See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
Jorge Garcia will be guest-starring in the pilot of Mr. Sunshine, Matthew Perry's new show on ABC.
Garcia will play a staffer at the second-rate San Diego sports arena that Perry’s character manages. He’ll appear in the pilot, which is undergoing some retooling.
A little white blond-haired girl (woman?) in a white shirt, blue skirt, and blue shoes, who looks to be made out of clay falls onto what looks to be plaid wool fabric. The left edge of the fabric unravels and curls and begins rolling toward her, making an ominous munching sound. Dot gasps and begins to run, as the rolling wool gives chase. She hops across the tops of coins, the edge of a paper bill, across the heads of screws and pins, along the top of a measuring tape, and keeps running, avoiding falling crystals, until she comes upon a bee. She hops on its back, and it flies over a sea of pencil gratings, and past a skyline of keys and iron files and tools, into a storm; Dot falls off and uses a flower as a parachute, landing just in time to begin running from the rolling wool again, which eventually catches her. Dot stands her ground, grabbing two nails and using them as swords to fight the rolling wool. It consumes her! She uses the nails as knitting needles and knits the wool into a blanket, which she then pulls over herself and goes to sleep, sighing contentedly.
Text Onscreen: The End. (Followed by credits.)
The hat tip goes to Shaker skirt, who found it here, and says: "Wow! A female protagonist who is by herself, saves herself, and is resourceful! Too bad she's microscopic. I now want a series of blockbusters devoted to Dot and her miniscule world." Me, too!
Or, more precisely, the backsides of female college students it's recruiting to promote its hot new bunless Double Down sandwiches.
Women on college campuses are being paid $500 each to hand out coupons while wearing fitted sweatpants with "Double Down" in large letters across their rear ends.
...KFC marketing chief John Cywinski says it's an effective way to catch the attention of young men — KFC's key customers and the biggest fans of Double Down.
Shaker somebodyoranother emailed this to me with precisely one word of commentary: "Ugh." I don't really have anything to add to that.
I'm all for not throwing in the towel at the slightest hint of trouble, but I am also for not hanging around in a shitty relationship on some sort of misguided principle.
[Trigger warning for clergy abuse, sexual violence, and victim grooming.]
I don't have a lot to say about the allegations against prominent Atlanta pastor Eddie Long, who is being sued by two men who say Long coerced them into sexual activity. I do want to note two things, however: The alleged grooming strategy is one that is familiar to anyone who has read and written about the Catholic Church abuses and many of the cases of clergy abuse in the evangelical community as well.
The suits also said that Long framed the sexual relationships as religious in nature.
The suits allege that Long chose the plaintiffs to be his "Spiritual Sons," a program that allegedly includes other young men from the church.
...Flagg's suit says that Long presided over a spiritual "covenant" ceremony between the two of them.
"It was essentially a marriage ceremony, with candles, exchange of jewelry, and biblical quotes," Bernstein said Tuesday. "The bishop [told] him I will always have your back and you will always have mine."
Robinson's suit alleges that "Defendant Long would use Holy Scripture to discuss and justify the intimate relationship between himself and Plaintiff Robinson."
Over and over again, we've heard about priests and protestant ministers who coerce victims into "sexual relationships" by positing that it is God's will and using their holy book to facilitate and justify rape.
This is one of many reasons I am desperately opposed to substituting faith-based initiatives for a federally mandated and funded social safety net. Yeah, sixty-seven layers of bureaucracy is a pain in the ass, but it also provides a level of oversight and accountability that going to your local neighborhood rectory doesn't. And yeah, institutional offices and overworked employees can be cold and clinical, but they also don't ply vulnerable people with coercive fairy tales.
Which is not to say that there are no government employees who exploit people they are meant to be helping. Of course that happens—and, in no coincidence, it tends to happen primarily in one-on-one, non-bureaucratic situations, e.g. military recruitment.
It's also not to say that everyone, or even most people, who work with faith-based social programs are preying on the people they are meant to be helping.
It's just to underline that extreme power differentials—like the one between a man claiming to be a spokesperson for God and a young person who needs a place to live—in the provision of basic life needs to vulnerable and/or searching people creates a situation that's rife for abuse.
Meanwhile, I'm sure you'll be totally unsurprised to hear that the victim-blaming has already begun:
A spokesman for Long told CNN on Wednesday that the allegations are "a case of retaliation and a shakedown for money by men with some serious credibility issues."
Let's just say for shits and giggles that's actually true. It's still not something that's appropriate to say about someone alleging sexual assault, because it plays into such pernicious narratives about the reasons anyone alleges rape.
And, frankly, the only people who should be interested in perpetuating the rape culture are rapists.
Bloomberg reports that Larry Summers will be leaving his White House position after the November election.
I love this:
Administration officials are weighing whether to put a prominent corporate executive in the NEC director's job to counter criticism that the administration is anti-business, one person familiar with White House discussions said. White House aides are also eager to name a woman to serve in a high-level position, two people said. They also are concerned about finding someone with Summers' experience and stature, one person said.
They want to replace famous misogynist Larry Summers with a woman...after the election (because Maude knows they wouldn't want anyone thinking they're pandering to women and alienating the prized misogynist vote before the election).
Naturally, I also love that they want to install a corporate crony "to counter criticism that the administration is anti-business." Fates forfend a Democratic administration be viewed as anything but in thrall to the Robber Barons who have trashed the economy!
And let's make sure the hack is a lady, so when the lefties complain, Gibbs and Obama can accuse progressives (especially feminist progressives) of not being happy with anything they do: "We give them a woman and all they can do is complain about how she's a corporate mouthpiece! We can't win!"
I'm fifty pages into the book now. Fifty pages. That's a fairly big chunk of the story. Allow me a moment to sum up what's happened so far. I'll even do it in bullet points, for true Darthur Gardner authenticity.
Prologue: Eli Churchill makes a phone call, is assassinated
Chapter one: Noah buys a Tootsie Roll
Chapter two: Molly hangs up a flyer
Chapter three: Darthur plots to overthrow the government
Chapter four: Noah makes some phone calls
Chapter five: Noah walks down a hall
Chapter six: Noah is briefly detained by Blackwater
Chapter seven: Noah walks in the rain
Fifty pages and not much of anything has happened. There was a little bit in chapter three and a little in six. But mostly it's been filler. It feels to me as if Beck has maybe a 30 page story here and is desperately trying to stretch it out to 300. The two page chapters might give the illusion that the story is moving briskly along, but the truth is there's just nothing really happening here.
In chapter eight, Noah arrives at the Stars 'n Stripes, and is stunned by the size of the crowd. He thinks perhaps he should "write off this whole wretched night, and get home to that nice, hot Jacuzzi." But he heads inside.
And it's at this point that Beck really drifts into fantasyland.
Live music from inside was filtering out through the buzz of the crowd. There were so many people it was impossible to keep to a straight line as he walked. The diversity of the gathering was another surprise; there seemed to be no clear exclusions based on race, or class, or any of the other traditional media-fed American cultural divides. It was a total cross section, a mix of everyone—three-piece suits rubbing elbows with T-shirts and sweat pants, yuppies chatting with hippies, black and white, young and old, a cowboy hat here, a six-hundred-dollar haircut there—all talking together, energetically agreeing and disagreeing as he moved through them. In the press, these sorts of meetings were typically depicted as the exclusive haunts of old white people of limited means and even more limited intelligence. But this was everybody.
Look, if Beck and his teabagging buddies want to pretend their group of mostly-white, upper-middle class, racist tax dodgers are not a group of mostly-white, upper-middle class, racist tax dodgers (or whatever it is they're pissed off about), that's fine by me. But don't blame that on the press. Don't blame that on the media. And while you're at it, Beck, please stop pretending you're not part of that very American media that feeds "traditional American cultural divides."
Up on stage at the Stars 'n Stripes, someone vaguely Dylanesque sings a folk song, much to Noah's delight.
This music and the mood it was creating, it was a smart PR move if they could make it work. If their enemies were trying to paint them as a bunch of pasty-white NASCAR-watching, gun-toting, pickup-driving reactionaries with racist and violent tendencies, what better ploy could these people make than to subtly invoke the peace-loving spirits of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi? If nothing else it would drive their critics on the left right up the wall.
I'll leave to you to sort out. I'm not even going to bother. Noah bumps into Molly, literally, and she leads him to a table near the stage. ("In a higher-class joint, seats this close would have been reserved for the VIPs.") As he orders a Sam Adams, she runs off to find him a dry shirt.
Molly returns momentarily with a friend in tow, "an enormous bearded man in jumpsuit coveralls and a Beech-Nut baseball cap." For some reason, the man, identified as Hollis [what an authentic, down home name!], has a voice like Winnie-the-Pooh. Seriously, that's how he's described. She hands him a hoodie, and tells him to change.
Noah, prima donna that he is, is aghast at the idea of changing his shirt in the crowded bar.
And... scene! Discuss.
[Note: There will be no Overton post tomorrow, as I've got plans this evening that don't include Glenn Beck.]
The time of year when women (and their dogs!) are expected to celebrate Halloween by dressing like the stripper version of any costume—You can't be a nurse; you've got to be a SEXY nurse! You can't be a witch; you've got to be a SEXY witch! You can't be a cat; you've got to be a SEX KITTEN! You can't be a schoolteacher; you've got to be a SEXY Catholic schoolgirl!
My friend Todd texted me this picture the other day:
Image Description: A sexy Big Bird costume. Todd told me he also saw a sexy Freddie Kreuger in the store, but he's decided to go as sexy Osama bin Laden this year. I told him I'm going to be sexy Saddam this year, with a sign on my tittays reading "Weapons of Mass Seduction." Because Halloween is now apparently about sexualizing the most inappropriate things of which one can conceive.
What trait that you don't possess do you admire in others?
I admire anyone who can walk confidently into a room full of people. Well, confidently isn't the right word, exactly, because I'm not lacking confidence; I just have general social anxiety.
The thing is, if I'm one of the first people to arrive to a party, say, I'm fine as people slowly pile in. It's the arriving to a crowded party already underway that gives me a case of the panics.
The one exception to this is if I'm addressing a group for some reason. I have absolutely no fear of public speaking at all. Go figure.
"You have in the defense bill, obviously, very important funding for the priorities of our Pentagon and our troops The president also supports repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' and the DREAM Act. ... And we're disappointed at not being able to proceed to the legislation, but we'll keep trying."—White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.
At STFU, Conservatives, I saw this editorial cartoon, featuring two "parent" elephants labeled "GOP Establishment," one looking angry and one looking worried, trailing after a "baby" elephant, masquerading as a teapot:
"Where did we go wrong?" asks the worried-looking parent.
As if that's a mystery.
The "GOP Establishment"—the people who flatter themselves by claiming to be the intellectual wing of a party that depends on the exploitation of an intractable streak of anti-intellectualism among its key demographic, the people sophisticated enough to not personally be offended by gays and people of color and feminists, but unethical enough to exploit such bigotries nonetheless—have lost control of their base. After decades of fear-mongering, scapegoating, and wedge issue politicking, they're left with a seething conglomeration of intolerant bullies whose stubborn refusal to evolve ideologically is matched in astonishing obduracy only by their unjustifiable hatred.
And now they have the unmitigated temerity to be surprised?! Snort.
For longer than I have been alive, the Republican Party has deliberately, cynically, and unapologetically fanned the flames of that hatred, which served as the fuel for the base's single-minded crusade to protect their privilege and thus the rationale for voting Republican—the party who promised to "protect tradition."
"Tradition" is the kind of word that appeals to people for whom the world is changing more rapidly than they can comfortably adjust, who are too busy to or socially discouraged from reading or thinking about things too much, who have heard some things about how feminism is responsible for the breakdown in the family and gays want to redefine marriage and immigrants are taking all the good jobs. "Tradition" is a word that plays well with people who can't be bothered to examine anything too closely, or were never taught how to properly think, how to analyze and assess information in a way that teases out the truth.
And it's an even better word for speaking to the unabashed bigots of the base, obliquely reassuring them that they're right to hate women and gays and brown people, those three separate monolithic groups of faceless enemies, and implicitly promising them they'll be protected from the onslaught of the radical hordes. America's great tradition of conferring undeserved privilege on you won't fail. Not on our watch.
That has been the sacred covenant between the Republican Party and its straight, white, patriarchal, Christian supremacist base for a generation: Vote for us, and we'll protect you.
And so they voted. And, in the process, they gave away their standard of living, their children's education, their jobs, their civil liberties, their national security, their environment, and their economy—all in exchange for the gossamer promise of a return to a time that never happened in a country that never really existed.
The Republican Party has traded again and again on the conjured idea of an American golden era, circa 1945 to 1960, after boys who were ripped from the arms of their virginal sweethearts and sent to another continent to fight a great war against tyranny and despair, had returned home as men, as heroes, and set to work, every last one of them, making babies with doting wives and grabbing the American Dream with both hands in the dawn of suburbia. Scientists in white lab coats and square, black-framed glasses toiled away to make American astronauts the first on the moon, and to fill all the pretty new homes behind perfect white picket fences with fancy, new-fangled household gadgets to make life easier and more fun. Teenagers hung out at sock hops and neon-lit diners, girls longing for lavaliers and boys wondering how to get laid. Elvis' pelvis was considered a scandal, and Marilyn Monroe a bombshell. Dad had a pension and the promise of a gold watch at the end of a long career with a single firm, and Mom had a Frigidaire. And everyone was happy.
Vote for us—and we'll give you that.
It's an empty promise built on an illusion, carefully constructed to conceal that America's so-called golden age was imperfect like any other, and perhaps even more so than most. Half a million of those boys who went off to war never came home—and some of them weren't boys at all, but men, who left wives and children with desperate struggles in the place where their husbands and fathers had been. Some who had come home were never the same, their bodies or minds damaged beyond real repair. Women who had been called to duty in factories were forcibly driven back into domesticity, segregation was a legal fact, every gay had a closet of hir very own, mental illness was treated with lobotomies, McCarthy was on his Communist witch hunt, and we fought an all-but-forgotten war in Korea for three years and lost over 35,000 soldiers. There were back-alley abortions, and the KKK, and Elvis and Marilyn both died of drugs.
The Republican promise has always had the very same flaw as their policies: It is contingent on pretending that the complexity and complications of human existence, and the flaws of humankind, don't exist.
The Republicans have held out this chimera to their base—this Leave It to Beaver bullshit—as if the typical family once was, and should be again, a model of white Christian perfection that never fought, never struggled, never suffered. And never had to be subjected to interactions with people of color, or gays, or any women besides Mom and maybe a nice lady to help sons take out books on the Boy Scouts from the local library. They have held it out as if it has actually been, and as if it could be again.
And they did so even knowing that the fantasy of this nonexistent perfect America is the very thing that created the beloved "traditions" of racism, sexism, and homophobia in the first place. It has been the dangling enticement of a happy family, supported by a single secure and well-paid job, in which no one is wracked with disillusionment, dispossession, or a lack of opportunity—an invitation to join for which most Americans are never given the chance to RSVP—which created the resentment and scapegoating that are the foundations of social conservative traditionalism.
Now the Republicans are stuck with the result—their revolting (in every sense of the word) base, who still believe, and must, lest they face their complicity in having been left with naught but their biases, that the responsible party for their struggles, their disaffection, their undefined but keenly-felt fury, is those people, not the Grand Old Party who promised them something better in exchange for their votes.
The political leadership taught their base too well whom to blame for what ails them, and thus cannot now move them from their fixed gaze and finger-pointing, even as it isn't helping the party anymore—and stands likely to hurt the party for the foreseeable future. They sowed the seeds of prejudice for decades, and now they reap nothing but the only crop such seeds can yield.
It would be amusing, if only the rest of us weren't stuck with the result, too.
And even as the conservative elites whinge grimly about the rabble whose greatest fear is liberals overrunning the perfect, lily-white, patriarchal Christian nation that only exists in their fever-dreams and RAISING THEIR TAXES, they're trying to rehabilitate George W. Bush, the Platonic Ideal of the Modern Conservative, the Golden Boy of the current incarnation of the Republican Party—a corporate shill with the demeanor of a country bumpkin, who could hold together the unholy alliance between Big Money and Big Religion, standing at the altar and giving the blessing to the grim marriage between the gullible bigots who pledged to march in lockstep with anyone who promised to protect the children from illegals and feminazis and kissing boys, and the business interests who sought to get rich off those rubes before sending their jobs overseas.
Even as they lament the radicalization of their increasingly extreme base, they foment it at every opportunity. Because it's the only way they know how to win.
Which is still the Most Important Thing.
And if the Mommy and Daddy Elephant find their Tea Partying spawn terrifying now, just wait until they see the monster it becomes once it has demonstrable, irrefutable proof of helping secure that win, but isn't getting the respect from Mommy and Daddy it feels like it deserves.
An empowered and rampaging elephant can do a fuckload of damage, even if it is a baby.
Despite their affected mystification, the Republican leadership knows precisely whence came the Tea Partying extremists. And they're going to keep exploiting that extreme and volatile rage as long as they can, even though a principled party would denounce this three-ring circus of unfettered bigotry before it's too late. If it isn't already.
"Where did we go wrong?" the philosophical sages of the Republican Party muse, shaking their heads gravely and publicly wringing their hands, before shuffling off to wash them of any responsibility.
Having a white cat was supposed to be the biggest obstacle to facilitating a harmonious environment when we adopted a retired racer, since greyhounds are trained to chase fluffy white things. But between making sure Dudley understood from the moment he arrived that Olivia was not his prey, Dudley being a good boy, and Olivia being a tough girl, it's nothing but cuddly love at Shakes Manor.
CNN: "A defense bill that includes the repeal of the military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy failed to advance in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday as Republicans closed ranks to keep the bill from coming up for debate."
Even the GOP Senators who ostensibly support the repeal of DADT found some justification for failing to break with their colleagues.
Republican opponents complained that Democratic leaders are limiting the debate and could have refused to allow GOP amendments to the broader National Defense Authorization Act, which included the "don't ask, don't tell" repeal provision.
GOP senators also disliked Reid's plan to add an immigration-related provision to the defense bill. Reid wants to tack on a measure that would provide a path to citizenship for students and soldiers who are children of illegal immigrants.
"I am opposed to illegal immigration, and I am deeply disappointed that Washington politicians are playing politics with military funding in order to extend a form of amnesty to certain illegal immigrants," Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts said in a statement issued hours ahead of Tuesday's vote.
One of Maine's two moderate Republican senators, Susan Collins, said Tuesday she would join a GOP filibuster unless Reid agrees to open the debate.
"I find myself on the horns of a dilemma," Collins said on the Senate floor, explaining that she supported repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy but "cannot vote to proceed to this bill under a situation that is going to shut down debate and preclude Republican amendments."
...In addition to Collins and Maine's other Republican senator, Olympia Snowe, Democratic hopes took another blow when Republican Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio also said he would join his party's filibuster.
Blah blah fucking blah. Yeah, everyone in the GOP's got other principles they can't possibly compromise when it comes to supporting the principle of equality. Quelle surprise.
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
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