This Week's Sneak Peek

What, another Ric Grenell cartoon? Oh, well — Scott Bessent will have to wait for some other time.

So I was mindful of being inclusive when creating the host in this week's cartoon. She's completely made up, by the way; any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

I suppose I could have drawn Eugene Daniels or Jonathan Capehart, but there is no way that Grenell would be caught dead on MS NOW.

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.

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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.

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

Q Toon: Jack and Alec

In case you don't keep up with MSNBC on Friday nights, brand new program host Alec Baldwin has been suspended for two weeks after being filmed calling a pesky photographer a "c***sucking f**." (Baldwin tried explaining that he actually called the guy a "c***sucking fathead," which is only half as homophobic.)

I don't usually have MSNBC on during Baldwin's particular time slot, but I presume that the channel has temporarily gone back to programming about what it's like to live in prison, where such language is completely unheard of.

As I mentioned the other day, drawing Baldwin from opposite angles proved to be quite the challenge, in part because he must have decided that his right side is not his good side. (Insert rightwing-vs.-leftwing snarky remark here.) After writing that, I tried image-Googling "Alec Baldwin cartoon" and found very little evidence that other cartoonists have been able to capture essence of Alec in their work. So I guess that while I don't feel that I've quite captured the Baldwin Moue, I don't feel so bad about my efforts this week after all.

What a Bunch of Dicks! (The Sequel)

We've all seen the photo of the wall of men testifying before Darrell Issa's committee yesterday on why the Fedrul Gummint shouldn't interfere with the Catholic Church's control over women's reproductive health.

From columnist Connie Schultz, here's a screen capture of the discussion of that event on MSNBC's Morning Joe today:

Q Toon: Controlled Outbursts

On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" today, I saw Mitt Romney tell Joe and Mika that unlike Rick Perry, he had to work with an opposition-led legislature and therefore knows how to reach across the aisle and get things done. That, he predicted, would be the style of a Romney presidency.

Should the Democratic leadership declare that their Number One Goal is to make sure that Romney is a one-term president, that could be a little difficult. Not as difficult as if he were facing opposition from the lockstep Republican legislators; Will Rogers' quip, "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat," still holds true.

MoveOn.org has got nothing on the [Insert State Name Here] Club for Growth. Code Pink is peanuts next to the Tea Party.

Radical conservatives made their 2010 gains after a summer of disrupting the town meetings of Democratic Representatives and Senators in a coordinated campaign to provide the media with ample dramatic footage of supposedly grass-roots opposition to Health Care Reform and all things Democrat. Republican Congressman Joe Wilson shouted "You lie!" at President Obama during a State of the Union address.

And while Republicans in Congress have shielded themselves from heckling by charging constituents money to attend their town hall meetings, or conducting town hall meetings over the phone (where they can cut off any unruly outburst, and which it would be illegal to record), Republican presidential candidates are finding that the enthusiastic behavior their party's activists have encouraged is not limited to shouting down the opposition.

Texas leads the nation in death row executions. Wild applause! Should medical care be withheld from some 30-year-old without insurance? Heck yeah! Is that a gay soldier risking his life in Iraq in service to his country? Boo!

What is a political party to do?

Liebermania!

Since the publications I draw for come out weekly, biweekly, or monthly, this week's Q Syndicate cartoon looks past Christmas and into the new year.

The good news is that Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Lieberman) hasn't succeeded in killing Health Care Reform just yet; perhaps it would have been more appropriate to have drawn him kneecapping Health Care Reform. But we cartoonists are an impish lot, and will seize any opportunity to draw buttcrack.

Incidentally, drawing Lieberman angry was mighty challenging. His Droopy Dawg demeanor just doesn't suit anger.