Act 2, Scene 3

Backward Christian Soldiers

Donald Joffrey Trump's nominee for Secretary of the Army is a Tennessee state legislator named Mark Green (R-Clarksville). Where Barack Obama opened the U.S. military to LGBTQ service members and appointed Eric Fanning to be the first openly gay head of any branch of the U.S. military, it is clear that Trump is issuing the military an about-face.

Green is a lead sponsor of a bill guaranteeing educators a right to discriminate against LGBTQ persons, and backs another bill allowing mental health practitioners to refuse to treat LGBTQ patients. The West Point graduate sponsored a Tennessee "bathroom bill," and another bill prohibiting local governments from enforcing antidiscrimination policies protecting LGBTQ citizens.

Green's bigotry comes cloaked in religiosity. He told a radio interviewer that because of St. Paul's letter to the Romans:

"...as a state senator, my responsibility very clearly in Romans 13 is to create an environment where people who do right are rewarded, and people who do wrong are crushed. Evil is crushed. And so I'm going to protect women in their bathrooms, and I'm going to protect our state against potential infiltration by Syrian ISIS people through a  refugee program." 

Speaking to a Tea Party Koffee Klatch in Chattanooga, Green said transgender persons are mentally diseased, deriding them as "guys and gals with question marks." He also told the group that legalized same-sex marriage might lead to using taxpayer dollars for infanticide.

His animus is by no means limited to gays, lesbian, and transgender persons. At that same Koffee Klatch, he enthusiastically supported a variety of other tenets of Tea Partisan faith:

To a questioner who worried about armed insurrection by people who “don’t belong here, like Muslims in the United States,” Green said it was a “great question.” Referring to the “Muslim horde” that sacked Constantinople five centuries ago, Green agreed that we must “take a stand on the indoctrination of Islam in our public schools”—even as he vowed to spread the Christian light into the military and the culture as he had as a young missionary in a Muslim section of Toronto.
Green agreed with a questioner that President Obama is not a citizen and he refused to answer whether the former president is really a Muslim. Asked what could account for a mysterious rise in Latinos registering to vote in Tennessee, Green theorized they were “being bused here probably.”

Green's confirmation is not a sure thing, given skepticism expressed by Senate Armed Services Chair John McCain and others.

“The statements he has made on a number of fronts — in particular to the LGBT community, to different minority groups, different religious groups — are a great, great concern toward military readiness,” said [Iraq War verteran Daniel] Feehan, who served as principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for readiness from 2015 until earlier this year.
It’s already hard enough to recruit a talented, diverse military to accomplish critical missions, Feehan said. Green’s record and public statements will make that job even more difficult by creating an environment in which potential recruits might feel unwelcome, Feehan said.

On the list of organizations opposed to Green's nomination are GLAAD, Outserve-SLDN, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Human Rights Campaign, the American Military Partner Association, and the Truman National Security Project, the last of which wrote:

"As every military leader knows, unit readiness at every level is built on mutual trust, often referred to as unit cohesion. When leaders denigrate service members on the basis of their personal characteristics, it undermines that essential trust. As several of you know firsthand, that can be the difference success and failure on the battlefield."

Reports earlier this week that Green might withdraw his nomination are so far being denied. If those reports prove correct, Green would be Trump's second Army Secretary nominee to pull out; billionaire Vincent Viola withdrew his nomination on the grounds that he couldn't extricate himself from several conflicts of interest with his family businesses. (Trump’s pick for Navy Secretary, financier Philip Bilden, also dropped out of consideration, citing similar business conflicts. President Trump Inc. could learn a thing or two from Viola and Bilden.)

Yet Republicans have been more than happy to stock all branches of government with reactionary right-wing apparatchiks, and party leadership is likely to pressure its wavering members to fall in line and approve whomever Trump wants. There is nothing the GOP values more highly than partisan unity.

Reversing any and all progress made by the Obama administration, however, ranks a very close second.

Q Toon: Mixed Nuts

Q Syndicate✒Mar 12, 2015

I'm arriving pretty late to this party — Dr. Ben Carson's ridiculous gays-and-prisons comment has been forgotten amid the furore over Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server and Republican senators' decision to notify Iran that they will never agree to any treaties while Barack Obama is President.

Dr. Carson, in case you've never heard of him before, is the GOP's token black presidential candidate — the guy a select few Republicans support for a while in an effort to show that they're not racist. Then, as with Herman Cain and Alan Keyes before him, they fall away when the rest of the party which hasn't nominated a new face since Wendell Willkie coalesces around some white guy with actual experience in government.

Since blurting out on national TV that homosexual sex in prisons proves that sexual orientation is something everyone chooses, Dr. Carson has apologized, which drove all of his supporters crazy. (A short trip, that.) He has promised never to talk about homosexuality again. He needn't worry; he isn't going to be on national TV much any more.

Toon: Asylum of the Tea Party

Yeah, negotiate. That's all they want.

I started watching Dr. Who during the Tom Baker years when WTTW out of Chicago showed the programme on Sunday nights. At some point, WTTW ran out of new episodes and aired several episodes from the Jon Pertwee years instead. After they started running new episodes, I kept watching until sometime in the Peter Davidson years when I got a second shift job that included a lot of Sunday nights, and I lost track of the show.

In those days, Daleks were all slate gray, so that's how I colorized them here. On Google Images, I see that they now come in a rainbow of colors, which just seems wrong. I just can't imagine there being a sensitive Dalek with a flair for design. Next thing you know, the Borg will start snazzing up their wardrobe.

Remember When the Posse Comitatus Was a Fringe Group?

How are we as a nation supposed to have civil discussion about our political disagreements when elected conservatives are nothing short of fucking nuts?

It's not just idiots like Congressman Todd Akin, who thinks that his only mistake in describing how a woman's hormones will protect her against pregnancy during a "legitimate rape" was using the word "legitimate" when he meant "forcible."

There's Tom Head (pictured at right), who has been a county judge in Lubbock, Texas, since 1999. He was being interviewed on the local Fox affiliate on Monday, and defended a proposed 1.7-cent  tax increase to fund the sheriff's department and courts because Barack Obama's reelection will result in civil war -- and Judge Head wants to be in the front lines of the armed insurrection:

"He's going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the [United Nations], and what is going to happen when that happens? I'm thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. We're talking Lexington - Concord - take up arms and get rid of the guy. Okay?

"Now what's going to happen if we do that? He's going to send in U.N. troops. I don't want 'em in Lubbock County, okay? So I'm going to stand in front of their armored personnel carrier and say 'You're not coming in here'. The sheriff, I've already asked him, I said, 'Are you gonna back me?' He said, 'I'll back you.'

"I don't want rookies. I want trained, equipped and seasoned veteran officers to back me."

So now we know what it takes to get one of these Red State Republicans to support a tax increase. *

If this longhorn moron were the only Republican talking about armed insurrection, that would be one thing. But here's something from the Greene County (Virginia) Republican Committee newsletter, written by its editor, Ponch McPhee:

”[W]e shall not have any coarse [sic] but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November.  This Republic cannot survive for 4 more years underneath this political socialist ideologue.”

This editor could use a copy editor.

Passage of the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") was greeted with death threats against Democrats in Congress and vandalism to their home district offices, including that of Arizona Democrat Gabrielle Giffords -- who would be shot in the head by a deranged assassin a few months later.

Over a year after those shots were fired in Tuscon, the Supreme Court upheld the ACA this past June. Matt Davis, formerly a spokesman for Michigan's Republican Party, sent out an email with the somewhat less radical view of Gee, I Hope It Doesn't Come To That:

"If the Supreme Court's decision Thursday paves the way for unprecedented intrusion into personal decisions, then has the Republic all but ceased to exist? If so, then is armed rebellion today justified? God willing, this oppression will be lifted and America free again before the first shot is fired."

How about an elected Republican that you've actually heard of?

“I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back,” --Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN)

And who can forget Nevada senatorial candidate Sharon Angle proposing "Second Amendment Remedies" to change Congress in 2010?

So much of the vandalism, death threats, and plans for armed insurrection came in response to health care reform -- people willing to take up arms to defend their right to have private health insurance companies price them out of the health insurance as they have kids, grow old, file claims, and become less profitable to the corporate bottom line.

Contrast that to the uproar over state governments' crackdown on union workers these past two years. As vitriolic as the confrontations in Wisconsin and other states were, I don't remember any elected or party officials calling for "Concord - Lexington - take up arms" "Second Amendment remedies."

The most violent reaction? Some jerk poured beer on Wisconsin State Representative Robin Vos (R-Burlington) in a bar.
_________
* UPDATE: I had wondered whether antitax crusader Grover Norquist would approve of Judge Head's little tax hike. Apparently not.

QToon: Don't Watch That! Watch This!

That's the problem with drawing a weekly cartoon. Remember that Hilary Rosen story? It's already been preëmted by the GSA Weekend In Las Vegas Scandal, which has already been superseded by the Secret Service - Colombian Hookers Imbroglio.

Since the Allen West story is now buried under layers of news cycle sediment, here's a quick reminder. At a public event last week, the Florida Republican and Tea Party darling was asked how many Marxists there are in Congress.

"That's a fair question. I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party. It's called the Congressional Progressive Caucus."

There was a brief flurry of calls for West to disavow that McCarthyist crack, but the Congressman has steadfastly refused to do so.

÷

My use of "Faux News" on the rolling anchor desk really does a disservice to the rest of the right-wing media who spent so much time and effort harping on Hilary Rosen's foolish crack about Ann Romney. The AM radio crowd and other Newsmaxis powers did their darnedest to keep the outrage going -- even Rush "She's A Slut" Limbaugh decried the supposed Liberal War on Women.

But not until I went looking for something to which this blog post could link did I find this tweet from America's own Torquemada, Bill Donohue:

“Lesbian Dem Hilary Rosen tells Ann Romney she never worked a day in her life. Unlike Rosen, who had to adopt kids, Ann raised 5 of her own."

Take that, you contumelious strumpet! 

÷

Meanwhile, on the Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite front, I've now found that CS5.1 does not include the ability to import an image from a scanner or other Twain source. I've been twunked!

It's a good thing that trusty old Ulead Photo Express 3.0 still accepts input from my scanner. If only it saved files that other programs were able to find...

Q Toon: Troy Mayor Daniels

Tea Partisan Janice Daniels has only been mayor of Troy, Michigan since November, but she has quickly come to the attention of national LGBT groups for her vociferous antigay bigotry.

It started with a post on her Facebook page back in June, saying, "I think I am going to throw away my I Love New York carrying bag now that queers can get married there." After the post blew up in her face in December, she apologized for the language, but not the sentiment, reiterating her opposition to marriage equality for same-sex couples.

In an attempt at further damage control, she met with a gay-straight alliance (GSA) group at the Troy high school. The damage, however, spiraled further out of control:

According to [Troy High School senior Skye] Curtis and others who attended the meeting – including GSA member Zach Kilgore and lesbian couple Amy and Tina Weber – Daniels, while discussing mental health and suicide among members of the LGBT community, at one point suggested putting together a panel of psychologists to show that homosexuality is dangerous to your mental health.

Mayor Daniels has denied that she made such comments. She has also so far refused to release recordings her staff made of the meeting, so we are left to wonder whether or not she indeed knows how to watch what she says.

And perhaps it's a good thing if she doesn't. As the Detroit Free Press opined in a strongly worded editorial:

The most peculiar thing about bigots is that they never figure the term applies to them. Or they're smart enough to know that, at least in polite society, prejudice is like nose-picking. So prejudice in 2012 is the art of veiled references and coded language. ... It's a reason to be thankful for someone like Troy Mayor Janice Daniels, who wears her own irrational biases like a fashion accessory of which she is especially proud. She's a throwback who makes it distressingly clear how elusive tolerance still is. ... 

[I]t's better for residents in Troy to hear what she's really thinking, and see how she's representing them publicly. Elections have consequences, and Daniels' embarrassing run so far as mayor of Oakland County's largest city is a good reminder of how swiftly those consequences can materialize.

Joe. (My God.) Walsh.

When I decided to draw this past week's cartoon about Illinois freshman Congressman Joe Walsh, I was worried that hardly anybody outside of his district would have any idea who he was. I certainly had never heard of him before.

I needn't have worried. The congressman has been caught -- twice --on video going batshit crazy at constituents, and both incidents have gone viral. He even made Willie Geist's "Week in Review" segment at the end of Morning Joe today.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

So Joe Jervis of the blog Joe. My. God. took note of my silly cartoon, and almost all of the reader comments approve enthusiastically. (Sorry, Charlie.) I appreciate the feedback.

It feels good to be ahead of the news curve for once!

Q Toon: Joe Walsh, Family Supporter

This news item may not have the shock value of Touched: The Jerry Sandusky Story, but we're giving it the notice it deserves here at Bergetoons. Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh (R-Teaparty, not the former Eagles guitarist) was recently named a "True Blue" member of Congress by the right-wing, gay-bashing Family Research Council. His "unwavering support of the family" falls somewhat short of supporting his own, however; he is more than $117,000 behind in child support payments to his ex-wife and children.

The thick nine-year-old divorce file in Cook County Circuit Court chronicles how every few years Laura Walsh has gone to court saying her ex-husband is not paying [child support] and asking a judge to order him to pay, sometimes garnishing his wages.

He claims that he and his ex agreed to let him slack off on child support.

Running for Congress is mighty darned expensive, you know.

Q Toon: Humpty Romney

The big challenge in this cartoon was to fit Mitt Romney's long, angular face onto a round egg (and then to redraw it again a centimeter to the left, because I hadn't left enough room on the page to put in the block of text. When I had a scanner that could handle a 14" by 17" sheet of bristol board, I would have just moved the border of the cartoon a centimeter to the right, but that scanner died earlier this year and I had to replace it with one with a raised barrier and a hinge immediately against two sides of its 12" x 8" screen).

While Rick Perry's face would fit better on Humpty Dumpty's head, I kind of like the insinuation that Romney is a fragile thing heading for a fall. It's difficult to imagine today's Republican party rallying behind a former Massachusetts governor whose major achievement in office was a health care plan that served as a model for Obamacare; and who is not, by literalist fundamentalist standards, a Christian, and thus ineligible for public office as far as GOP theocrats are concerned. Their crowd was disappointed by John McCain and his lack of open religious fervor, and they're not going to lose another election cycle to someone who isn't one of their own.

Moreover, I like the name. It was a coin toss whether to call him Humpty Romney or Romney Dumpty.

For anyone who has not had the pleasure of reading Through the Looking Glass, Alice buys an egg from the White Queen (the Queen having turned into a sheep), who places the egg upright on a far counter. By the time Alice reaches it, the egg has turned into Humpty Dumpty, and the two have a conversation full of Dodgsonian wordplay.

[Humpty Dumpty said,] "There's glory for you."

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.

"Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"

"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument," Alice objected.

"When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more not less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. "They've a temper, some of them -- particularly verbs, they're the proudest -- adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs -- however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"

"Would you tell me, please," said Alice, "what that means?"

"Now you talk like a reasonable child," said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. "I meant by 'impenetrability' that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life."

"That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

As I noted on Monday, Alice -- in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass -- appears to be becoming a running theme for this election. I've already drawn the Republican field as Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum; and although I haven't yet set a cartoon at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, one seems inevitable. I wouldn't be the first to do so, however.

(Nor am I positing that Dwayne Powell was the first to do so. I'm pretty sure that every liberal editorial cartoonist has produced a Mad Hatter's Tea Party cartoon since the Tea Party emerged on the scene.)

Q Toon: Tea for Two

If I hadn't drawn this cartoon particularly for LGBT publications, I might well have added a few other fellow travelers in Mr. Teabagger's wake: the governmental shills for corporations, anti-environmentalists, anti-women's reproductive rights activists, anti-Latino xenophobes, and the rest of the lot.

But for the purposes of this cartoon, I'm concerned that should Republicans (and let's face it, the Tea Party is the activist wing of the Republican Party for this election cycle) take over state and federal government, what few gains the LGBT community has made in the past few years are seriously at risk. Republican Gubernatorial candidates in my home state have pledged to turn the document registering my domestic partnership into an expensive sheet of toilet paper. There will no doubt be a return to the days of federal laws forbidding state and local governments from recognizing LGBT rights. Not only will "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" stay on the books, Republicans will tack a provision barring gay and lesbians from military service onto their constitutional amendment denying us any right to marry, adopt, speak in church, publicly assemble or use public rest rooms.

There are not enough libertarians in the Republican party to offset conservatives' tendency to believe in Small Government only insofar as it deals with Big Business. When it comes to the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of you and me, Republicans are perfectly happy to enlarge governmental intrusion.

This Week's Sneak Peek

That's right, boys and girls, it's another unflattering picture of a Teabagger.

Teabaggers have responded to these cartoons by saying that they're not all angry white guys dolled up in colonial drag, to which my response is: suck it up and get used to it. TV cameras and cartoonists are attracted to the outlandish and extreme elements of any group, which is why images of Gay Pride focus more on drag queens and leather fetishists than on casually dressed revelers -- and there's no point in complaining about it.

It's why Sarah Palin is more emblematic of the Tea Party than Dick Armey, in spite of his new dye job.

And its why Mr. Grouchy Imitation Patriot gets to be the image of your grouchy imitation patriotic movement.

Tea Partiers Take Up Another Cause

The Washington Post reports that the National Spelling Bee is being protested by advocates of phonetic spelling.

Or shouldn't that be fonetik speling?

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.

Pity Party

After several months of gun-totin' and callin' the president a Socialist Nazi and threatenin' secession, the Tea Party movement has noticed that it has an image problem. Accordingly, they have decided that this is the media's fault.

Strangely enough, the people in government whom they've spit on and portrayed as the Joker and shouted down at town hall meetings just aren't listening to them. (That last summer the administration wasted trying to woo Republican votes for health care reform notwithstanding.) This has never happened before.

Or, to put it another way: how's that nopey angry thing working out for ya?

Hopi Changey Stuff

I debated whether I ought to change the caption in this cartoon to more accurately reflect what Sarah Palin actually said to the Teabaggers over the weekend: "hopey changey stuff." But then, would I need to change the hand to "cynicky samy oldy policiesy ..." ?