Q Toon: Can You Take a Joke. Please

A witless baboon in the White House Octagon to celebrate Donald Commodius Trump's Octogenarian Birthday made a gratuitous swipe at former First Lady Michelle Obama, grabbing the mic to call her a man. 

I guess MAGArillas think that kind of thing is funny. At least until they start clinging to it as a core belief, like their tenacious insistence despite all evidence to the contrary that her husband was born in Kenya.

It's of the same joke book of pretending that James Talarico is a transgender vegan, or Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet.

To be fair, liberals do it, too. Sarah Palin never said she could see Russia from her house; J.D. Vance never wrote that he made passionate love to a sofa. And Donald Trump doesn't really have a pig snout. I do not, however, see liberals insisting that these things are, in fact, true.

Poking fun at politicians is fair game; questioning the gender identity of Mr. Talarico and Mrs. Obama, however, is intentionally mean. The present fascist regime is devoted to persecuting transgender and gender-non-conforming persons, so casting aspersions on someone's gender identity can hardly be innocent fun.

Of course, there are dimwitted, cranky trumpeters who imagine that coining the word Dumocrats or calling anyone who disagrees with him stupid is fiendishly clever, and any liberal who doesn't agree must not have a sense of humor.

Melania's Turn of Phrase

Somebody had better warn Rudy Giuliani that the calls are coming from inside the Quicken Loans Center!

Q Toon: Pardon the Interruption

Since all the news today is about the massive database amassed by the U.S. government of every phone call, fax,  instant message, tweet, Facebook post, Google search, and garage door code for every person in the world, it's quite possible that you have forgotten the news items at the heart of this week's cartoon.

But rest assured that there is someone at the National Security Agency who remembers Ellen Sturtz, the woman who heckled Michelle Obama about employment non-discrimination, and they know what the PIN for her credit card is, how often she uses her microwave oven, and where she drove yesterday. If it's not someone at the NSA, then it's at least some high school dropout tech geek who got a job at some NSA subcontractor by virtue of his skills at Tomb Raider.

And, as that NSA subcontractor geek well knows, Chris had our TV tuned to the French Open on Sunday morning watching Rafael Nadal beat David Ferrer when one of the antigay yet homoerotic Hommen protesters stormed the court with a flare. Which was a great thing as far as I was concerned, thanks to the fifth law of editorial cartooning: Two Things Make a Cartoon. It's also been months since I've had an excuse to draw a guy without his shirt on.

It's also been over a year since I've had any use for my high school French.

Q Toon: Inaugural Shout Out

It's a week late, but here's my cartoon about President Obama's Second Inaugural Speech. As cartoonist for  the nation's LGBT news and feature syndicate, I couldn't very well ignore the first ever mention of marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples in a presidential inauguration speech, even if that speech was delivered four hours after I sent last week's cartoon to the syndicate.

I understand that conservatives have their collective nose out of joint because President Obama failed to deliver the inaugural address they had written for Mitt Romney. The Economist's Lexington complains about the President's "partisan" speech:

In his speech Mr Obama painted conservatives as akin to a primitive tribe—intensely united around such totems as climate-change denial or hostility to gay rights, rigid in their belief that government safety nets trap citizens in dependency, and generally prone to mistake “absolutism for principle”. In contrast, Mr Obama used the inauguration to thank and reassure the loose coalition that returned him to power in November. In a cascade of lyrical stanzas he pledged his second term, in turn, to those who depend on public health care and pensions, to those weary of war, to women seeking equal pay, to gays seeking equal rights, to minorities angry about legal hurdles that seemingly exclude them from voting, and to immigrants wanting new lives in America. The president ended with a call for citizens to demand that politicians address that progressive agenda.

Lexington suggests that this address is par for the course, reporting that Republicans "routinely accuse Mr Obama of distorting their positions." These must be the same Republicans who say that Obama is a socialist Marxist Israel-hater foisting death panels on Grandmas nationwide while apologizing for everything America has ever done and snatching away everybody's guns.

Speaking of guns, while Lexington pays President Obama no compliments on the issue, the Republican reader who has found in the column a sympathetic account of his/her grievances will likely stumble over the parentheses in this sentence toward the end: "A confrontation looms, too, over Mr Obama’s (feeble) proposals on gun control, such as curbs on high-capacity ammunition clips or new checks on gun buyers."

Would it have been less feeble to have described a progressive movement from Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall and Sandy Hook?

This Week's Sneak Peek

This week's sneak peek marks a return to the traditional snippet out of my own cartoon.

You might have heard that the President was in the news a bit last week.

The Race Card Canard

I try very hard not to ascribe racism as the motivation of people with whom I disagree. But when a woman who "can't stand to look at" President Obama is upset because Michelle Obama "doesn't look like a first lady," what else is one to think?

"I just - I don't like him. Can't stand to look at him. I don't like his wife. She's far from the First Lady. It's about time we get a first lady in there that acts like a First Lady and looks like a First Lady." --Bobbie Lucier, interviewed at the American Legion Convention in Indianapolis

Put Mrs. Obama next to either Laura Bush or Ann Romney and tell me what about her doesn't look like a First Lady. Her sleeve length?

Puh. Leeze.

Add to that the incident in which two white men at the Republican convention threw peanuts at a black female CNN cameraman and shouted "This is what we feed animals!" at her. It is not known whether they were delegates or alternates; to the Republican Party's credit, they were escorted from the floor.

The racists in these two incidents are white and around retirement age. Mrs. Lucier is from Manassas, Virginia; and while we don't know where the peanut throwers are from, cameraman Patricia Carroll seems to assume they were from the Deep South:

Carroll said that as an Alabama native, she was not surprised. "This is Florida, and I'm from the Deep South," she said. "You come to places like this, you can count the black people on your hand. They see us doing things they don't think I should do."

February, 1989: Klansman David Duke wins the Republican
 primary for a seat in Louisiana's House of Representatives

Retirement-age white southerners are perhaps the most resistant group that President Obama has notoriously failed to win over in the four years since he ran for president. (I can think of several retirement-age white northerners who have been equally skeptical of him from the get-go, too. And young white southerners, for that matter. You can picture the Venn diagram for yourself.) Clearly, the election of Barack Obama as President did not herald the arrival of the long-awaited "Post-Racial America" some were celebrating at the time.

Patricia Carroll is not giving interviews. She's there to record the news, not be the news. But immediately after the peanut incident, she did say this:

"I can't change these people's hearts and minds. No, it doesn't feel good. But I know who I am. I'm a proud black woman. A lot of black people are upset. This should be a wake-up call to black people. . . . People were living in euphoria for a while. People think we're gone further than we have."

Q Toon: Rush on Coach Sandusky

Last week, Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience, "[Jerry] Sandusky has to be — he’s a gay guy. Nobody’s mentioning that aspect, because it’s just too dangerous." The Gay Mafia, Limbaugh explained, is enforcing omertà on the mainstream media, keeping the former Penn State assistant football coach's homosexuality hidden way back in the closet.

This cartoon would have been easier to draw if Limbaugh hadn't taken the care to draw a distinction between gays and pedophiles. Right-wingers have a long history of broadcasting their belief that there is no difference between two consenting adults having a sexual relationship on the one hand and pedophiles or "Man-on-Dog" on the other. So I at least give Limbaugh credit for steering clear of that canard.

Another problem with this cartoon is that Limbaugh got more publicity out of calling Michelle Obama "uppity" this week, defending NASCAR fans who booed the First Lady as she, Dr. Jill Biden, a veteran and some children of servicemen prepared to say "Gentlemen, start your engines" a at a Florida race. Somewhere, an editor is wondering what Jerry Sandusky's legal problems have to do with a radio blowhard calling Mrs. Obama "uppity."

(Remember when all those elitist liberals booed First Lady Laura Bush at that one event? Yeah, neither do I.)

A couple weeks ago, when I drew a cartoon about Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh, I was happy to see that  videos of him were going viral in the meantime, because it meant that there would be more readers who had some idea who he was. I don't need to worry about people not knowing who Rush Limbaugh is (although I will never forget a guy I dated for a while who thought that Senator Jesse Helms was an ally of the LGBT community; you can fool some of the people all of the time). I do expect, however, that a lot of readers will have no knowledge of anything Rush Limbaugh has said about the scandal at Penn State. 

With any luck, there will be some news event of common knowledge to draw about next week -- although there's a big holiday this week shutting down Washington D.C. and many of the big-name newsmakers around the country are taking most of the week off. Unless I finally find some gay angle to the Occupy Movement (oh, God, I hope Offisa Pike is straight!), I suspect that next week's cartoon will be just as obscure as this week's.