Q Toon: A Gentleman in Moscow

Gay Republican operative Richard Grenell is reportedly interested in snagging a prominent foreign policy position in the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™, including the post of U.S. Ambassador to Russia, vacant since last June.

"He had an interest in the job – or at least he floated the idea to select colleagues," one anonymous source close to Grenell told the Daily Mail of London, while acknowledging that "Putin's regime is extremely anti–LGBTQ."

Thirty years ago, Republicans' objections to President Clinton's nomination of James Hormel to be U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg included the claim that the fact of Hormel being openly gay would be an insult to Catholic Luxembourgers. If the citizens or government of Luxembourg were truly upset, however, I don't remember hearing anything about it, and I'm certain that the U.S. Senators who raised such a stink about Hormel's nomination would have been sure to point out any complaints.

Two decades later, during the First, Almost As Corrupt Trump Administration, Ric Grenell raised his hosts' hackles as U.S. Ambassador to Germany; but it was because he insisted on meddling in domestic German politics. It had nothing to do with his sexual orientation. 

Trump's State Department is apparently in no hurry whatsoever to put anybody in charge of our embassy in Russia. Trump crony Michael Witkoff and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner have been Trump's de facto conduit to the Kremlin (when he isn't getting his instructions directly from Putin), operating without the nuisance of having to get confirmed by the Senate. The two are likely to play a more important role in U.S.-Russian relations than whoever eventually becomes the next official ambassador, anyway.

As for the former Acting Director of the Donald J. Trump John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, Mr. Grenell just wants to get any foreign service appointment at all. He appeared most recently in my cartoons in March, when he was reportedly angling for a position with Kristi Noem's "Shield of the Americas."

By the way, if anyone has heard from Kristi Noem's "Shield of the Americas," please contact the Bureau of Missing Persons.

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National Coming Out Days

Q Syndicate, October, 2013

Tomorrow being National Coming Out Day (NCOD), I thought I'd share a handful of the cartoons I've drawn over the years to mark the event. There are many years when I failed to publish an NCOD cartoon; it comes in the midst of election season every other year, so I often feel compelled to draw about more pressing matters. 

This year, I just couldn't keep up with the deluge of More Pressing Matters.

Q Syndicate, October, 1998

One of my early NCOD cartoons featured 18-year-old Dylan confiding in his gay Uncle Jim over coffee. Fourteen years later (although I miscounted and had Dylan say it was twelve), I revisited the pair. Well, it's not likely that any of my readers actually remembered the earlier cartoon, so let's just go along with Dylan's version of the time line; here's how I imagined 30-year-old Dylan and 50-something Jim had aged.

Q Syndicate, October, 2012

If the two ever make it back in a cartoon, I figure that Dylan has married and adopted a child. Uncle Jim, however, has commitment issues and is a swinging sexuagenarian single. He probably never did explicitly come out to his parents.

But let's not overlook some real people who have not come out.

Q Syndicate, October 2002

This wasn't exactly an NCOD cartoon, aside from its timing. Out magazine editor Brendan Lemon had written in his magazine in May, 2001, that he had been "having an affair with a pro baseball player from a major-league East Coast franchise, not his team’s biggest star but a very recognizable media figure" for a year and a half. A year and a half later, inquiring minds were still abuzz over who that very recognizable media figure might be, and New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza actually held a news conference to announce that it wasn't him.

Eighteen years later, we still don't know who Lemon's boyfriend was, but one has to assume that the stress Lemon wrote about, having to keep their relationship hush-hush while being very much an out public figure himself, eventually doomed the relationship. You can count Major League baseball players who have come out of the closet on one hand, and most of them did so after they retired from the sport.

As for the football player in panel four, he was just someone I made up for a punch line.

Q Syndicate, October, 2017

This odd little news item highlights the sort of thing that could get the vote of ordinary citizens like you or me thrown out. Overzealous election officials, and those pressured by Republican legislatures to suppress the vote, can disqualify you if your signature doesn't quite match what they have on record. Or if you've resumed using your maiden name. Or, certainly, if your gender doesn't present the same as it did when you first registered.

I hope not to have any reason to keep drawing more cartoons about this family very, very soon.

Q Syndicate, October, 2007

And I'm sure you remember Senator Larry Craig (R-ID), of wide stance in the men's room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport fame.

He's still not giving keynote speeches anywhere these days.

It's just as well if some people want to stay in the closet, anyway. Really. We're good.

Toon: One Masterpiece After Another

Trump has tapped son-in-law Jared Kushner to be in charge of whatever part of the federal COVID-19 response Vice President Mike Pence is not supposed to be in charge of.

Throughout the coronacrisis, Jared has demonstrated his complete and utter incompetence dealing with it. Back in January, he advised his father-in-law that the media were exaggerating the danger of the virus. When the danger became undeniable to all but the most ignorant right-wingers, he helped write his father-in-law's widely criticized March 11 address to the nation that falsely stated that the U.S. was cutting off all travel and imports from Europe.

Two days later, he was behind his father-in-law's Rose Garden promise that Google was on the verge of launching a website where anyone could test themselves for coronavirus, which was news to Google. By some extraordinary coincidence, a company Jared's brother founded was working on such a website, but that project has since been abandoned.

Last week, Jared showed his face at one of the daily White House coronabriefings, and responded testily to a question about data showing states' need for masks, ventilators and other emergency equipment, "The notion of the federal stockpile is that it's supposed to be our stockpile. It's not supposed to be states' stockpiles that they then use." Instead, he called on states and localities to rely on states' medical stockpiles.

By the end of the day, somebody from Trump's Ministry of Truth altered the Strategic National Stockpile page on the Public Health Emergency website so that it would no longer contradict what Jared had just said.

But the website read on April 2: “When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.”
Shortly after Kushner’s remarks, however, the text of this website was changed.
On April 3, the website read instead: “The Strategic National Stockpile’s role is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies. Many states have products stockpiled, as well. The supplies, medicines, and devices for life-saving care contained in the stockpile can be used as a short-term stopgap buffer when the immediate supply of adequate amounts of these materials may not be immediately available.”

Jared's latest duty adds to a long and scattershot list of things his father-in-law has assigned to the 39-year-old real estate heir. He had some success in getting a package of prison reforms through Congress; it's no wonder this would be a priority for an administration which has seen 14 prominent advisers, donors and aides indicted or convicted of criminal activity (as of January).

But the rest of Jared's portfolio is bullish on ambition and bearish on results. He started negotiations for peace between Israel and Palestine by taking off the table everything Palestinians have ever wanted. He was then shocked and offended that no Palestinian official was willing to agree to the terms of surrender Jared and Bibi Netanyahu demanded of them.

All we have to show for Jared's mastery of immigration reform are children in cages and a ugly, easily breached wall tearing through nature preserves and private property. Ironically enough, the coronacrisis has forced the government to designate migrant farm laborers as officially "essential workers."

That ugly wall may be the only thing Jared has to show for the Infrastructure Weeks announced by his Office of American Innovation from time to time. As for management of trade talks with China, most of that has been kept Top Secret. But his wife got China to grant her five trademark deals, so that's at least one thing Jared has accomplished there.

There are, thankfully, some cases where Jared has been able to get COVID-19 supplies where they are desperately needed. But Jared and his father-in-law's modus operandi is that it matters less what you need and more on who you know — and what you can do for la loro cosa.

Now Turn and Face to Your Left

Tell me I'm not the only one who saw the latest cover of Time magazine this way.

Q Toon: Resolutely Fabulist

From the outside, it looks like January has been a bad month for Mercurial American President Donald Joffrey Trump. Nancy Pelosi called his bluff on shutting down the government over Trump's Ugly Border Wall, and Trump punted.

Robert Mueller is coming down hard on Trump's lawyers, co-conspirators and trusted confidantes, and they're all singing like canaries, hitting the talk-show circuit with their tell-all books, or, in the case of Rudy Giuliani, establishing their insanity defense.

Testifying before Congress, his own highest ranking intelligence advisers publicly disagreed with him on the level of threats posed by ISIS, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Latin America, NATO and Jared Kushner.

And he had nothing to serve the collegiate champion Clemson Tigers but junk food from the drive-thru window.

But lest you forget, Trump gets to shut the government down again on February 15, and Nancy Pelosi won't be able to take away his State of the Union privileges then!

And you know what? He can still rely on the loyalty of Roger Stone. Just look at the guy. You can always trust a fella who dresses like a Batman villain and has a tattoo on his back of the only President ever to resign in disgrace. He certainly seems like a stable genius, just like Trump himself.

Speaking of which, Trump knows so much more about foreign affairs than all those people who actually bothered to do any research on the subject. Books? Experience? A lifelong career in the CIA? Who needs it? Trump is the foremost expert on everything anyone ever needs to know about anything from Nambian health care to Swedish terrorism! Brains? He don't need no stinking brains! Trump has his gut!

Furthermore, he's been feeding that gut nothing but KFC nuggets, McDonalds Big Macs, and Taco Bell salad bowls all his life. That gut got him elected President of the United States in spite of the worst second-place finish of any candidate since John Quincy Adams. So there!

Besides, the Supreme Court said he could go ahead and kick all the transgender service members out of the military, at least while their appeals make their way on up to the Supreme Court. Gee, I wonder what the GOP majority on the Supreme Court will decide when they're asked to rule a second time?

Clarence Thomas's wife met with Major Bonespurs the other day. Perhaps she knows.

Q Toon: Fulsome Prison Blues

In his never-ending quest to erase all traces of the Obama presidency, Donald Joffrey Trump last week issued an executive order reversing provisions of the Prison Rape Elimination Act geared to protect transgender persons in the prison system.

The Bureau of Prisons now “will use biological sex” to make initial determinations in the type of housing transgender inmates are assigned, according to a notice posted Friday evening that modifies the previous policy.
...
The shift comes after four evangelical Christian women in a Texas prison sued in US District Court to challenge the Obama-era guidelines, and claimed sharing quarters with transgender women subjected them to dangerous conditions.

Their complaint alleged housing transgender women — whom it calls “men” — along with the general female population ”creates a situation that incessantly violates the privacy of female inmates; endangers the physical and mental health of the female Plaintiffs and others, including prison staff; [and] increases the potential for rape.”

Their lawsuit took aim at regulations established in 2012 to protect transgender inmates from violence under the Prison Rape Elimination Act and a guidance memo — issued days before Obama left office — on how to handle transgender inmates. The memo noted that transgender prisoners face an "increased risk of suicide, mental health issues and victimization."

The rules said officials must give “serious consideration” to the wishes of transgender and intersex inmates when assigning facilities, while also instructing prison staff to “consider on a case-by-case basis whether a placement would ensure the inmate’s health and safety, and whether the placement would present management or security problems.”

Without entirely dismissing the concerns of incarcerated women out of hand, the record is very clear that the Corrupt Trump Administration is extremely biased against transgender Americans. Trump, Pence and their henchmen have moved to kick transgender service members out of the military, to force transgender students into the lavatory of the government's choice, and declared that transgender people aren’t protected under federal civil rights law barring discrimination on the basis of sex.

Frankly, I don't think Trump is at all worried about what conditions Cohen, Junior or Jared would find in jail; he's not concerned with anyone but himself. Besides, unless one of his co-conspirators squeals to the feds first, Trump will surely issue pardons like confetti.

But you never know. He might forget to sign them.

Q Toon: Truth Will Out

A peculiar little detail in the case of Jared and Ivanka Kushner using private e-mail for government business (gosh, where have I heard about that before, I wonder) is the revelation that Jared Kushner was somehow registered as a female voter in the state of New York.

It has since been revealed that the mistake was due to a clerical error rather than some subconscious desire on the part Kushner himself. It does lead one to wonder, however, whether any other such clerical errors will be cited by the Kris Kobach Kommission as proof of widespread voter fraud.

Q Toon: Go Away, Kid, You Bother Me

I shouldn't admit this, but the one thing that doesn't work in this cartoon is its very premise.

Not the part about Ivanka's tweets. That much was real.

But if there's one thing you and I know about Mr. Donald Joffrey Trump, it is that he is not really, really busy making policy decisions with his staff this month. He's watching TV today, phone in hand, ready to cast self-serving — check that, make that deranged — tweets about Jim Comey's Senate testimony.

He's also not dedicated to any philosophy, antigay or otherwise, other than continuing the con job that has so improbably propelled him from real estate swindler to Trump University scammer to children's charity fraudster to President of the United States. The men on the other side of the table in this cartoon may be dedicated to slashing the budget for HIV/AIDS, blessing discrimination against same-sex couples, and keeping transgender persons out of public lavatories, but Trump is interested only in keeping the suckers who have thus far fallen for his con job from turning against him.

On top of all that, doesn't Jared have something he's supposed to be doing, like bringing peace to the Middle East, running the Office of American Innovation, setting up super-secret back channels to the FSB, diverting the doomsday asteroid, or something?