Happy Thanksgiving!

 If you were looking for this week's cartoon, I posted it yesterday. 

"The Scoffer" by H.T. Webster, Nov., 1922

But thanks for stopping by anyway. Here's an oldie for your troubles.

Q Toon: Merry Christmassacre

 

Saturday night, a young man armed with two long rifles of the AR-15 variety burst into Club Q, a popular LGBTQ+ bar in Colorado Springs, and opened fire. Two of the bar patrons heroically disarmed and subdued him, but not before five people were killed and at least 17 more injured by gunfire or in the ensuing panic.

It was an exceptionally violent week across the U.S. Prior to the Club Q shooting, a former member of the University of Virginia football team shot and killed three current Cavaliers and wounded two others on a bus returning to campus from a class field trip; someone still at large stabbed four University of Idaho students to death at their off-campus apartment.

Politicians and religious leaders from across the political spectrum expressed their varying degrees of outrage and sympathy after each of these tragedies, the Club Q attack no less than the others.

That includes Colorado Congressman Lauren Boebert — or someone on her staff, or whoever paid Elon Musk eight bucks to impersonate her — who sent out a sympathetic tweet the morning after the Club Q shooting:

Up to now, Boebert's reputation has been as an ammosexual activist (today's cartoon is based on her actual 2021 family Christmas card), a hard-core defender of all things Trump, and a spreader of Trans Derangement Syndrome. On the floor of the House, on the campaign trail, on right-wing media, and prolifically on Twitter, she has mocked others' pronoun preferences, blamed trans men for shortages of baby formula and tampons earlier this year, and accused the Biden “regime” of paying for the “mutilation of children who are gender confused.”

In August, Human Rights Campaign rated her as the #3 on their list of "the top ten people responsible for driving the 'grooming' narrative on Twitter."

Back when Twitter had rules about hateful conduct.

But if she finally wants the public to know she's now against slaughtering LGBTQ+ citizens, perhaps at least we're seeing some progress. Why, even Franklin Graham has come out against spraying weapons fire into gay bars.

Consider that only six years ago, the morning after the terrorist attack on Pulse nightclub in Orlando that killed 49 LGBTQ+ patrons, the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, thought it would be a good time to tweet out Galatians 6:7: "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

Faced with uproar from the LGBTQ+ community and our allies and friends, Patrick quickly took his tweet down, and his staff issued a mealy-mouthed apology that it had nothing to do with the massacre. It was just supposed to be an inspirational message from a random book off his nightstand.

Twenty or thirty years ago back before Twitter, politicians like Patrick would have responded to loss of LGBTQ+ life by proudly issuing that biblical passage as a press release. That generation of conservatives unapologetically exulted that HIV/AIDS was God's punishment of gay men for being gay, and made jokes about Jeffrey Dahmer.

So, goody for Lauren Boebert for showing some vestige of humanity this time. Those morning prayers were the least she could do, and I guess they're better than nothing at all.

But they don't get her off the hook for contributing to a culture that egged on — and armed — some murderous psychopathic loser.

This Week's Sneak Repeat

Instead of the usual snippet out of this week's syndicated cartoon, here is my cartoon published immediately after a hate-filled gunman killed 49 patrons of Pulse, an LGBTQ+ bar in Orlando, Florida, six years ago.

Meanwhile, in Non-Gump Election News

"Keeping to the Main Highway" by Gustavo Bronstrup in San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 9, 1922

I hope you enjoyed our recounting the past two Saturdays of Andy Gump's election to Congress and the recount that took his victory away. But it's time now to get serious and to catch up on what really happened in the off-year election of 1922.

Gustavo Bronstrup, with a nod to the initially victorious Mr. Gump, celebrates the Republican sweep in California that year. Friend Richardson was elected Governor and Hiram Johnson was reelected Senator, both by landslides. (Ironically, Richardson, supported by a Republican majority in the legislature, would proceed to undo several policies enacted when Johnson had been Governor.) 

The Proposition 19 straw man fallen off the back of the car represents a defeated constitutional amendment that would have granted the governor authority to create and fund a board to develop, distribute and fix rates for water and electrical energy.

"Nearly Everybody in the House Knew..." by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, Nov. 10, 1922

The California results ran counter to the national trend that year, however: Democrats gained 72 seats in House and a net gain of six seats in the Senate. 

"Shrinkage? It's a Washout" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Nov. 9, 1922

The Democrats' gain was not quite enough to regain the majority lost in the elections of 1918 and 1920, but was an impressive showing nonetheless, and set off a wave of prognostication as to where the Republican Party had gone wrong.

"Now We'll Hear the Specialists" by Edwin Marcus in New York Times, Nov. 12, 1922

One of Edwin Marcus's "specialists" is an "anti-prohibitionist" who doesn't look anything like the Mr. Dry used by every other cartoonist of the time (see John Cassel, below). That may well be because Mr. Dry looks more like an undertaker than a doctor; but it leaves me suspecting that Marcus had everything drawn before the election results were in but the labels and the elephant head.

"After the Downpour" by John Cassel in New York Evening World, Nov. 10, 1922

To the extent that Republicans were hurt by the "wet" vote, it was primarily because they happened to have more incumbents in office than the Democrats did in 1922. Prohibition sentiments pro and con crossed party lines; support for the 18th Amendment included both conservative Southern Democrats and northern progressive Republicans. Opponents included big-city Democrats and Republicans alike.

"Home Again" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, Nov. 13, 1922

One of my disappointments in covering the 1922 election is that I was not able to turn up any cartoons by John Knott of the Dallas News and Galveston Daily News having anything substantial to say about the Klan candidate Texas elected to the U.S. Senate that year. Instead, he chose to celebrate Tennessee returning its governor's chair to the Democrats — and I do apologize for that character carrying Miss Tennessee's bags.

"The Retreat of the Lame-Duck Brigade" by John Baer, reprinted in National Leader (Minneapolis), December, 1922

Former Congressman John Baer cites a few of the ailments diagnosed in Edwin Marcus's cartoon and adds a few more: a proposed sales tax (to replace the income tax), an anti-strike bill, and a subsidy for shipbuilders.

What I was expecting to see in the National Leader was a celebration of Minnesotans' election to the Senate of the Farmer-Labor candidate, Henrik Shipstead, ousting Republican Senator Frank B. Kellogg, seated in the wheelchair in Baer's cartoon. (The Democrats' candidate, Anna Dickie Olesen, came in a distant third). The Farmer-Labor Party was the offspring of the Leader's "Non-Partisan League," after all, and the Leader had emblazoned a heroic sketch of Shipstead all over the front page of its November issue.

Front page of National Leader, Minneapolis, MN, November, 1922

Other than that, however, the Leader seems not to have found much to say about his campaign or his election.

Shipstead, a former and future Republican, would serve in the Senate until losing a GOP primary in 1947. An isolationist, anti-Semite, and conspiracy monger (Protocols of the Elders of Zion and all that crap), a senator described by the British Foreign office as "bigoted and crotchety," he is not remembered fondly these days.

"A Case for Careful Diagnosis" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Nov. 13, 1922

But returning again to 1922: it must be noted that for all this talk of the Republican Party needing to find out where it had gone wrong, the 1920's would continue to be a solidly Republican decade in most of the United States.

"He Fits the Niche" by John Cassel in New York Evening World, Nov. 8, 1922

To wit: 1922 saw the election of one of the Democratic Party's enduring heroes, Alfred E. Smith, as Governor of New York. As the party's presidential nominee in 1928, he would lead the Democrats to their third consecutive landslide loss.

And lucky for him, too.

Q Toon: Above All, D'Oh!

While liberals (and not only a few conservatives) were celebrating the defeat of Trumpism at the ballot box last week, right-wingers were able to celebrate the triumph of Trumpism in the courts.

Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk struck down a Biden administration ruling that LGBTQ+ patients were covered under Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) protections against discrimination. The Obama administration had also stipulated these protections for LGBTQ+ patients, only to have them erased by the corrupt Trump administration.

Kacsmaryk's ruling came in a case brought by a pair of doctors — medical professionals, mind you — who think providing professional medical care to transgender patients is icky; and so, backed by a right-wing legal activist group looking for any way to destroy the Affordable Care Act, they went to court.

Now, if you're a transgender person, and you're looking for a doctor, you probably shouldn't go to a doctor who personally objects to treating transgender people. It's highly unlikely that such a doctor has bothered to learn anything about the medical needs peculiar to transgender patients. You might as well ask your ophthalmologist to perform root canal surgery.

But we're talking about Texas here: home to vast, wide open spaces sparsely populated by people who think that Ted Cruz is a marvelous senator. You may not have a lot of choices when looking for a doctor there.

Texas, moreover, is ruled by a Republican Party from Governor Abbott on down who are determined to make health care for transgender persons a crime; so even if you've had a country doctor who is considerate and caring (they call that "woke" in these parts), the best she can do is refer you to someplace out of state. 

If the statehouse hasn't already made that illegal, too. 

Praising Arizona

The results are in, and Trumpster Kari Lake has been defeated in the race for Governor of the state of Arizona.

It's too bad that Saturday Night Live is on hiatus for the next couple of weeks.

I had been looking forward to a sketch in which Lake was played by Cecily Strong when filmed with a gauzy filter and by Amy Sedaris without it.

Or possibly by Andy Serkis.

This Week's Sneak Peek

 Do I have a guest cartoonist filling in this week?