Q Toon: Goblins, Ghouls, and Grifters

With all that's going to hell in a handbasket in the world today, it may seem frivolous to focus this week's cartoon on the cartoonish Congresscretin from Long Island. And maybe it is.

On the other hand, it's important, at least to his constituents on Long Island, not to overlook the astounding degree of grift and fraud of which George Santos stands accused. According to the federal indictment:

“As alleged, Santos is charged with stealing people’s identities and making charges on his own donors’ credit cards without their authorization, lying to the FEC and, by extension, the public about the financial state of his campaign.  Santos falsely inflated the campaign’s reported receipts with non-existent loans and contributions that were either fabricated or stolen,” stated United States Attorney [Breon] Peace.  “This Office will relentlessly pursue criminal charges against anyone who uses the electoral process as an opportunity to defraud the public and our government institutions.”...

“The defendant — a Congressman — allegedly stole the identities of family members and used the credit card information of political contributors to fraudulently inflate his campaign coffers,” stated District Attorney [Anne T.] Donnelly.  “We thank our partners in the US Attorney’s Office and the FBI as we work together to root out public corruption on Long Island.”

Those of us who did not personally donate to Mr. Santos's 2022 campaign may have to wait until a court of law has judged the case against him, but apparently people who did donate are not granting him the benefit of the doubt. Newsday reports that his 2024 campaign is deep in debt, refunding donors more than it receives.

So let's just say that he certainly appears to regard the leader of his party as a role model. From the indictment:

[B]etween approximately December 2021 and August 2022, Santos devised and executed a fraudulent scheme to steal the personal identity and financial information of contributors to his campaign.  He then charged contributors’ credit cards repeatedly, without their authorization.  Because of these unauthorized transactions, funds were transferred to Santos’s campaign, to the campaigns of other candidates for elected office, and to his own bank account.  To conceal the true source of these funds and to circumvent campaign contribution limits, Santos falsely represented that some of the campaign contributions were made by other persons, such as his relatives or associates, rather than the true cardholders.  Santos did not have authorization to use their names in this way.

For example, in December 2021, one contributor (the “Contributor”) texted Santos and others to make a contribution to his campaign, providing billing information for two credit cards.  In the days after he received the billing information, Santos used the credit card information to make numerous contributions to his campaign and affiliated political committees in amounts exceeding applicable contribution limits, without the Contributor’s knowledge or authorization. To mask the true source of these contributions and thereby circumvent the applicable campaign contribution limits, Santos falsely identified the contributor for one of the charges as one of his relatives.  In the following months, Santos repeatedly charged the Contributor’s credit card without the Contributor’s knowledge or authorization, attempting to make at least $44,800 in charges and repeatedly concealing the true source of funds by falsely listing the source of funds as Santos himself, his relatives and other contributors.  On one occasion, Santos charged $12,000 to the Contributor’s credit card, ultimately transferring the vast majority of that money into his personal bank account.

But unless Santos turns out to be Joe Biden's bastard son, he's likely to remain in Congress until 2025. Even, that is, if he gets found guilty on all charges. Miss Thang knows no shame, and Gym Jordan (or Paul Gosar, or Marginal Taylor Greene, or whomever the MAGAverse vomits up next as its next candidate for Speaker of the House) needs his vote, and Santos knows it.

Q Toon: Count Your Blessings

 

By now, every possible joke about Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr. watching his wife cuckold him with the pool boy has been done to death. 

But in these dark times, we all need the comfort and solace of knowing that someone who richly deserves it is having a worse day than we are. So here's one more.

Toon: Staking the MeToo High Ground

It's hard to imagine how Bill Clinton thought he could make the talk show rounds chatting up his book, co-authored by James Patterson, without having to discuss in light of the #metoo movement the sex he did not have with that woman.

Or why James Patterson stuck with the tour past Interview #1.

Republicans can safely make the rounds of every show on Fox News secure in the knowledge that they won't have to answer any uncomfortable questions; but Democrats, for all the blather about "liberal media bias," have no such safe space. Seemingly blindsided by pointed questions in a "Today" show interview, Bill Clinton was afforded a chance to revise and extend his remarks on Stephen Colbert's "Late Night" the next day. But it meant having to spend an entire segment of the show repenting for the horndog behavior that got him impeached 20 years ago.

Up until the #metoo movement, Bill Clinton remained the Democrats' second-best Elder Statesman after Jimmy Carter. Al Gore had insisted that Clinton stay at arms length from Gore's 2000 campaign, and lost West Virginia and Florida as a result. Barack Obama sent Clinton to campaign for the Good Ol' Boy vote, and got just enough of them to break the Republican lock on the South twice.

Contrast that with the Republicans' relationship with their most recently disgraced president, Richard Nixon. They defended him in office until the Smoking Gun tapes came out, but unlike the Democrats and Clinton, never gave him a speaking slot at their conventions or sent him out to campaign anywhere. 20 years later, Nixon was studiously rehabilitating himself, cranking out scholarly tomes on foreign policy but still not invited to speak at GOP nominating conventions.

Donald Joffrey Trump is unlikely to be around in 20 years (does even Brian Kilmeade believe the notes from Trump's doctor?), so I don't expect him to be churning out The Art of the Treaty or Everyone Is Saying The President is Missed, That I Can Tell You in 2038. Assuming we have our democracy back, perhaps Republicans will have made a more honest assessment of him by then.

Either that, or his visage will be beaming down on the America Great Again Party Convention, between those of Emperor Putin and our Dear Friend And Ally Kim Jong-Il, as Don Jr. accepts renomination to a fourth term as CEO of the United States.

Ready for Their Tax Cut

Here's an extra cartoon for your Christmas stocking:

As I write, we're waiting to see whether Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) can persuade his party's deficit chicken hawks to increase the child credit in their tax bill to double the current amount. This as a sop to lower and middle class taxpayers so that the Republicans' so-called reforms don't come off as a complete give-away to corporations and the rich.

Republicans and their benefactors have long complained that tax rates for U.S. corporations and the richest Americans are the highest in the world — which they're not, but we have to let that pass for now. They gloss over the fact that the overwhelming majority of these upper-bracket filers end up paying little or no taxes thanks to a wealth of deductions that they have lobbied for over the years.

Slashing the upper income tax rates was supposed to be accompanied by erasing significant numbers of those tax loopholes, but by some miracle, the only exemptions and deductions being eliminated are the ones used by lower and middle class filers. Exemptions and deductions that benefit the top 1% — including many Republican members of Congress — remain or are increased.

For example, during the fall, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson — the 26th-richest member of Congress — withheld his support for the bill, leveraging his vote to pressure lawmakers to add provisions to the bill increasing tax breaks for investors in pass-through entities. The most recent federal records show Johnson has up to $30 million of ownership stakes in three LLCs that generate rental income. Johnson earned between $115,000 and $1,050,000 of income from those investments in 2016.

And if you still believe the theory that coddling the rich will enable the benefits to trickle down to everybody else once their wealth finally achieves some mythical critical mass, think again. They have plenty of other plans for their tax breaks, starting with mergers and acquisitions and ending with trimming the newly redundant employees from their mega-companies.

Well, at least Monopoly Man at the southeast corner of this cartoon is generating jobs for all the attendants at the sexual harassment clinic.

School for Sex Scandal

I've been over the river and through the woods with family over the Thanksgiving holiday, so I may have missed whatever new accusations of sexual harassment or under age dating or indecent exposure have come out against whatever beloved, respected, or powerful politician, entertainer or sports figure came out Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. It's not as though I've been incommunicado with the world, but given the vast range of political opinions around our dinner table, some subjects just had to be ignored for a while.

But now that we're all back home with our Thanksgiving leftovers, Sexcapadeback Saturday reheats cartoons of selected sexual scandals that I've had the occasion to draw about. This mess didn't start with Harvey Weinstein, and it probably won't end with Charlie Rose. It goes way back, and there has often been one Usual Suspect in particular.

Because of the accusations against Alabama Inquisitor Judge Roy Moore, conservatives want to re-litigate the sexual dalliances of President Bill Clinton. His peccadilloes fall in that gray area between consensual affairs and clear and obvious sexual harassment; Monica Lewinsky was no 14-year-old, but she was a subordinate employee, and the episode displayed, more than any of Clinton's other affairs, a profound lapse of judgement on the President's part.

But if we are to re-litigate the Clinton imbroglio, it's only fair to file an amicus curiae brief about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, too. After all, unlike Bill Clinton, Justice Thomas is still regularly collecting a government paycheck.

Sexual harassment scandals are the exclusive province of no political party. But the Edwin Edwards test often determines the degree of damage to the accused: the Louisiana Democrat once boasted, "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy."

In 2006, Republican Congressman Mark Foley lost his reelection bid in Florida over revelations that he propositioned male pages who worked in his office.

Four years later, it was Democrat Eric Massa of New York who was compelled to resign as the House Ethics Committee investigated reports that he habitually groped male members of his staff. He admitted on Glenn Beck's Fox News program that "not only did I grope [a staffer], I tickled him until he couldn't breathe," but then he denied on Larry King's CNN program ever having groped anyone.

The revelations that House Speaker Dennis Hastert had molested student athletes when he was a high school wrestling coach in Illinois came out only after he had left office. The statute of limitations had run out on those incidents; he was convicted of violating banking rules when he paid hush money to the now adult victims of his predatory behavior.

Sexual harassment typically involves an imbalance of power: adult vs. adolescent or child; employer vs. employee; faculty vs. student; celebrity vs. average citizen. Or the strong arm of the law vs. the legally vulnerable:

Many of these cartoons have involved male-on-male misdeeds because I draw cartoons for the LGBTQ press, so unless the perpetrator has a history of telling us how immoral we are, it's extremely rare that I turn my pen to heterosexual hanky-panky. In part it's also because for so long, male-to-female sexual harassment was passed off as relatively normative — even funny. (You can draw a straight line from Pepe LePew to Al Franken.)

When it comes to sexual relationships between adults and children, however, we have always reacted with more seriousness, whether we're talking about girls or boys. (Gauzy recollections of heterosexual boys coming of age in The Graduate and The Summer of '42 notwithstanding.) Prior to the Roy Moore accusations, the right-wing media played up man-on-boy pedophilia scandals because it was so easy to extrapolate sexual misbehavior victimizing under-age males with consensual and healthy relationships between adult gay men.

The LGBTQ community constantly needs to remind Republican Puritans that one thing is not always like another thing. Again and again.

Q Toon: Vale, Benny

The Associated Press may have made last week's cartoon moot, but as long as Benedict XIV doesn't change his mind about becoming Ex-Benedict I, I think this week's cartoon will stand.

As the cartoon states, Italian media have linked the Pope's abdication to his receiving a 300-page report on what is called the Vatileaks scandal, a report which will be turned over to whomever gets to be the next heir of St. Peter.  A report in La Repubblica alleges that Vatican clergy would meet clandestinely for partying and sexual encounters with men, some of them prostitutes, at such venues as a villa outside Rome, a sauna in a Rome suburb, a beauty parlor in city center, and a former university residence that was in use by a provincial Italian archbishop. As relayed to us Anglophones by the Guardian of Great Britain:

The paper said the pope had taken the decision on 17 December that he was going to resign – the day he received a dossier compiled by three cardinals delegated to look into the so-called "Vatileaks" affair. ...According to La Repubblica, the dossier comprising "two volumes of almost 300 pages – bound in red" had been consigned to a safe in the papal apartments and would be delivered to the pope's successor upon his election. The newspaper said the cardinals described a number of factions, including one whose members were "united by sexual orientation".
In an apparent quotation from the report, La Repubblica said some Vatican officials had been subject to "external influence" from laymen with whom they had links of a "worldly nature". The paper said this was a clear reference to blackmail.
It quoted a source "very close to those who wrote [the cardinal's report]" as saying: "Everything revolves around the non-observance of the sixth and seventh commandments."

Panorama magazine followed up with NSFW video footage from their own undercover investigation:

The first [priest], a Frenchman about 35 years old, met the Panorama reporter Friday, July 2, at a gay party in a local neighborhood of Testaccio. In the evening, which included paid escort two men who danced naked with the priest and with other guests (then having sex with some of them), was also Charles, the second priest, who was aged between 45 and 50 years. The night ended at the home of Paul, where the reporter's gay accomplice asked the priest to wear the cassock and then had sex with him, filmed by hidden camera.
The next night, Paul and Charles made ​​an appointment with the Panorama reporter and his accomplice in the Gay Village in Rome, showing that they are comfortable in that environment. On this occasion, Charles was absent, having claimed several times to have had to do to avoid meeting those whom he had recognized as other priests or catechists. ... The next day, Sunday, July 4, Paul celebrated Mass on a table in his own home, in the presence of the Panorama reporter and his accomplice.

In this cartoon, Benedict takes the place of this guy at right in Michelangelo's "The Last Judgment" on the Sistine Chapel ceiling:

It is said that this guy represents Despair, or a person who is surprised to discover that he didn't live as good a life as he perhaps thought he did. Of all the damned souls on the right side of the painting, he is perhaps the most sympathetically rendered, although I've never read anything to suggest that Michelangelo had a specific person in mind (unlike several other faces in the painting). You'll find him below and to the right of St. Bartholemew, whose flayed skin is said to represent Michelangelo himself.

My dilemma artistically was that Mr. Despair is surrounded by a whole lot of open space, so I ended up moving several elements of Michelangelo's masterpiece into the cartoon frame from other places in the painting. The boatload of damned souls, for example, is from well below the character whose left buttock appears on the right side of this detail image.

Q Toon: Beefcake for Thanksgiving

We pause one moment before the Thanksgiving holiday, the fiscal cliff, and the next round of Israeli-Palestinian bombings to wring one more drop of prurience out of l'Affaire David Petraeus.

Have a happy and blessed Thanksgiving. Unless you're forcing your minimal wage employees to spend the holiday stocking shelves and ringing up sales. Then I hope your Thanksgiving sucks even more than theirs.

Toon from the Archives: Shock Light!

This week's cartoon (see yesterday's post) reminded me of a cartoon I drew in 1991:

The cartoon was based, more or less, on a shampoo commercial airing at the time, as well as on various ads for lower-calorie malt beverages.