Oh, Come On, Wisconsin

Considering that the presidential candidates are nowhere to be found this year, this is turning into a hotly contested election here in Wisconsin today.

Among the highlighted items on the ballot are a state Supreme Court Justice, a ballot measure to enshrine crime victim's rights in the state constitution, and mayoral and county executive positions around the state.

Over the weekend, Democratic Governor Tony Evers summoned the Republican-run legislature into emergency session, calling them to extend Tuesday's election. With over 1,000 diagnosed cases of COVID-19 in Milwaukee County alone and rapidly rising numbers elsewhere around the state, especially in all urban counties, everyone concerned feared for the health and safety of voters and poll workers.

Everyone concerned, that is, except for the Republican majority in the state legislature.

They gavelled Saturday's emergency session to order and adjourned it in one second flat — a repeat of their emergency session last year on gun control measures. Another emergency session on Monday was just as abruptly cut off, adjourned until the day after the election.

So Monday afternoon, Evers issued an executive order postponing the election until June 9, and extending the terms of incumbent local politicians until after that election would have taken place. It was a move he had previously said he was powerless to make.

Within hours, the state Supreme Court — whose seven members are nominally non-partisan, but five of whom are bought and paid-for shills for the state Republican party — told Evers he was right: he is powerless to make that move. (They met virtually, by the way. I'll bet that's not in the constitution!) The U.S. Supreme Court was even speedier in quashing Evers' order to extend the date by which absentee ballots are due.

Robin Vos and Scott Fitzgerald, leaders of the Assembly and Senate respectively, are following Mitch McConnell's playbook from the Obama administration: block anything and everything; deny Evers even the most necessary legislation. No matter who gets hurt.

Many people will either put themselves at great risk or be disenfranchised by the Republicans' power play. Campaigns have been exhorting people for weeks to vote absentee or by mail. Our household has, but that leaves out voters who can't just up and get down to city hall whenever they want.

Demand for mail-in ballots quickly exceeded supply, and there are thousands of reports that ballots that were mailed to voters in mid-March never got delivered. Those ballots must be witnessed, but who is there to witness the ballots of older voters (exactly the ones most at risk of exposure to the virus) who live alone?

Others may have believed the President's promises that the crisis would have blown over around now. Voters who waited to cast their ballots in person may find their regular polling place closed because there aren't nearly enough poll workers, even with the National Guard called in. Milwaukee, with a population of over 600,000, will have a total of five polling locations open.

FIVE.

How many voters will be able to find their alternate poll location in time? Since many polling sites are limiting the number of persons allowed inside the building at a time, how many will bother to wait outside? (Stormy weather is predicted.)

I foresaw Republican mischief in this spring's election. I vastly underestimated how deadly serious it would be.

Q Toon: How's This Going to Look

Rush Limbaugh spent a good portion of his program recently gloating over supposed anxiety among Democratic leadership over Pete Buttigieg's decent performance in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. The Presidential Medal of Trumpitude recipient imagined party leaders whimpering the sentence at the top of my cartoon this week.

That's a direct quote. For what it's worth, Pete Buttigieg turned 38 on January 19, three weeks before Rush's remarks, so don't sic the Snopes on me.

Buttigieg isn't ashamed of his PDAs; and to their credit, while the other candidates have plenty of grounds for grudges against the upstart former mayor, they have come to his defense on this little contretemps. Even some Republicans voiced criticism of Limbaugh's comments.

Meanwhile, Melania Trump's sentiments about PDAs with her husband are well documented. So, fine, let's bring it on, Rush.

Q Toon: Pete, or Repeat

Video went viral last week of a woman learning at her Iowa Democratic caucus that a candidate she supported, Pete Buttigieg, is gay. Somehow, she had never heard this before, and since there's no same-sex marriage in the Bible, she asked to change her vote.

This week's cartoon is not about her.

That woman was also wearing stickers for Amy Klobuchar, a perfectly reasonable alternative for any voter who may have been interested in Pete Buttigieg. They're both centrist Democrats from the Midwest, with similar stands on most major issues. Chances are good that either is the second choice of many of the other's supporters.

If few of the Democratic candidates are catching fire yet, it's because most Democrats would be just as happy voting for any of the candidates besides the one they favor the most.

Most Democrats, that is, other than certain Bernie Sanders supporters from whom I hear a lot. So do pollsters.

In 2016, pollsters found that ten percent of Bernie Sanders voters in the primaries cast ballots for Donald Trump in November, which flabbergasts me. Wanting to shake up the system is one thing, but the differences between Socialist Sanders and Plutocrat Trump are so vast one has to wonder what exactly it was that the 10% saw in both of them.

10% of Bernie Bros may not sound like a lot, but they were enough to tip Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to Trump.

I'm guessing that if he doesn't get the nomination, most Buttigieg supporters today will support, more or less enthusiastically, whomever the Democratic nominee turns out to be rather than Donald Berzelius Trump. But you can never be sure about these voters who have only started paying attention to the race in the past week or two.

I don't know how else to explain a voter who had no idea that Buttigieg is gay and finds that fact to be a deal breaker.

Every one of the other Democratic candidates supports marriage equality, anathema to the crowd pushing to legislate Leviticus. If this woman gets all her news from her evangelical preacher, there's a good chance Revrunt Soandso's has forgiven Trump his multitude of sins past, present and future, but still thinks that Barack Obama was the Antichrist and that the current Democratic field is just as bad.

Oh, by the way, did she know that Amy Klobuchar is a Vikings fan?

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Q Toon: Yes, We Have No Palmettos

If the polls are to be believed, Pete Buttigieg has soared into the lead among Democratic candidates for president in first in the nation contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

But even if December polling translates into actual voting in February, the next stop on the campaign trail is in South Carolina, where Mayor Pete is polling just slightly ahead of A Poke In The Eye With A Sharp Stick.

Whereas Iowa and New Hampshire electorates are among the whitest in the nation, South Carolina Democrats rank among the blackest. Not that race has helped black candidates there; even if you added Cory Booker's numbers and those of Kamala Harris before she suspended her candidacy this week, you'd still fall well short of former Vice President Joe Biden's support among South Carolina Democrats. Apparently, being anti-malarkey is a big selling point down there.

I don't hold a lot of stock in polls this far before any actual voting, however, especially where Democrats are concerned. Democratic candidates are like a bunch of cats in a room, and the polls are like a laser pointer shining on one of them. The rest all attack that spot of light until it lands on one of the other kitties.

Remember: at this point in 2003, Howard Dean led the polls; Hillary Clinton had a substantial lead over Barack Obama in December of 2007.

But once the cattle calls debates are over and the caucuses and primaries are underway, my cartoons will have to focus on issues, not who's up and who's down. My deadline for cartoons that will appear after the polls close is well before the polls open. So if I'm gonna comment on the horse race, I have to do it now.

Q Toon: LGBTQ Town Hall Highlights

 

CNN hosted a town hall event last week in which Democratic presidential candidates appeared on stage one by one to take questions from audience members and CNN news anchors.

Senator Elizabeth Warren had the viral moment of the evening, answering an audience member's question about how to respond to someone who believes in defining marriage as exclusively one man to one woman. "Well, I'm going to assume it's a guy who said that," she said. "And I'm going to say then just marry one woman, I'm cool with that — assuming you can find one."

Former Congressman Beto O'Rourke gave a firm answer to a question, sidestepped by Senator Cory Booker earlier in the event, about tax exempt status for religious institutions that oppose marriage equality:

"There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights or the full civil rights of every single one of us, and so as president, we are going to make that a priority and we are going to stop those who are infringing upon the human rights of our fellow Americans.”

It was one of many moments of the evening that have been held up as examples of thumbing the party's nose at Middle America and kowtowing to the Gay Mafia.

Senator Kamala Harris echoed the new practice of introducing onesself by adding "My pronouns are she, her and hers," and I really can't fault her for that. It was host Chris Cuomo who stuck his foot in his mouth by quipping "Mine, too." (He has since apologized.)

Former Vice President Joe Biden should hardly have to prove his bonas fides on the issue of marriage equality; most of us remember him getting out ahead of the rest of the Obama administration in advocating the cause. Uncle Joe made a point of demonstrating how comfortable he is palling with The Gays, complimenting a questioner about his outfit, and joking about "coming out" by putting his arm around host Anderson Cooper. In this #metoo era, he probably would have caught hell if those had been a female questioner or Dana Bash.

Frankly, and predictably, none of the candidates said anything that put any daylight between themselves and the mainstream LGBTQ community at large. O'Rourke and Mayor Pete Buttigieg handled protesters with seriousness and respect, as did hosts Cooper and Don Lemon. Warren thoroughly disavowed her 2012 statement opposing taxpayer funding of gender reassignment surgery for prison inmates.

I should note that the Saturday Night Live parody of the forum did a serious disservice to Senator Cory Booker. I've read the 1992 op-ed he wrote for the Stanford Daily, which the SNL sketch characterized as demeaning to gays. It most certainly is not; it is instead a full-throated apology for having ever had any antigay animus.

Finally, I must apologize for not including Julian Castro in this cartoon. Lin-Manuel Miranda's father, however, has assured me that his son is available next time I draw any cartoon about the Democratic candidates for president.

Q Toon: This Just In

In a Washington Post op-ed back on August 15, Robert Kabel and Jill Homan, Board and Vice Chairs, respectively, of the Log Cabin Republicans, published their endorsement of Donald Berzilius Trump for reelection in 2020. According to Kabel and Homan, Trump is responsible for leading the GOP away from its open hostility to LGBTQ humans:

This is the party that Trump has helped make possible by moving past the culture wars that dominated the 1990s and early 2000s, in particular by removing gay rights as a wedge issue from the old Republican playbook. And since taking office, President Trump has followed through on many of his commitments to the United States, including taking bold actions that benefit the LGBTQ community.

Kabel and Homan apparently missed that plank in their party's 2016 platform renewing its support for a Federal Marriage Amendment and sending kids off to quack conversion therapy chambers.

Since the LCR went public with its allegiance to their fearless leader, the Corrupt Trump Administration has now filed LGBTQ-hostile amicus briefs in three Supreme Court cases. I drew last week about the Trumpsters' filing that transgender employees are not covered under equal opportunity law because congressmen in 1964 didn't have transgender persons in mind at the time.

Now, the Corrupt Trump Administration wants the Supreme Court to rule that federal law allows private companies to fire workers based on sexual orientation, filing an amicus brief in the cases of Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia and Altitude Express v. Zarda.

Remarkably, the department argued in its memorandum that the reason anti-gay discrimination is not unlawful under the ban on sex-based discrimination is because, in cases of adverse treatment by an employer, both gay men and gay women would be addressed equally poorly.
Upon experiencing discrimination from an employer, both men and women in same-sex relationships "would be similarly situated — and they would be treated the same," the department argued, negating a claim under Title VII's sex-based protections.

If the Trumpsters had not themselves put forward the argument that "both gay men and gay women would be addressed equally poorly," I probably would have made that the punch line of this week's cartoon. Damn, but it is hard to make jokes about the Corrupt Trump Administration's way of thinking when the CTA's way of thinking is a joke all by itself.

Meanwhile, a number of prominent Log Cabin members have quit the organization over Kabel and Homan's op-ed, most recently Executive Director Jerri Ann Henry. But according to those who were involved in the endorsement decision, it was approved by a majority of respondents from national chapters of the organization.

The endorsement cited Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell's public advocacy of pushing antigay foreign governments to come around on LGBTQ rights, but a more likely explanation for the endorsement is that Trump only listens to people who kiss his ring and his ass first.

[T]here’s a sense throughout the party that Trump expects loyalty and fealty before he’s earned it. President Trump does not feel that he should have to take action or stand on principle or express support for anyone else. He sees all that as being activity and behavior that should be directed toward him.

Maybe this buys Kabel or Homan a seat at the table when LGBTQ issues are discussed someday.

More likely, an appointment as Ambassador to Greenland.

Elizabeth Warren, Nevertheless

Here's the third in a series of caricatures of 2020 Presidential candidates.

Warren rose to national prominence as an advocate for consumer protection in the financial markets, the need for which was demonstrated by the crash of 2008, brought on by careless lending practices and over-easy credit. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created largely due to her advocacy

President Barack Obama nominated her to head the CFPB in 2010; but Republicans — whose idea of consumer protection is to force consumers to agree to a 4,000-word release form forfeiting all expectation of product safety, the right to a fair and public hearing should any harm befall them, and if they don't like it, a gag order for themselves and all future generations — blocked Warren's nomination and have rendered the CFPB toothless under Corrupt President Donald Trump. Nevertheless, she persisted, and in 2012, she unseated GOP Senator Ted Brown to represent Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate.

She may be the third oldest candidate in the Democratic presidential race (after Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders), but she is arguably the feistiest. If living up to her slogan of "Warren's Got a Plan for That" makes her come across as wonkish and schoolmarmy, it keeps her from being compared to Hilary Clinton, whose campaign relied too lightly on a plan for the next four years and too heavily on a sense that it was Her Turn.

But she can be compared to Clinton in the sense that Republicans already loathe her. Sticking up for consumers is anathema to the Chamber of Commerce set, and the very idea that government should be useful is heresy to Tea Partisans. Republican stooges are sure to draw her as a wannabe Injun, based on her having accepted some overstated family lore of Native American ancestry. Warren Derangement Syndrome will plague her campaign, and her administration should she win the presidency.

Well, it's not as if the right-wing media machine would be any less harsh to any other Democratic president, or Mitch McConnell wouldn't devote every millisecond of the next four years to making a one-term president of whatever Democrat takes office. It takes a World War to get our political parties to put aside partisanship even for a moment, and I for one will take partisanship over World War III any day.

But I hope Warren's got a plan for dealing with Republicans in Congress dead set against all of her other plans. Obama thought he could work with them, and he was wrong.

Toon: The Eyes Have It

I considered two possible cartoons for syndication this week, and this one is the one I didn't go with.

I like it better, but I'm worried that only comic enthusiasts will get it. But if you have to ask...

Q Toon: Side Eye for the Gay Guy

South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg is now an officially declared candidate to become the first openly gay president of the United States since James Buchanan. As such, he now qualifies to have antigay zealous crackpots bellowing about Sodom and Gomorrah at his campaign events.

Mayor Pete came out in 2015, two years into his first term, while his state's governor, now Vice President Mike Pence, was preaching the right-wing gospel of exclusion and Christian Privilege, and the Supreme Court was about to rule on Obergefell v. Hodges. He married his husband in an Episcopal church last June, and their first stop in their wedding Studebaker was the local Pride Week block party. His penultimate appearance before making his presidential campaign official was on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

So it might surprise you to know that Mayor Pete is getting hit from both sides.

There is a certain camp of people, mostly within the LGBTQ community, who think that Mayor Pete may be gay, but he isn't gay enough.

There is a certain kind of gay guy. He is very likely white. He would say that he is in his “mid-thirties,” although he is much closer to the end than to the beginning of his last credibly young decade. Older women think he is handsome; younger men are not so sure. He is a professional of some kind — not ostentatiously wealthy, but comfortable enough to take the occasional ski trip in Colorado or spring vacation in Spain. He probably enjoys “the theater.” He is sure to mention at some point that he likes to read.

The knock on Mr. Gay Whitebread is that we've had enough white men in the White House, and it's a woman's turn now, preferably a Latina or a Muslim, and transgender if possible, and perhaps a paraplegic, except we've already had one of those so scratch that. He can always come back in another eight years once the cuteness factor has worn down (or in four if either of the two candidates currently leading in the polls wins the nomination).

Frankly, at this moment in history, I'm fine with any of the 147 candidates for the Democratic nomination. I'm not 100% thrilled about half a dozen of them, but I find the criticism that Buttigieg is too Midwestern Nice and doesn't check enough boxes tiresome and just a little bit dangerous.

All of this seems like an attempt to write Buttigieg off as “just another white guy,” standing in the way of more diverse candidates. It’s the Oppression Olympics at its worst: In a battle to prove that one community is more discriminated against than another, we tear each other apart rather than unite in common cause.

Or, as Geneve Thomas-Palmer, the editor of Ann Arbor Community High School's newsletter (and wow! Have high school newsletters changed since I was in bell bottoms!) warns:

"By suggesting Buttigieg appears too heterosexual to run for office, Democrats have sent a clear message to their almost 12 million queer voters; we do not care about diversifying our party, we only care about appearing as though we do." 

Beto Know a Candidate

Installment II of my caricatures of 2020 presidential candidates:

To the best of my knowledge Beto O'Rourke is no relation to the Kennedy clan, but the man looks like he ought to be. I learned the other day that his given name is Robert Francis, exactly the same as Bobby Kennedy, and quickly conceived this parody of Roy Lichtenstein's pop-art portrayal of RFK that appeared on the cover of Time magazine's May 24, 1968 issue.

Lichtenstein's work has been derided as derivative, which makes this caricature doubly so. The large ben-day dots are a leitmotif of Lichtenstein's work, and not here some effort to tie Mr. O'Rourke to the anti-vaxxer movement.

I don't use or have ben-day dot technology, so I had to add each and every one of those blasted dots individually. During the course of which, I had to leave for several hours and returned to find that Photoshop apparently prevents my computer's screen saver and energy saver settings from taking effect.

Happily, I don't have the half-finished drawing burned into my screen.

At any rate, until this week, I had simply assumed that the man's given name was Beto, perhaps being a simplified spelling of a traditional Irish name. The Gaelic spelling would probably have turned out to be Beitgeaughe, but pronounced the same. He was born in 1972, at which time American parents had begun ditching common names like John and Mary in favor of ethnically telling names like Siobhan and Aksel. (If they had WASP heritage, the kids ended up with names like Sunflower and River.)

But I suspect that Beto sharing the name Robert Francis with RFK was no coincidence, and that makes it ethnic enough.