Of Graham Bondage

Since last week's Graphical History Tour memorialized a sitting U.S. Senator who claims not to be dead, this week's episode rustles up my cartoons about one of his Republican colleagues whose passing is less, ah, speculative.

April, 2010

Lindsey Graham himself barely appeared in what I believe was my first cartoon about him, sixteen years ago. An anti-immigrant Tea Partisan then from South Carolina, William Gheen, alleged that Senator Lindsey Graham was being blackmailed over his widely rumored homosexual orientation to support Democrats' version of Immigration Reform.

"Sen. Graham, you need to come forward and tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality. Come out of that closet, Lindsey. Come out of that Log Cabin closet," Gheen told a Tea Party Klatch. "Look, I'm a tolerant person. I don't care about your private life, Lindsey. But as our U.S. Senator, I need to figure out why you're trying to sell out your own countrymen, and I need to make sure your being gay isn't it."

Whether in response to Gheen or not, Graham announced that he opposed the immigration bills proposed by the Democratic majority in Congress. As for Gheen, he has since migrated across the border to North Carolina, where he is President of an anti-immigration political action committee.

December, 2012

I drew this cartoon in response to Graham advocating against achieving marriage equality by congressional legislation or litigation in the courts.

Graham knew full well how unlikely getting a pro-marriage equality amendment to the U.S. Constitution approved by Congress and ratified by 34 state legislatures would be. For years, Republicans pushed an amendment to do exactly the opposite, not to mention other amendments for all sorts of their pet peeves, without getting anywhere. 

October, 2014

Did you know that Lindsey Graham ran for the Republicans' 2016 presidential nomination? Even people who were paying close attention at the time may not remember it.

Graham was running for a third term in the Senate in 2014, and told Politico that in the (inevitable) event that he won reelection, he was considering looking into a 2016 presidential run. He made his official campaign announcement on June 1, 2015, but failed to qualify for a Republican presidential debate cattle call on CNN two months later.

The highlight of his presidential campaign was calling Donald Trump "a jackass" in successive interviews on CNN and CBS. Trump responded by telling Fox & Fiends viewers Graham's personal cell phone number.

By Christmas, Graham had suspended his campaign; he then endorsed Florida Governor Jeb Bush in January. Republican voters didn't listen.

October, 2018

Neither did the Electoral College.

As Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham played a prominent role in the confirmation of Donald Trump's Supreme Court appointees. Allegations that the second of them, Brett Kavanaugh, was a beer-swilling bro in college suggested the "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" character Brick to me; casting Graham as Maggie followed as a matter of course.

That's Senators Maizie Hirono and Jeff Flake as Mae and Gooper (well, I needed somebody in those roles) and Trump as Big Daddy Pollitt.

March, 2021

Insinuating Lindsey Graham's Kinsey rating couldn't be the point of every cartoon I put him in. Sometimes, he was just a recognizable Senator to populate a cartoon about the Senate Republican Caucus. But as the supposedly closeted gay one, he afforded me the opportunity to draw a cartoon about a non-LGBTQ+ topic for the LGBTQ+ publications that run my cartoons. 

(Openly bi Senator Kyrsten Sinema also figured in this one. A two-fer!)

February, 2021

In the post for this week's cartoon, I included Lindsey Graham's "Count me out" comment on the evening after the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, disassociating himself from Donald Trump. I also included Trump's more recent story of Graham then calling him up to apologize.

You certainly can't take Trump's word for anything, but Graham counting himself out on January 6 did not extend to his voting to convict Trump when the Senate voted on his impeachment trial on February 13.

Graham just couldn't stay mad at his latest infatuation.

September, 2022

Republicans who bothered at all to explain their votes against conviction claimed that since Trump was out of office, his attempt to overthrow the government should be a matter for the courts rather than the impeachment process.

As the prosecution of Trump for offenses starting with January 6, tax fraud, and sexual assault crept ever so slowly forward during Joe Biden's presidency, Lindsey Graham and quite a few other Republicans complained that pursuing justice in the courts was a bad idea, too.

In the fall of 2022, Citizen Trump was refusing to return classified papers included among dozens of bankers boxes of files he had spirited off to Mar-a-Lago, directing underlings to hide them away when the FBI showed up to seize them. Graham warned that if Trump were ever brought to trial for those actions, his hordes of MAGA minions would reprise January 6.

To his dying day, Graham was mute about any possibility of Antifa, DEI, or Woke Inc., getting violent over what now passes for the Justice Department's overtly political, Trumped up prosecutions of anyone who has ever crossed Donald Trump.

Q Toon: Exit Lindsey Graham

I generally have two approaches to cartoons about the recently departed. Either I draw a caricature of the person next to a quotation of theirs, or I depict the person ready to step into the celestial/infernal elevator (the reader may decide which). For the late Senator Lindsey Graham, I went with the latter.

If I had chosen the former approach, which Lindsey Graham quotation should I have used?

Graham, widely spread rumors of his being gay notwithstanding, was not friendly on LGBTQ issues, which are my cartooning bailiwick. He supported Don't Ask Don't Tell, voted against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), voted in favor of a bill amendment prohibiting same-sex couples in the District of Columbia from adopting and against another extending immigration protections to binational same-sex couples, and was a co-sponsor of the Republican bill to amend the Constitution to define marriage to exclude same-sex couples. 

I did not find any pithy, succinct opinions of his on LGBTQ+ issues that I could quote in a cartoon, however. So how about his thoughts on other issues?

“Well, Donald Trump’s plan on immigration is stupid. I find him offensive. His solution is just constitutionally flawed. It’s not practical. I don’t think there’s ten votes in the United States Senate for this plan. I promise you no Democrat’s going to vote for this, I certainly wouldn’t vote for it. You’re not going to get 11 million people out of this country. That’s just not practical, that’s going to kill the Republican Party. It’s self-deportation on steroids.”  —August, 2015

“You know how you make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell. He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represents the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for. … He’s the ISIL man of the year.”  —December, 2015

“If Trump is the standard bearer, it’s not about 2016, it’s about losing the heart and soul of the conservative movement. I’m not going to stand behind a guy that gets David Duke’s support. What is it about Trump’s campaign that David Duke likes? I don’t think he is a reliable conservative Republican. So it’s no longer about winning the election for me, it’s trying to salvage a party that I love and conservatism as I know it.”  —March 2016

“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed......and we will deserve it.”  —May 2016 tweet

““I…cannot in good conscience support Donald Trump because I do not believe he is a reliable Republican conservative nor has he displayed the judgment and temperament to serve as Commander in Chief. I think Donald Trump is going to places where very few people have gone and I’m not going with him.”  —on CNN, May 2026

“The Senate should not confirm a new Supreme Court Justice until we have a new president … You can use my words against me.” — Lindsey Graham, February, 2016, nearly a year before Inauguration Day

 “As the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I’m very committed to ensuring that the nominee gets a challenging, fair, and respectful hearing. We move forward on this nomination knowing that the President has picked a highly qualified individual who will serve our nation well on the highest court in the land.” — September 26, 2020, after Donald Trump named Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court five weeks before another presidential election

"Trump and I, we've had a hell of a journey. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough."  —after the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol

Perhaps I should have quoted someone else's thoughts about Senator Graham. Donald Narcissus Trump, perhaps?

"He had one bad moment in the January 6 thing when he stood up — 'alright, now I've had it, that's it, I can't do it anymore' -- then he called me about 40 minutes later and said, 'Did I really said that? I can't believe it.' And he took it back." —July 13, 2026

Or better yet, Capitol Police Officer Michael Fanone:  

“Lindsey Graham is dead. I will always remember my first and only encounter with him when he looked the grieving mother of a dead police officer in the face and barked that he wasn’t going to listen to her blame Trump for January 6th. When I showed him my body cam footage from that day he turned away and looked at his phone. Rest in Piss you fucking worthless scumbag. If there is a hell I hope you're in it.”

The Ghosts of Cartoons Past

Welcome to another Graphical History Tour. Let's rummage through my December cartoons from 2013, 2003, 1993, and 1983, shall we?

for Q Syndicate, December, 2013

I brought up Megan Kelly in this here blog the other day, quoting her fairly lengthy question to Chris Christie at last week's less-than-presidential debate. She accused him of being out-of-step with Republican orthodoxy and her own prejudices against transgender youth.

Ten years ago, Kelly was over at Fox Noise, whence she opined that everybody knows that Santa Claus can't possibly be Black because he's as Aryan as she is. Of course, we know from the historical record that the OG St. Nicholas was no such thing.

He was a Klingon. Qapla'!

for Q Syndicate, December, 2003

Once upon a time, I had an editor who objected to my depicting Santa Claus as gay. He was worried that it would offend readers' religious sensibilities. He had sold Q Syndicate by the time I drew this cartoon at the end of 2003, so I don't know if he would have had the same qualms about outing Old Man Time.

The editors of the Washington Blade really liked this cartoon, however, adding color and featuring it on the front page of their year-in-review issue. How I wish I had downloaded that version of the cartoon! (I had printed a screen grab of the page back then, but that piece of paper is a bit worse for wear twenty years on.) The Blade's colorizing job was an improvement over the original —cross-hatching really is no way to draw rainbow colors. But the grayscale image now in their archives is dark and muddy.

2003 was an extraordinarily good year for the LGBTQ+ community. An openly gay cleric, Rev. V. Gene Robinson, was elected Bishop Coadjudicator of the Episcopal Church New Hampshire Diocese. The original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was the most popular program on Bravo, spawning further gay-oriented "reality programming." (Chip and Reichen were a gay couple on CBS's Amazing Race; Bravo's Boy Meets Boy was a gay version of The Bachelor with the catch that some of the supposed suitors were closeted straight dudes.)

Sadly, 2004 would prove to be a year of backlash, with President George W. Bush campaigning for reelection by pledging to enshrine opposite-sex marriage exclusivity in the U.S. Constitution — and America rewarding him by making him the only Republican presidential candidate in this century to win the popular vote.

UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Dec. 9, 1993

Skipping back another decade, I have fewer cartoons to choose from, and this may be the only one in today's post that hasn't appeared in my blog before. The student newspapers for which I drew always suspended publication in early- to mid-December for finals and winter break. Local newsmakers are busy with holiday business (as are local cartoonists), so I don't believe I drew anything for the Racine Journal Times during any of the Decembers featured here today.

The baby and the muralist in this cartoon would be millennials in their thirties today; I guess the parents might be millennials, too. If so, their family is spared having a generation gap.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Jan. 19, 1984

I drew this cartoon of the 1984 Democratic presidential candidates in December of '83 for the student newspaper of the University of Wisconsin at Parkside after the last issue of the semester had been published, so it was held over until January.

Having a plethora of official whatnots of the Olympic games was a new development in 1984. Having sponsors actually started way back in 1908 (Soup maker Oxo sponsored the London Olympics that year), and Coca-Cola has been an official sponsor ever since the 1928 Amsterdam games. But by 1984, it seemed that every other commercial on TV boasted of being the official adhesive tape, motor oil, or hemorrhoid ointment of the Olympics.

Since we're back to December of 1983, I have to close with the Christmas break episode of my crude take-off of "The Maltese Falcon" starring thinly disguised characters from the comic pages.

At this point in my story, a police detective who looked suspiciously like Dick Tracy was interrogating an out-of-work fellow you might have sworn was Mike Doonesbury — note: Garry Trudeau had put his strip on hiatus at the end of January — when a bunch of characters from one of my all-time favorite strips suddenly interrupted:

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Dec. 15, 1983

I hope you'll check back before the holidays are over; but in case we miss each other, juHqu' qechmey!

Q Toon: Dear Leader's Cheerleader

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) predicted — or perhaps threatened— that if Donald Joffrey Trump is ever brought to trial for absconding with a couple dozen boxes of tippy-top secret White House documents and stashing them at his Florida hotel, hordes of his MAGA minions will riot. Again.

During his time in office, Trump found the presidency to be an effective shield against being held legally accountable in any court of law. Once he was kicked out of office, not content to let old crimes and lawsuits catch up with him, he immediately started purloining papers and flouting the very law he signed in February, 2018. 

Trump's conceit that he is permanently immune from prosecution is simply the way he has conducted business since, well, prep school. Now Requblicans argue that he has precedent on his side: no president or former president has had to serve jail time. True: Nixon got that pardon, and Harding died before the corruption of his administration burst forth.

If the prospect of Trump sitting in a jail cell is too much for the Constitution to bear, perhaps — if the case ever makes it past his legal maneuvers (and the judges he got to appoint) to trial in the first place — some other punishment can fit the crime.

Trump thinks he's entitled to swipe the nation's secrets? Okay, let's publicize his.

What did he really promise Putin at Helsinki? 

Or is that still a matter of national security?

Those tax returns he promised to release someday after he got elected, then.

We at least deserve to know Mr. Stable Genius's school records.
 

Q Toon: As I Have Foreseen

Long ago, in a polity far away, having the Senate evenly split between fifty Republicans and fifty Democrats would have forced the two parties to work together to keep the government running. These days, however, we have one party interested in good government, and the other, led by Mitch McConnell (R-Byss), happy to see no government at all.

Barack Obama came into office in 2008 with a filibuster-proof 60-40 Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, and the the U.S. economy four months into the most serious collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s. McConnell had vowed that thwarting Obama at every turn would be the Number One priority of the Republican Party, over and above national interest, leaving Democrats to rescue the economy on their own.

From there, Obama and Senate Democrats tried a bipartisan approach to crafting the Affordable Care Act, trimming the bill a little here and gutting it a little there in a vain attempt to persuade even one Republican to sign onto it. But the GOP had their orders to stick together in intransigent opposition no matter what. Democrats might just as well have passed a Swedish-style single-payer system instead.

Then Ted Kennedy up and died and was replaced by Republican Scott Brown, handing McConnell effective veto power over all legislation and dozens upon dozens of judicial appointments.

Today, McConnell is still in charge of Senate Republicans, who continue to show remarkable unity when opportunities to do nothing arise. Ten Senate Republicans do not exist who will put the national interest above party politics.

None of the issues that Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats ran on in 2020 can be dealt with as long as Mitch McConnell retains his veto power, so many Democrats are eager to scrap the filibuster— possible now if they have their 50 votes plus that of Vice President Kamala Harris.

But not so fast! Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) like the filibuster! Manchin cited the "Byrd Rule," named for the 1970's-80's leader of Senate Democrats and 1940's Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd. Byrd personally filibustered four fourteen hours against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 along with other Dixiecrats.

Sinema, this cartoon's link to being of interest to LGBTQ+ readers, avoided citing the filibuster's history of anti-civil rights, but told Politico, “I want to restore the 60-vote threshold for all elements of the Senate’s work.” (Emphasis mine.) Considering her experience as one of the very few Democratic members of the Arizona legislature, her love for the filibuster may be understandable — but self-defeating.

“I have long said that I oppose eliminating the filibuster for votes on legislation,” Sinema’s office went on to explain. “Retaining the legislative filibuster is not meant to impede the things we want to get done. Rather, it’s meant to protect what the Senate was designed to be. I believe the Senate has a responsibility to put politics aside and fully consider, debate, and reach compromise on legislative issues that will affect all Americans.”

From this explanation, a voter might conclude that the Framers created the Senate to be some sort of debating society that occasionally passes bills, rather than an active and functional legislative chamber.

The Framers of the Constitution actually got rid of a forerunner of the filibuster, a requirement that "important resolutions" be approved by two-thirds of the states — a practice that had hobbled government under the Articles of Confederation. As Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist #22, observed:

To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser. ... The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching towards it, has been founded upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority. In those emergencies of a nation, in which the goodness or badness, the weakness or strength of its government, is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. The public business must, in some way or other, go forward. If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.

It was catchier when Lin Manuel-Miranda rapped it, but perhaps you get the point.

Q Toon: Your Word Is Gymkhana

While Democrats in Congress and the White House have been hard at work dealing with the COVID-19 crisis, Republicans are keeping busy clutching their pearls over Cancel Culture and transgender schoolgirls.

Supposedly, they're afraid that girls' sports will forever be ruined by the superior prowess of MTF girls who are bulked up like the East German Olympians of 1970's cartoons. That's a little hard to swallow, however, in these days of cisgender women starting to find their way into men's sports.

Nevertheless, Requblican Senators Tommy Tuberville, Lindsey Graham, and Roger Marshall even tried to slip an amendment into the COVID-19 relief bill this week “to prohibit funds made… to States, local educational agencies, and institutions of higher education that permit any student whose biological sex is male to participate in an athletic program or activity designated for women or girls.”

Senator Tuberville's amendment was voted down, 50-49. (Joe Manchin, D-WV, voted in favor of the amendment; Lisa Murkowski, R-AK, voted against it. Otherwise, it was a party-line vote. Alaska's other GOP senator, Dan Sullivan, was back home for a family funeral.)

To put it another way, Tuberville's junk amendment having nothing whatsoever to do with coronavirus relief had the vote of each and every Republican south of Ketchikan who has complained that the bill passed yesterday is larded up with junk amendments having nothing whatsoever to do with coronavirus relief.

Q Toon: Lindsey Explains It All

 

I get annoyed by right-wing editorial cartoonists who do little more than illustrate a Republican Talking Point day after day, so I have to apologize for doing the same with a Democratic one.

My cartoon this week is taken almost verbatim from a comment I made on Facebook last week and subsequently saw made and memed by others. If I didn't find Lindsey Graham's duplicity particularly galling, I probably would have left this cartoon undrawn.

Senator Graham was a House trial manager in the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton over aforementioned blow job. On January 16, 1999, then-Representative Graham told Senators:

“When a president gets out of bounds, and doesn't do as he or she should do, constitutionally -- and I would argue that every president and every citizen has a constitutional duty not to cheat another citizen, especially the president -- and they get out of bounds, it is up to us to put them back in bounds or declare it illegal.

"And how do we do that? How do we regulate presidential misconduct when it's done in a presidential fashion? Through the laws and powers of impeachment. That is why we're here today. ...

What's a high crime? How 'bout if an important person hurt somebody of low means? It's not very scholarly, but I think it's the truth. I think that's what they meant by 'high crimes.' Doesn't even have to be a crime. Just when you start using your office and you're acting in a way that hurts people, you've committed a high crime. ...

You don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic if this body determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role. Impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”

Democratic House trial managers played Graham's argument at last year's impeachment over that perfect phone call to the President of Ukraine. It didn't sway him from his slavish fealty to Donald Berzelius Trump then, and neither did his momentary revulsion against the events of January 6 this time around.

Dismissing last week's House trial managers' presentation out of hand as "offensive and absurd," Graham went on to blame Speaker Nancy Pelosi for somehow having a hand in the insurrection, and he even threatened to impeach Vice President Kamala Harris over last year's Black Lives Matter riots as soon as Republicans win back the House.

Now that would be offensive and absurd.

Ta

Read more here: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article230483449.html#storylink=cpy

Presidents' Day Sneak Peek

"All I can say is that the most potent force in the Republican Party is President Trump. We need Trump-plus and at the end of the day, I’ve been involved in politics for over 25 years, the president is a handful and what happened on January 6th was terrible for the country, but he's not singularly to blame." —Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-EverTrump)

Faces in the Crowd

The cartoon I posted on Sunday employed caricatures of a number of House Republicans, when I could more easily have drawn a single GOP elephant at a microphone. So why didn't I do that and knock off an hour earlier?

June, 1996 for the UWM Post.

Pardon me if I step back a few years in order to answer that. In 1996, I drew a crowd of (hopefully) recognizable Republicans, grinning smugly, because that made more sense than drawing a single elephant, and was more effective than a bunch of smugly grinning elephants. Behind Bob Dole in this cartoon, mocking GOP claims of having a "big tent" on the abortion issue in spite of the hardline plank in the party platform, stand, from left to right: Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms, Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson, and Ralph Reed.

(Since the UWM Post didn't put out any editions that summer, the above cartoon was never published, but I ended up drawing another one a lot like it for them in September.)

in UW-M Post, March 5, 1991

My cartoon of sheepish Democrats at the peak of George H.W. Bush's popularity would have been less pointed if I had drawn a donkey or donkeys among the sheep. (From left to right: Sam Nunn, Bill Bradley, Dick Gephardt, Tom Foley, Al Gore, Mario Cuomo, Lloyd Bentsen, and George Mitchell.)

in UWM Post, September 28, 1989

Which is not to say that every editorial cartoon has to include caricatures of actual politicians. I liked the idea for my cartoon about multiple ethics investigations going on in the nation's capital in 1989, but there weren't enough politicians actually leading one investigation while being the target of another for me to have drawn a bunch of real people.

This idea is not far removed from Thomas Nast's "Who Stole the People's Money? Do Tell. 'Twas Him" cartoon showing easily recognizable members of the Tammany Ring standing in a circle, each pointing fingers at the man to his right. It's a great cartoon that had great impact when it was published and has stood the test of time, even though the real Richard Connolly was not accusing Peter Sweeney, who was not accusing Boss Tweed, who was not accusing James Ingersoll, etc.

for Q Syndicate, June 21, 2004

Here again, I could have drawn specific Republican senators pulling a prank in 2004, but I think this particular cartoon works better this way artistically.

Still, I believe it is useful for cartoonists to hold actual politicians accountable for their stands on issues. Thomas Nast's cartoons would have had little impact if he had tamely drawn generic "City Hall" characters — or comical Tammany Tigers — every week. Likewise, it's all well and good to draw a cartoon highlighting Lindsey Graham's or Matt Gaetz's craptasm du jour; but if one doesn't hold their feet to the fire, the effect is likely to be ephemeral.


We can't all be Thomas Nast, but we can still try.

Kavanaughna Hot Tin Roof

I told you this wouldn't be a hip cultural reference. I don't watch all those fresh new TV shows the kids are into, like Murphy Brown, Will & Grace, Hawaii 5-0, Magnum P.I., The Odd Couple, and The Connors.

There once was a time when not knowing the characters, plot and dialogue from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was grounds for forfeiting one's Gay Card. But time swishes on, and it's perfectly acceptable not to be conversant in Technicolorᵀᴹ culture any more. Hell, you probably don't even have to know who Madonna is.

But I've gone ahead and based this week's cartoon on the Tennessee Williams play; and to complicate matters even further, I haven't added labels to identify the people on stage. (I'll give you Jeff Flake as Gooper Pollit, since I got his hair color wrong.)

🐖

P.S.: There are times when I think that maybe it's time to hang up the business of drawing Donald Berzelius Trump with a pig's snout. Then he goes and gratuitously insults the intelligence of a reporter at a press conference before she even has a chance to ask her question, and then riffs on and on mocking a sexual assault victim before a cheering crowd of — yes, I'm going there — deplorables.

And at times like this, I worry that I'm being unfair to swine.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Tune in later this week for yet another totally unhip cultural reference.

Q Toon: Diss Belief

MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid opened her program last Saturday by apologizing for some posts which apparently appeared on her weblog in the '00's — or perhaps some hacker managed to go back in time and put them there. She "genuinely do[es] not believe" that she wrote them herself.

In the posts on her now-deleted blog, which lives on on the Wayback Machine, she (or her impostor) refer to Senator Lindsey Graham and then Governor Charlie Crist as "Miss Lindsey" and "Miss Charlie," alluding to rumors of their closeted homosexuality. Other posts complain about "Brokeback Mountain" and two men's lips meeting in a Snickers ad that ran during the 2007 Superbowl. There's also a post making fun of Harriet Myers's supposedly lesbian hair-do.

“In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology,” Reid said. “The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.
“Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that it does not represent the original entries,” she continued. “I hope that whoever corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me, but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ, immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.” 

This kerfuffle has the aura of having been generated to distract interested parties away from more significant media misbehavior (say, e.g., Sean Hannity's intimate relationship with Team Trump). Twitting Graham, Crist, and others for rumors of homosexual orientation is fairly common (who, me?); and when Reid's supposed posts about them were dredged up last December, little notice was paid to them.

So someone kept digging and came up with the Brokeback and Snickers stuff, which make it sound as though she believes us LGBTQ folk need to keep our PDA's private. If the posts are genuine, they call into question Reid's ally cred with LGBTQ issues (PFLAG is rescinding a Straight for Equality award they were planning to give her next week). If they're not, it can only mean that Russian, Breitbartian, or Gallifreyan hackers are sophisticated enough to fool the various experts who claim that the posts can't possibly be forgeries.

Gay journalist and Glenn Greenwald is one of the people pushing the Joy Reid allegations. Perhaps his buddy Edward Snowden can clear things up for us.

🎶

Meanwhile, as followers of this blog know, I draw my syndicated cartoons several days before I post them here; so this week's cartoon was created without the foreknowledge that Kanye Kardashian-West would be under fire this week for musing that 400 years of slavery was a "choice."

I think Ms. Reid is probably relieved that Kanye is not in her corner.

🎶

P.S.: Nothing on the internet ever really dies.

Q Toon: Monday Morning Deadline Blues

Q Syndicate✒Oct 9, 2014

So I'm spending the entire weekend stewing over what to draw for the LGBT press and finding nothing inspiring in the news until I come across a little item about South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham floating the idea that he might consider thinking about mulling the possibility of running for president in 2016. And I scour the internet trying to find a photo of Senator Graham taken from his right and spend a couple of hours sketching and erasing and resketching and re-erasing and getting thoroughly annoyed with the utter failure of his face to translate onto the page until I decide, Oh, screw it, I'm inking what I've got because it's getting late on a Sunday night and it's been a long enough day already. And I wake up in the morning to scan and colorize the cartoon, and I send the finished product off to the syndicate and post a Sneak Peek on this here website, and I get into the car and drive to work on the first Monday in October.

And as I'm getting out of the car, I hear the report that the Supreme Court has decided to let a bunch of lower court rulings in favor of marriage equality stand.

Q Toon: In App Ropriate

As American media have begun to realize how boring the next two years of Democratic presidential run-off will be if Hillary Clinton is the only one running off, some have been casting around in search of potential challengers.

The loquacious former Governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer, was considered to be one possible rival.  That is, until he offered the National Journal his two cents on soon-to-be-former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's surprise loss in a primary race for reelection.

"Don't hold this against me, but I'm going to blurt it out. How do I say this ... men in the South, they are a little effeminate. ... They just have effeminate mannerisms. If you were just a regular person, you turned on the TV, and you saw Eric Cantor talking, I would say—and I'm fine with gay people, that's all right—but my gaydar is 60-70 percent. But he's not, I think, so I don't know. Again, I couldn't care less. I'm accepting."

This display of candor has effectively removed Schweitzer from presidential level consideration. I mean, you can't just go around questioning the he-manliness of every gentleman from below the Mason-Dixon line if you want to be taken seriously.

That sigh of relief you hear is from the Senior Senator from South Carolina.

Q Toon: Leahy Amendment

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) last week introduced an amendment to the immigration reform bill which would recognize the relationships between American and non-American same-sex couples. While marriage to Mark Sanford would automatically make his Argentinian girlfriend eligible for U.S. citizenship, the same is not now afforded to the foreign nationals who marry a person of the same sex in any of the twelve states where such marriages are recognized.

Republicans -- notably closet case Lindsey Graham (R-SC) -- quickly announced that they couldn't support the bill with the Leahy amendment in it, and erstwhile Democratic LGBT allies from Diane Feinstein to Al Franken to Chuck Schumer immediately signaled that they wouldn't support the amendment, either. With President Obama reportedly also urging him to drop the issue, Senator Leahy withdrew his amendment.

“It’s hard for me to look at two couples in Vermont, both legally married, [and] say to one, ‘We can help you with your immigration problems,’ but to the other one, ‘Sorry, the law requires us to discriminate against you.’ But the Republicans made very clear that they would defeat the whole immigration bill if that amendment was in there,” Leahy said. 

Republican opposition to LGBT couples is hardly surprising -- breaking up our families is a longstanding priority of their party -- but the utter lack of any support from Leahy's fellow Democrats is more than disappointing:

Steve Rawls, spokesman for Immigration Equality, a Washington-based group that has been pushing the issue, had high praise for Leahy on Friday, but the opposite for other Democrats.
“We expected Republican opposition, but we also expected other Democrats to stand with Senator Leahy and pledge their support for our families,” Rawls said. “And the fact they didn’t was just disgraceful.”

I don't often have occasion to draw cartoons critical of Democrats these days, the alternative to them being so thoroughly, horrifically offensive. So make a note of this week's cartoon. I am unlikely to draw many more like it.

Q Toon: Condemned to Repeat It

Senator Lindsey Graham appeared with Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman on CNN earlier this month, and program host Piers Morgan brought up the topic of marriage equality. After Graham had stated that South Carolina would never vote for marriage equality, the other two senators couched the issue in the question of states' rights to define marriage for themselves.

Morgan then suggested that it wasn't fair that a couple could be legally married in New York but not in South Carolina. I've twisted Senator Graham's words in the cartoon, so here's his original reply:

"Can — can I suggest this? Slavery was outlawed by a Constitutional amendment. Go watch 'Lincoln,' a great movie. The people decided. The question for us is who should decide these things? Should it be a handful of judges or should it be the people themselves? And I come out on the side of the people themselves. Different people will look at it differently. But slavery was outlawed by a Constitutional amendment. If you want to propose a Constitutional amendment legalizing same-sex marriage and it passes, that’s the law of the land."

Mission Implausible

Last week, William Gheen, a South Carolina Democrat (yes, a Democrat — the political spectrum is S.C. skews to the right compared to most of the country) now active in the Tea Party movement told his fellow teabaggers that Senator Lindsey Graham was being blackmailed to support Democrats' version of Immigration Reform:

"Sen. Graham, you need to come forward and tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality. Come out of that closet, Lindsey. Come out of that log cabin closet...Look, I'm a tolerant person. I don't care about your private life, Lindsey. But as our U.S. Senator, I need to figure out why you're trying to sell out your own countrymen, and I need to make sure your being gay isn't it."

What connection there is between being a closeted gay and supporting immigration reform is beyond me. If Gheen wasn't saying that Sen. Graham was being blackmailed, perhaps he was charging that immigration reform is somehow part of the Homosexual Agenda. Could we be planning to allow homosexuals from around the world into our country to infiltrate our post-Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell military so that we can rise through the ranks and achieve World Domination?

Since the weekend, when this cartoon was drawn, Sen. Graham has declared himself against any immigration reform bill likely to come out of this Congress, so I suppose Mr. Gheen's bizarre linking of the Senator's long-rumored "private life" and his openness toward moving immigration reform forward has had its desired effect. (For the record, I have no idea whether Sen. Graham is gay, straight, or a eunuch pining away for Greta Garbo.)

The question now is whether Republican or Teabag minders will trot out insinuations about Lindsey Graham — or any other unmarried politician — any time he is suspected of wavering from the Tea Party Line.