The Dog Days of Cartooning

Or, You Cannot Be Sirius.

1986

in Iconoplastic, Poughkeepsie NY, August 1986

Our Graphical History Tour today delves deep into the Bergetoons vaults for its carefully ripened and aged cartoonistry.

Iconoplastic ("The Magazine for the Self-Interested") was published by a college classmate of mine, Mark Hopkins. The photocopied zine was a way for a bunch of us who had attended St. Olaf together to share our artwork and creative writing with each other. Most of the cartoons I sent to Mark had appeared previously in the UW-Parkside Ranger, but this was one I had drawn expressly for Iconoplastic.

Every one of the five issues of Iconoplastic was dated August, 1986; this cartoon appeared in the second of them. There was supposed to be a sixth and final issue in June of 1987, but if it was ever printed, I never got to see it.

I had begun writing the date in the margin of my cartoons, so I know that I actually drew the above cartoon in August of 1986. I'm sure that it had to do with Ronald Reagan's Missile Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars.

1996

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Sept. 3, 1996

Why am I including this September cartoon in a collection of my August cartoons? Well, according to my margin notes, I drew it in August. Its topic was the 1996 Republican Party platform, a laundry list of religious right priorities, which the party's nominee, Sen. Bob Dole, told reporters he hadn't read.

The composition of this cartoon is a lot like one I had drawn two months earlier, but with a slightly different cast of Republicans standing behind Dole. Appearing between him and Newt Gingrich is probably the best caricature of Pat Buchanan that I ever produced, which is a pity, since I drew plenty of other cartoons in which he was the main focus rather than an extra in the background.

I had drawn the earlier cartoon for a summer semester issue of the Post that was never published, so I wasn't concerned that some reader might have thought they had seen this cartoon before. 

2006

for Q Syndicate, August 2006

There is nothing wrong with your set.

At some point during the sketching out of this cartoon, I realized that for the dialogue to read properly — for your eyes to read the straight line before the punch line — I either needed the second dialogue balloon to cover Mildred, or to flip the drawing horizontally 180 degrees.

I decided that rather than starting the whole cartoon over, I would just write the dialogue, my signature, and the date in mirror image, then flip the whole cartoon 180 degrees in Photoshop. Being left-handed, I ink my cartoons from right to left anyway, so as to avoid smearing wet ink with the side of my hand.

Here's how the published cartoon looked.

Visually, I think the composition of the cartoon worked better this way, too. The eye sees Luke and Brian first, then Mildred, and finally the two men talking behind Luke and Brian's back.

According to my marginalia, I drew this cartoon in August as a cartoon to be held in reserve, to be released sometime when I didn't send in a cartoon on deadline, so I can't be sure when it was actually published. I think my Better Half and I went on vacation that November, although that would have been an odd time for Mildred to be watering her garden and everyone else to be wearing shorts.

Unless they lived in Florida or southern California.

2016

for Q Syndicate, August 2016

Running for President in 2016, Donald Trump responded to the Pulse Night Club massacre by claiming that his anti-immigrant policies would protect LGBTQ+ Americans.

He didn't mention that the heavily Latino clientele of the Pulse Night Club was just the sort of people who would be targeted for exile to concentration camps in shithole countries by the Corrupt Trump Regime™'s ethnic cleansing program. 

And he apparently had no clue that the T stands for Transgender, people whose persecution would join that of Latinos and Moslems as Corrupt Trump Regime™ priorities.

That, and erecting monuments to himself all over Washington, D.C.

Drawing them discomfited by what I had Trump say in this cartoon, I gave a hefty benefit of the doubt to three of his ardent supporters: Kellyanne Conway, Rudy Giuliani, and his running mate, Mike Pence. That benefit proved entirely undeserved. The three proved ready, willing, and eager to debase themselves in service of Dear Leader's alternative facts, phantom election fraud, and commitment to not just one, but two Corinthians.

Q Toon: Berlin

There was another topic I had planned to draw about this week, but the truck and knife attack that killed one and injured 29 at Berlin's annual LGBTQ Pride event over the weekend changed all that.

It was the terrorist act of an 21-year-old wannabe ISIS jihadi, whom German police later sent in search of those 72 virgins. Too bad he had to leave his body behind. Sorry not sorry.

His choice to murder innocent LGBTQ+ people celebrating and having fun cannot be happenstance. Nothing represents what Islamic fundamentalists hate about what they see as Western decadence more than LGBTQ+ pride and joy — it's even worse than string bikinis, the Reconquista, and cartoons of The Prophet.

The attack is sure to inflame Islamophobic passions in Germany, where the neo-Nazi Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) was already polling distressingly well beforehand. The AfD are fascists — not a term I toss around lightly — who oppose both immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, and are surely taking advantage of this tragedy for their own ends.

Caught in the middle are LGBTQ+ Muslims in Germany such as Ali Darwich, an influencer on Instagram who was at the Christopher Street festival himself, ready to go to some afterparty when friends began calling to find out whether he was okay. He later told the Associated Press:

“Born a Muslim, living as a gay man, working as a police officer,” Darwich said, as he tried holding back the tears, “this terror attack touches so many aspects of who I am. ...

“I asked myself as a gay if we will have to live with more fear now even though we are already experiencing bullying and hatred. I asked myself as a Muslim if our community will be exposed to even more racism now.”

Here at home, there are some antigay Americans — and some LGBTQ right-wingers as well — who try to excuse Republican actions against our community by pointing to Islamic fundamentalists decreeing the death penalty for LGBTQ people. That argument overlooks countries, especially in Africa, passing draconian antigay penalties up to and including capital punishment, egged on by Christian fundamentalists in the U.S.

For the time being, the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime will be happy to cite the Christopher Street Festival attack as further justification for its ethnic cleansing program, even when it dumps refugees who fled persecution for being LGBTQ+ back to the countries that condemn them.

Persecuting white gays and lesbians here in the Homeland will have to wait until Republicans have finished eradicating the transgender menace.

This Week's Sneak Peek

There has been a lot of LGBTQ+related news this week, not least of which was the alarming arrest of 31 neo-nazis on their way to attack an LGBTQ+ Pride celebration in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

I could have drawn about that last night, but I'm opting to wait until more of the facts come to light. Somewhere there is a hero who saw a bunch of masked, uniformed, armed fascists cramming into a U-Haul and decided to alert the authorities. There were authorities who took that report seriously and intercepted the U-Haul with sufficient force to apprehend these domestic terrorists.

Somewhere, there may also be someone who sent his minions on this mission while remaining safely in the shadows himself. Somewhere, there may well be more to come.

Meanwhile, there are people in elected office whose actions, because they are in positions of power, are equally reprehensible.

Tune in here again on Thursday.

Wall Street Bombed

This week marks anniversaries of two terrorist attacks on New York City: 9/11/01, of course, but also 9/16/20.

"Murdered to Make Me Tremble" by Lucius Curtis "Lute" Pease in Newark News, Sept. 1920

At the start of the lunch hour on Thursday, September 16, 1920, a horse-drawn carriage blew up in front of the J.P. Morgan & Co. offices at the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street. The blast killed 38 and injured hundreds more, the most casualties of any peacetime attack in the U.S. up to that date (but superseded the following year by the white race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma).

There was no claim of responsibility, but suspicion immediately fell to anarchists and communist sympathizers, who became the focus of Attorney General Palmer's investigation.

Uncaptioned, by Clifford Berryman in Washington (D.C.) Evening Star, September 17, 1920

The bomb was found to have been made of TNT and the iron weights commonly used for window sashes, connected to a timer; investigation into window sash weight makers all over the U.S. yielded nothing. One Pietro Angelo, who was connected with a bombing the previous year, was able to produce an alibi but was deported to Italy anyway. Another suspect was champion tennis player Edwin P. Fischer, who had made earlier warnings to friends predicting a mid-September Wall Street explosion; but it turned out that he happened to be in Canada that day and had developed a habit of making similar predictions.

"New York" by Bill Sykes in Philadelphia Public Ledger, Sept. 17, 1920

As for a motive for the bombing, a theory that it was an assassination attempt against J.P. Morgan was discounted because the banker was in Europe (although his son Junius was injured and his chief clerk, William Joyce, was killed). The bombing may also have been an attempt to rob a scheduled shipment of 900 gold bars to the U.S. Treasury building next door; if so, it failed in its mission.

"Seems About Time to Clean Them All Out" by Fred Morgan in Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 18, 1920

The FBI and Secret Service eventually dropped the investigation in 1940; the bombing remains unsolved to this day.

"The Fuse" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sept. 18, 1920

With a Rebel Yell She Cried

Shaltnotback Saturday takes this last opportunity before the special election in Alabama to rehash the three four* cartoons I've drawn about the Republican standard bearer in the race. Alabama voters will go to the polls this a week from Tuesday to elect someone to complete Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III's term in the U.S. Senate. The odds-on favorite according to the latest polls? Moore, Moore, Moore.

State Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore made himself a cause celèbre in 2001 by unilaterally installing a 5,200-lb. granite monument of the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments in the lobby of the state judicial building. He sparked a reprise of the lawsuits and countersuits sparked after he had mounted a wooden version of the Decalogue in his Etowah County courtroom in 1992, but this time it ended with his fellow justices removing the monument when he refused a federal court order to do so.

A judicial panel then removed Moore himself from the Court, but Alabama's voters returned him to the seat in 2012.

I occasionally get push-back from right-wing Christian evangelicals who object when I refer to the politicians who push their agenda as "theocrats." When it comes to the theocratic agenda, Judge Roy Moore is the case in point.

Having sworn to uphold the law, he nevertheless insisted upon being a law unto himself after the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges established marriage equality as the law of the land. He instructed Alabama officials to openly defy the Supreme Court decision and to deny equal rights to Alabama's LGBTQ citizens. The U.S. Constitution be damned, he declared; it's the Book of Leviticus that is the supreme law of the land.

* I had forgotten about this one!

And for the second time, the judicial panel removed him from the State Supreme Court.

For all his posturing as a paragon of Biblical morality, accounts of Judge Moore having been a creepy guy hanging around the mall angling to pick up teenage girls began to came to light last month:

His hardened core of supporters includes a number of prominent "Evangelical Christians" and their fiercely loyal flock; given their support of the Pussy-Grabber in Chief, why wouldn't they be equally eager to overlook Moore's prurient interest in pubescent girls? When you're a Republican, they let you do anything.

The other day, I read a comment on GoComics trying to cast this as a Democratic scandal, because Moore "was a DEMOCRAT when all the incidents are supposed to have happened" — a variation on the drivel blaming Democrats for racism because way back in great-great-grandpappy's day, all the racists were Democrats. (Left unsaid is that the racists have since found the Republican party more hospitable to them. If the Democrats drive Al Franken and John Conyers out, perhaps sex offenders will follow the racists to the party of Trump and Moore.)

Meanwhile, Moore's Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, prosecuted the men who bombed the two surviving perpetrators of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which you might think would give him some credibility as a defender of Christianity. But no.

I guess they can't forgive Jones for also coordinating the state and federal task force tracking down and prosecuting Eric Rudolph for a string of bombings 20 years ago, including the 1998 attack on Birmingham's New Woman All Women Health Care Center, killing a police officer and critically injuring a nurse.

It was an abortion clinic, after all.

Perhaps you remember Mr. Rudolph, a radical Christian terrorist whose other targets included LGBTQ bars and the 1996 Olympics.

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With December 7 coming up this week, I would be remiss if I failed to take note of this Day That Will Live In Infamy:

100 years ago this Thursday, the United States, citing "repeated acts of war against the government and the people of the United States," declared war on Austria-Hungary. Unlike the European powers, whose treaties bound them to declare war on each other like a room full of tripping mousetraps, the U.S. had up to this point been at war only with Germany.

The House passed President Wilson's declaration of war against the Hapsburg Empire by a vote of 365 to 1, the lone dissenting vote being cast by Rep. Meyer London (Socialist-NY). The Senate approved the measure unanimously (Sen. Robert LaFollette, Progressive-WI, being intentionally absent).

The declaration enabled American soldiers to come to the aid of Italy in its fight against the Central Powers. 5,000 members of the 332nd Infantry would fight alongside Italian troops in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in the fall of 1918.

"The Avalanche" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Star, December, 1917

2016 in Headlines

Since ’16back Saturday coincides with New Year's Eve this year, I'm going to post my annual photo of newspaper and magazine front pages here.

I offer my usual caveats: with only newspapers from the midwestern United States to choose from, I can't include many big international stories, such as the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. The slow crushing of the rebellion in Syria lends itself more to photojournalism than a banner headline. And I might have included the death of Fidel Castro if he hadn't already turned the reins of power over to his brother years ago.

Meanwhile, I don't have a home paper publishing my stuff that would put together a 2016 in cartoons spread, so here are my own favorites from this crappy year:

It All Makes Sense Now

Q Toon: Danse Macabre

On the evening after the Orlando massacre at Pulse, Pastor Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento, California told his congregation:

"Are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today? Um, no, I think that's great! I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida is a little safer tonight. ... There’s no tragedy,...I wish the government would round them all up, put them up against a firing wall, put a firing squad in front of them, and blow their brains out.” 

After a terrorist attack, you expect the nut jobs at the Westboro Baptist Church to crawl out of their cesspool to insult the victims. When the victims are LGB or T, the Westboro cult has its share of company among so-called Christians.

"The left is having a dilemma of major proportions and I think for those of us who disagree with some of their policies, the best thing to do is to sit on the sidelines and let them kill themselves.” -- Pat Robertson, 700 Club, Christian Broadcasting Network

"The good news is that there’s 50 less pedophiles in this world, because, you know, these homosexuals are a bunch of disgusting perverts and pedophiles. That’s who was a victim here, are a bunch of, just, disgusting homosexuals at a gay bar, okay? Obviously, it’s not right for somebody to just, you know, shoot up the place, because that’s not going through the proper channels. But these people all should have been killed, anyway, but they should have been killed through the proper channels, as in they should have been executed by a righteous government that would have tried them, convicted them, and saw them executed." -- Pastor Steven Anderson, Faithful Word Baptist Church, Arizona

“These 50 sodomites are all perverts and pedophiles, and they are the scum of the earth, and the earth is a little bit better place now. And I’ll take it a step further, because I heard on the news today, that there are still several dozen of these queers in ICU and intensive care. And I will pray to God like I did this morning, I will do it tonight, I’ll pray that God will finish the job that that man started, and he will end their life, and by tomorrow morning they will all be burning in hell, just like the rest of them, so that they don’t get any more opportunity to go out and hurt little children.” Pastor Donnie Romero, Stedfast Baptist Church, Fort Worth, Texas

Meanwhile, in Buford, Georgia, someone decided to spray paint over a hate message against gays and transgender persons that had been out front of The Back to the Bible Holiness Church for weeks before the massacre. Pastor Bobby Weeks bizarrely claimed that "I haven’t cursed anyone. I haven’t called anyone a name" with his sign which read "God created man and woman. Satan created gays and transgender." He further claimed that everyone is "welcome" in his church.

I suspect that the vandals possessed the same degree of restraint, love, and charity as Mr. Weeks.

Q Toon: The Grim Sower

Today's cartoon uses a very peripheral sidebar to the Orlando massacre to comment on an aspect that isn't at all peripheral. But to begin with, the antiLGBT Lieutenant Governor of Texas tweeted the text of Galatians 6:7 on Sunday morning after the Orlando nightclub massacre. He deleted the tweet later that day, explaining that he didn't mean to say what it seemed to say about the terrorist victims.

If the gun-lovers in this country refuse to connect the dots between easy access to weapons of mass murder and mass murder itself, terrorists are more than happy to connect those dots.

I've seen plenty of arguments that the real issue is not assault weapons, and Republicans immediately looked for other ways to frame the issue. Donald Trump wasted no time congratulating himself for having called for quarantining the nation indefinitely (yeah, right: "until we figure out what's going on"). And Ron Johnson, Wisconsin's sorry excuse for a Senior Senator was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN this week:

“The AR-15 that was used in this terror attack, killing 49 people, you wouldn’t describe that as an assault weapon?” Blitzer asked. “You’re differentiating between that and a fully automatic assault weapon? Because that weapon certainly did kill a lot of people.”
“So do bombs,” Johnson replied. “So there are other ways that terrorists can slaughter people. It’s their ideology. Their ideology calls for the slaughter of innocents. That’s the root cause. It’s not law-abiding gun owners that are the problem here, it’s Islamic terrorists.”

Republicans have decided that real problem is that President Obama refuses to utter the words "radical Islamic terrorism." But even if saying "radical Islamic terrorism" somehow had a Rumpelstiltskin effect against those who inspired the slaughter in San Bernardino and Orlando, we'd still have the radical Christian terrorists who inspired the slaughter in Charleston and Oak Creek. And all the radical gun-worshiping terrorists from Littleton to Sandy Hook in order categorical.

There is a meme going around which attempts to counter the NRA argument that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" with a photograph pointing out all the armed "good guys" around President Ronald Reagan just before he was shot by John Hinckley, Jr. It somewhat misses the point in that Hinckley was indeed stopped by some of those good guys — after he had wounded four people, yes, but he did get stopped.

Hinckley was armed with a .22 caliber Röhm RG-14, and only hit Reagan at all because one of his six bullets ricocheted. Had he been able to get his hands on a a SIG Sauer MCX semi-automatic rifle, or any of the other assault weapons made readily available to "bad guys" since 2004, Ronald Reagan's presidency would have been a historical footnote tucked between those of William Henry Harrison and James Abram Garfield, and there would probably be a monument somewhere in memory of many "good guys," photographers, and by-standers who were in front of the Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981.

Q Toon: Orlando

I've asked my syndicate to release two cartoons this week. This is the more immediate of the two.

A sick, twisted, perverted excuse for a human being opened fire in the crowd at Latino Night at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, at last call, and held the people who couldn't get away hostage for three hours before being shot and killed by police.

Edward Sotomayor, Jr., 34, was one of about 50 people killed in the terrorist attack. His employer at an LGBT travel agency, Al Ferguson, told the Orlando Sentinel that Sotomayor was a bright young man who loved to travel:

Sotomayor was keenly aware of the dangers facing gay travelers, and of prior incidents of mass violence like the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris, Ferguson said.
But he never let fear stop his adventures.
"What I will say, over and over again, was he was a person who said, 'We cannot be afraid,'" said Ferguson. "I know his friends are going to be the exact same way… we are not going to be afraid."

Support Your Right to Explode

Dateline Shigagowinj, WI (IPU): At the National Rifle Association and Wisconsin Wisconsin Firearm Owners, Ranges, Clubs, and Educators Inc. (FORCE)  annual convention in Weston this month, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) signed a bill into law that allows suicide vests, five years after the state approved concealed firearms and seconds after a bill to allow carrying switchblades.

Manufacturing, selling, transporting, purchasing or possessing a suicide vest has been illegal in

Wisconsin since frontier days.

The bill also lowers the minimum age for wearing a suicide vest to three months and bars local governments from enacting suicide vest regulations stricter than state law.

The bill’s author, Kathleen Van Kooykmir (R-Idiculous) told reporters, “Local ordinances more restrictive than state law only serve to confuse or entrap law-abiding citizens traveling within or through the state. Preemption ensures that citizens can expect consistent enforcement of state suicide vest laws everywhere in Wisconsin.”

Suicide vests may now be worn in Wisconsin schools, houses of worship, bars, restaurants, sports arenas, public transportation, airports and amusement parks. The one place suicide vests will still be banned is the state capitol building.

“We may be wild and reckless,” said State Senator Ron Onionson (R-Eilavac), “But we ain't nuts.”

This Week's Sneak Peek

This guy has everything bookmarked and ready for Thursday. I'm back from vacation and rarin' to go.

Since I was away, I have not had the opportunity to draw any reaction to Friday's terrorist attacks in Paris. I did hear about it on the news (although both my resort and the Puerto Vallarta airport appear to have made a deliberate decision to have no newspapers for sale -- or news magazines, for that matter).

So I leave you with this photograph from my visit to Paris in 2010. The Eiffel Tower I'm sure you will recognize, but you will have to look closely at the structures in the foreground.

Etched on the glass and carved into the columns is the word "Peace," over and over again, in over 100 different languages.

October, 1985

It's Smackback Saturday again, and for this week's trip in the wayback machine, I've hauled up a couple of my cartoons from an October 30 years ago.

So there's no theme here, really. Back in the 1980's, one of the papers I drew for was the NorthCountry Journal, a monthly newspaper out of Poynette, Wisconsin, focused on environmental issues. Every month, the editor would send me the topic of the next issue's editorial, and I'd draw something to match.

Acid rain, not climate change, was the chief environmental concern of the era. Acidity caused by such things as burning waste products and fossil fuels, was raising the pH levels of streams and lakes, although industry and others which relied on burning stuff resisted calls for change.

The cartoon riffs on a slogan in a long-running TV ad about a masochistic tuna fish. The problem, of course, is that there are not now, nor have there ever been, tuna in Wisconsin's lakes and streams.

The cartoons for the NorthCountry Journal had to be send through the U.S. Mail, so I drew them on 8.5"x11" typing paper. In 1985, the ones I drew for the local UW-Parkside Ranger, on the other hand, are on 14"x17" bristol board, and don't quite fit on my scanner.

Like this Spaghetti Western themed cartoon, drawn after the hijacking of the Achille Lauro, a Mediterranean cruise ship seized by the Palestinian Liberation Army on October 7, 1985. The hijackers had shot and killed one Jewish American, wheelchair-bound retiree Leon Klinghoffer, forcing two of the ship's crew to dump his body overboard. They later agreed with Egyptian negotiators to give up the ship in exchange for safe passage to Tunisia, but the Egyptian plane carrying them was intercepted by the U.S. Navy and forced to land at a NATO air base in Sicily.

Italian Carabinieri arrested the hijackers after friction between American and Italian authorities over which country had jurisdiction over Air Station Sigonella. Italy released all but four of the terrorists, releasing the hijackers' leader, Muhammad Zaidan, a.k.a. Abu Abbas, over U.S. protests. Egypt, for its part, demanded that the U.S. apologize for forcing its airplane off course. Zaidan/Abbas remained a free man until U.S. forces captured him in Iraq in 2003, where he died in custody.

I've already posted a cartoon or two from October, 1985, in previous fits of nostalgia, so I'll wrap up with this one on a topic that never goes out of style. 1985 was when Tipper Gore founded the Parents' Music Resource Center and pushed for those explicit lyrics warnings that used to be pasted onto the covers of music, back when music didn't come to you by downloading it off the internet (which, as you know, was invented by her then husband, Tennessee Senator Al, Jr., which must have figured in their divorce some way or another).

"Why can't they be like we were: perfect in every way? What's the matter with kids today?" -- Bye Bye Birdie, 1963

Q Toon: Terms of Enragement

Given how the assassination of nine Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina's Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church during a Bible study last Wednesday night has dominated the news in the U.S. this week, my Q Syndicate cartoon this week is only very tangential to LGBT issues.

This weekend on NPR's On the Media, Brooke Gladstone noted what she called the media's rules for different races when it comes to mass murder:

"If [Dylann] Roof were Muslim, he would have been identified swiftly and universally as a 'terrorist.' Reporters would focus on his 'recruiters,' which in his case could be a multitude of white supremacist web sites, or one of the many hate groups that exist legally in his own state. But when the suspect is white, he's an 'aberration,' immediately furnished with a name, a family, a history, and a diagnosis. Whereas a black suspect, for instance, accused of far less or nothing, more often is displayed as a nameless emblem of a social disease."

In the days since, The Guardian of Great Britain led American media in unmasking the Council of Conservative Citizens as Roof's on-line recruiter. Digging further, American media found that the head of the CCC, Earl Holt III, has donated thousands of dollars to Republicans over the years (including Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Senator Ron Johnson, and Representative Paul Ryan); Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum are among the presidential candidates now stumbling all over themselves to turn away that cash.

Well, who could have known that an organization sharing its acronym with the Coo Clucks Clan would be a bunch of racists? Besides the Southern Poverty Law Center, that is.

And while Republicans have been hastily disavowing Roof's recruiter, Walmart, Amazon, Target and even the state of Alabama have taken the rebel battle flag off their shelves and flagpoles. Anything to keep the subject away from gun control, I suppose. Minneapolis might even rename Lake Calhoun.

I do so hope that Roof is being kept up to date with these developments in the Race War he wanted to spark.

Beaucoup Haram

Quoi encore peut-on dire?

We Are Charlie Hebdo

"100 lashes if you don't die of laughter!"

Terrorists killed at least 12 people, including policemen and cartoonists, at the offices of French satirical magazine newspaper Charlie Hebdo (loosely translated as "Charlie Weekly") this morning.

The cartoonists assassinated were Jean "Cabu" Cabut, Georges Wolinski, Bernad "Tignous" Verlhac, and editor Stéphane Charbonnier, who signed his cartoons "Charb."

In 2006, Charlie Hebdo had reprinted the caricatures of Mohammed that had appeared in the Dutch magazine Jyllands-Posten and added a few of their own. The cover at right was from a 2011 issue whose conceit was that Muslims had taken over the magazine that week. Islamic terrorists responded by fire bombing the offices. Charlie Hebdo responded in turn with a cover showing a stereotypical Moslem and one of their own cartoonists deep in a wet, sloppy kiss.

Charlie Hebdo was an equal opportunity offender, running scandalous cartoons about not only politicians and celebrities, but also the Catholic church, Jews, and Muslims which would never get past an editor in the United States. One cover showed a Nazi SS guard and an Orthodox Jew deep in yet another wet, sloppy kiss. Other cartoons have depicted the Pope having sex, with and without condoms, and various other lewd and scatological acts. Another depicted the Holy Trinity as a three-way. Charlie Hebdo is not so much Punch as it is Hustler with fewer photographs.

"Still no attack in France."
"Wait! We can send best wishes till
the end of January."

The magazine newspaper has been under guard by police due to the continued threats against it, but has refused to back down. Charb recently drew a poke in the eye of  the terrorists with the cartoon at right. (This must have been drawn before a series of attacks in December in Joue-les-Tours, Dijon and Nantes.)

Centuries ago, Christianity was mired in its Dark Ages while Islam was alive with intellectual activity, science and art -- and, yes, satire. After attacks from rural, anti-intellectual barbarians from East (and from the ascending West), Islam sunk into its own Dark Ages, which these terrorists hope to spread around the world.

Nous sommes tous Charlie Hebdo.

We are all Charlie Hebdo.

Update: The American Association of Editorial Cartoonists has issued its condemnation of the attack: "Cartoonists and journalists around the world should be permitted to express themselves freely without fear of reprisal. These types of attacks only serve to illustrate how important the free spirit of cartoon commentary is, and how cartoonists make a difference in helping to expose hypocrisy."

Q Toon: Tony Perkins

I was almost done drawing this cartoon Sunday night when I turned on the TV for the local news and instead found George Stephanopoulos, Christiane Amanpour and Mike Boetcher eagerly awaiting an announcement from the White House. They had already spilled the beans that Osama bin Laden was dead, and were filling the time by getting reactions from New York firefighters and 9/11 widows.

Clearly, terrorists this week were not going to give a rat's ass that the president of the Family Research Council said on April 29 that terrorists are just like LGBT activists.

The actual quotation isn't exactly as brief as one would like for a cartoon. He's talking here about gay and lesbian activists, boycotts against corporations that support antigay constitutional amendments and candidates, and publicizing the names of those who sign antigay petitions:

"This has moved from cultural terrorism to corporate terrorism. That's what this is. Now, back in the '80's and early '90's, I worked with the state department in anti-terrorism and we trained about fifty different countries in defending against terrorism, and it's, at its base, what terrorism is: it's a strike against the general populace simply to spread fear and intimidation so that they can disrupt and destabilize the system of government. That's what the homosexuals are doing here to the legal system."

At the risk of mockery from Editorial Explanations, I went ahead and finished the cartoon (I had nothing left to do but ink the background). By morning, I hadn't thought of any way to tweak the cartoon to take the previous night's news into account, so I sent it in to my syndicate for distribution. Q Syndicate, after all, is interested in providing LGBT content to LGBT publications, and would be less interested in the cartoon that I posted here yesterday.

✍
And since I've brought up yesterday's cartoon, a few words about it.

A number of my friends posted that misquoted quotation of Martin Luther King yesterday, so I have to ask myself whether it was unseemly to crow about the death of an enemy. Looking back, I did not exult in the death of Saddam Hussein; and even though I would hold him responsible for the deaths of innocent Americans, Britons and Canadians, I probably wouldn't feel any elation over the death of Muammar Khaddafy were that to come to pass. How I would have felt about bin Laden's death if the U.S. had succeeded in bombing him to smithereens in 1998 I can no longer remember, although I would probably have forgotten his name by now. (Like that blind cleric who fomented the first bombing of the World Trade Center.)

Maybe it was the sheer scale of Al Qaeda's appetite for death and destruction. Maybe it is the lingering memory of Al Qaeda sympathizers exulting in the carnage of 9/11. Maybe it's the nagging feeling that we'd better celebrate while we may, because somebody somewhere is eventually going to do something horrible in retaliation.

Jesus' admonition to love one's enemies notwithstanding, I'm happy that bin Laden is dead and that it was Americans who dispatched him. And I just can't apologize for that.

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And then there is Christian Broadcasting Network commentator David Brody, who not only let his heart rejoice over bin Laden's death, he actually criticized President Obama for not gloating, too:

"I know President Obama understands that getting Bin Laden doesn't mean an end to the war on terrorism but how about a smile? How about showing a little joy? How about a word or two saying something about how this is no doubt a happy or joyous occasion for Americans? We got nothing like that at all... Any hint of gloating or happiness might be rubbing it in the face of some of the crazies in the Arab World and heaven forbid we get them upset! How dare we Americans look like we’re celebrating his death! The travesty of it all! Give me a break. Isn’t it time to stop catering to thugs?"

Apparently, Brody forgot about President Obama cracking a great big smile over Osama bin Laden the night before:

So Long, Chum

My hat is off to our United States Navy Seals. They did an excellent job Sunday night.

Hooyah!

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