Q Toon: A Letter from Camp

A Letter From Concentration Camp, that is.

Obsessive readers of my toons will recall that Leo here got himself caught up in a dragnet of brown-skinned immigrants at the food pantry where he was volunteering. Having sent him off on this misadventure, I feel obligated to follow Leo’s story line and see where it goes.

I had originally intended for Leo and Max to stand in for our deeply divided country, engaging in a back-and-forth, getting each others' goats, and yet somehow remaining a couple. If I ever get Leo out of Trumplinka, I’m sure I’ll get back to that. 

Americans' divisions cut straight through family lines, as I was reminded during a big pre-Lenten party my husband's family has every year. I'm talking about a huge get-together of a hundred or so descendants of his great-grandparents, who came to the U.S. from Italy in the early years of the 20th Century. 

Most of the family recognizes that their forebears weren't exactly welcomed to this country with open arms. Yet until 1923, all they needed to do to be legal immigrants was secure passage on a boat, and once they came ashore, answer some questions from Port Authorities who spoke no Italian.

Those immigrants and their children opened up butcher shops and grocery stores, and/or went to work in the automobile factory. They built churches, founded social clubs, and went to war. More than a century later, some of the family are solid union Democrats and others are dyed-in-the-wool MAGA Republicans. Even among my husband's immediate siblings, nieces, and nephews, political conversations can get heated.

So, as an in-law, I didn't want to get into an argument when one of the cousins at Sunday's get-together started telling me how she only voted for Trump this time around because she operates a small business and Trump was supposedly good for small business. I wish nothing but the best for her small business, but I can't pretend that the Tigers Eating Faces Party is anything but a disaster for LGBTQ+ families like mine.

Or for Ukraine. Or for Palestinians. Or for our National Parks. Or for airline safety, Social Security, cities, farmers, home and auto buyers, health, the environment, our international alliances, or the price of eggs.

Or for the stock market. Or for the economy.

Or for small businesses.

We're starting to hear from Trump voters who are already getting hurt by Trump maladministration policies and are beginning to second-guess their votes. Unfortunately, the U.S. electoral system doesn't allow for do-overs.

One just has to hope that in 2026 and 2028, there will be enough of these voters who will have realized that there are issues more important to them than persecuting transgender people and Latinos.

Q Toon: Devil's Advocates

Buzz and Killer return this week with a question for our times.

The answer, of course, is that it would take an amendment to the Constitution, because Mr. Yiannopoulos was not born an American citizen.

Yiannopoulos, for those of you who have forgotten his fifteen minutes of fame last year, is a British-born, racist, Breitbartian provocateur whose schtick was getting invited by college Republican groups to speak on their campuses (campi?), usually provoking protests that prompted college administrators to cancel his speech. He is also gay, which made him a darling of the far right — their Token Homosexual — until he expressed his approval of pedophilia.

Now they have Kanye West, so as far as the Sinclair-Fox-Breitbart crowd is concerned, Black is the New Gay.

His star having fallen, Yiannopoulos wasn't the best example of somebody right-wing evangelicals would rally around the way they have steadfastly defended the Prince President of Lies, Donald Joffrey Trump. I'm fully convinced that not only would they stick by him if he shot somebody on Fifth Avenue, they'd stick by him even if that somebody were Franklin Graham.

While performing an abortion. On his daughter. Of his incestuous love child. And bragging about it every step of the way.

Those right-wing evangelicals have already sold their souls to him.

The rest is merely haggling over the price.

Milos to Go Before I Sleep

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been rounding up undocumented immigrants who have run afoul of the law lately. In a departure from previous policy, the immigrants do not even need to have been proved guilty of any crime; the mere accusation of an offense, even as trivial as a parking ticket, can now lead to being shipped off to Mexico.

Even if that's not where they came from.

I had been resisting drawing another cartoon about this Milo Yiannopoulos creature. He's an import from Britain who made a splash on this side of the pond as Breitbart News's ubergay senior provocateur against feminism, Islam, LGBT rights and Leslie Jones. He provoked a riot at Berkeley, mocked from on stage a transgender graduate at UW-Milwaukee, and got himself banned from Twitter.

Then he got caught seeming to be okay with sexual relationships between adults and 13-year-old boys. Even Breitbart News has to maintain some minimal standards.

✍

I wasn't sure readers would recognize the acronym "ICE," which stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Homeland Security Department. Many people I work with are well acquainted with ICE, but it may be unfamiliar to people who don't have to deal with it.

In the previous century, we had "INS," Immigration and Naturalization Service, part of the Department of Justice; but after 9/11, the focus was less on "service" or "justice" than "enforcement." The INS was split into three new entities during the George W. Bush administration: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), with all the new regulations required by creating three agencies out of one.

No existing regulations were removed to make way for them, either.

Q Toon: That's Entertainment

This week's cartoon takes us back a few years. And away from the usual preoccupation with LGBT issues of marriage equality, gays in the military, etc.

In Mr. Limbaugh's latest attempt at an apology for calling Georgetown student Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute whose sexual activities he would like to see posted on YouTube, he claimed to have accidentally departed from lofty conservative standards and become as bad as those lefty liberals:

 "This is the mistake I made: In fighting them on this issue last week, I became like them. Against my own instincts, against my own knowledge, against everything that I know to be right and wrong, I descended to their level when I used those two words to describe Sandra Fluke. That was my error. I became like them."

Conscientious conservatives must be relieved to know that Mr. Limbaugh was in no way emulating the elevated likes of Ann Coulter, or Andrew Breitbart of sainted memory. Nope, it was only a momentary lapse into liberalism. Liberanazilism, even. Sexually demeaning personal attacks are so unlike him!

Columnist Molly Ivins reported (Arizona Republic 10/17/1993) this incident from Limbaugh's TV show—"Here is a Limbaugh joke: Everyone knows the Clintons have a cat. Socks is the White House cat. But did you know there is a White House dog?" And he puts up a picture of [13-year-old] Chelsea Clinton.

"Some of these babes, I'm telling you, like the sexual harassment crowd. They're out there protesting what they actually wish would happen to them sometimes." [Reported by Media Matters, 4/26/04]

One may at least take solace in the fact that Mr. Limbaugh is merely an entertainer, as many in the conservative movement have pointed out, and not a leader whom Republican politicians cross at their peril.

Sew and Say

I expect that the Obama administration was afraid that news reports about a racist employee in the Department of Agriculture would step all over this week's news about the banking reform bill and/or extension of unemployment benefits. Well, surprise, surprise: the Shirley Sherrod story is overshadowing the administration's two legislative accomplishments anyway.

The reason is simple. There are four things that the media love to talk about:
1. The media
2. Race
3. Bloggers
4. The media

That, and any topic that allows the cable talking heads to discuss, at great length, the excellent 20/20 hindsight advice they would have given the administration if only the administration would have listened to them.