Q Toon: Great Is Thy Cravenness

Led by Merck's Kenneth Frazier, eight business and labor leaders resigned from Donald Trump's Manuafacturers' Jobs Initiative Council over Donald Trump's tardy, begrudging, and muddled condemnation of Nazis, Klansmen and unspecified radicals "on both sides, on both sides." Leaders of another council, the Strategic and Policy Forum, announced it was disbanding because Charlottesville had become "a distraction" to their purpose.

"As our members have expressed individually over the past several days, intolerance, racism and violence have absolutely no place in this country and are an affront to core American values. We believe the debate over Forum participation has become a distraction from our well-intentioned and sincere desire to aid vital policy discussions on how to improve the lives of everyday Americans."

A pouting Trump seized his ball and flounced home. (Or, rather, to a campaign rally in Arizona.)

Before he could disband them himself, the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities  resigned en masse in a letter crafted so that the first letter of each paragraph spelled out the word "resist."

State Department Science Envoy Daniel M. Kammen followed suit with his own acrostic letter of resignation. At this point, the only reason the rest of the career bureaucrats and Obama holdovers are still in Washington is that they're still working on how to hide clever messages in their resignation letters.

The only resulting resignation from Trump's Evangelical Advisory Board, on the other hand, was New York City pastor Rev. A.R. Barnard. If his resignation letter contained any secret message, it has not yet been found. (A Chicago area pastor had resigned from the board last year over the Billy Bush interview tape.)

Prior to Rev. Barnard leaving the 24-member board, Matthew Dowd, a strategist on George W. Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, tweeted "Not a single member of Trump's Evangelical Council has resigned. We have learned corporate America has a greater moral compass.  So so sad."

The remaining members of the commission, the most prominent of whom had had no hesitation to criticize Democratic presidents, crept to the defense of Mr. Trump.

Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, praised the president for his "bold truthful statement" about Charlottesville. Mark Burns, pastor of Harvest Praise and Worship Center in South Carolina, retweeted a link to a television interview in which he declared his support for Trump and criticized the counterprotesters. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, blamed the news media for misrepresenting Trump's comments.

The Evangelical Board hold-outs have defended standing by their man by claiming that it's their Christian duty to give Trump their aid and counsel. By contrast, that Chicago pastor who quit the board last year, Rev. James MacDonald, posted this Facebook message to his congregation:

"The greater your influence the greater your complicity if you don't call the Charlottesville rally and attack what it really is: a heinous act of domestic terrorism entirely rooted in racial hatred.
"It is the height of hypocrisy to demand that people use the proper term 'Islamic terrorism' ... then turn around and refuse to use similarly candid terms when referring to racial hate crimes."

Q Toon: Hubba Hubba

"Padre" in this cartoon is Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, who three years ago was telling us that "we need to dispel the myth... that a person's private morality has no effect on his ability to run for office or to serve in office. Look, character is what counts, and a person's judgment in his private life spills over into his other life."

Yet Jeffress was one of the first professional evangelicals to endorse a thrice-married casino mogul who stiffs his workers and contractors; and now that we know Trump thinks sexual assault is an acceptable way to say hello, Jeffress is standing by his man. "Look, I might not choose this man to be a Sunday school teacher in my church, but that's not what this election is about."

Other professional evangelicals such as Ralph Reed and Gary Bauer continue to defend Jabba the Trump in a triumph of partisanship over principles. If you missed last night's The Daily Show segment on this, it's well worth a watch.

Pat Robertson gave this weird explanation on his 700 Club: "“A guy does something 11 years ago, it was a conversation in Hollywood where he’s trying to look like he’s macho. And 11 years after that they surface it from The Washington Post or whatever, bring it out within 30 days or so of the election and this is supposed to be the death blow and everybody writes him off, ‘Okay, he’s dead, now you’ve got to get out of the way and let Mike Pence run the campaign.' The Donald says no, He’s like the Phoenix. They think he’s dead, he’s come back. And he came back strong. So, he won that debate.”

“Coach” Dave Daubenmire, a failed candidate for the Ohio legislature and founder of Pass the Salt Ministries, argues that he can support a candidate who grabs vaginas as long as they are not her own: “I think it’s pretty clear that the Bible teaches us that women should not be in authority over a man. ... Rather than worrying so much about the immorality of a sinful man, what about the biblical principle that when a woman rules over a man … it’s a sign of judgment of the Lord?”

Billy Graham's Christianity Today this week editorialized, however, that while it is committed to being officially neutral in the presidential race, and cannot support Hillary Clinton, it urges Christians to stay as far away from Trump as possible.

"What Trump is, everyone has known and has been able to see for decades, let alone the last few months. The revelations of the past week of his vile and crude boasting about sexual conquest—indeed, sexual assault—might have been shocking, but they should have surprised no one. ...
"Enthusiasm for a candidate like Trump gives our neighbors ample reason to doubt that we believe Jesus is Lord. They see that some of us are so self-interested, and so self-protective, that we will ally ourselves with someone who violates all that is sacred to us—in hope, almost certainly a vain hope given his mendacity and record of betrayal, that his rule will save us."