Oath Keepers: When the Teabaggers Just Aren't Whacked Enough

Between the Teabaggers and the Birthers, I'd thought I'd pretty much seen the pinnacle of evolution for Rightist nutcakes.

Then, the Oath Keepers showed up, a bunch of current and retired military and cops howling about the new dangers to the Constitution they've sworn to uphold with all the bluster they can muster on a Web site which, like all similar right-wing sites, is hopelessly swimming in Revolutionary War-era metaphor and imagery. Oh, and don't forget to check out their video, in which they declare their intent to disobey their Top Ten Unjust Orders with a lush backdrop of inspiring patriotic and military imagery and overwrought music. Yeah, you might think we Lefties get a bit over the top, but for sheer Drama Queen goodness, you can't beat the Right Wingnuts.



What's especially interesting about this bunch is that they were founded just this past March, not even two months after Barack "Timberlake" Obama took office. Now, mind you -- during the eight goddamn' years in which the Bush Regime was instigating illegal wars of aggression, censoring the news, arbitrarily declaring people "enemy combatants" and detaining them without charges or a trial, criminalizing Muslims and the Left, suppressing dissent, allowing torture, and otherwise generally pissing on the Constitution at every opportunity, the people comprising the Oath Keepers were nowhere to be found. In fact, when US service personnel were refusing to comply with illegal or unconstitutional orders under Bush, you could hear the future Oath Keepers howling for courts martial and trials for treason.

Now that there's a Donkeycratic administration in power, though, the Oath Keepers have suddenly appeared out of nowhere, bellowing at full throat about illegal orders and detention camps and the military occupation of American cities and threats to the Constitution. Never mind that Obama's pretty much continuing all of Bush's favorite programs such as imprisonment without charges, rendition, torture, suppression of the news -- not to mention that he's escalating the war in Afghanistan. That sort of pertinent information is totally lost on these doorknobs: all they know is that now the Donkeycrats are in the White House, the President is a N!gg3r, and the Republic is in grave danger. Oh, yeah, and they don't want to pay taxes, either; they want highways and schools and National Parks, but they don't want to pay taxes -- like the Teabaggers, but with more brass and swagger. Basically, the Oath Keepers are for people who think the Teabaggers are too liberal.

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(...and read more about the Oath Keepers' association with White Nationalists at Lady Liberty's Lamp.)

Radio Hate

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Just so we're on the same page, here: community organizing group ACORN registered large numbers of black voters in Chicago for the last big "election". As is common in many registration campaigns, there's a fair number of wise-asses registering dead peoples' names, or fake names. Also, as is required by law by boards of elections in any US city I've been to, any bogus/invalid registrations are reported, to keep the voter rolls cleared of all the dead people, and all those Luke Skywalkers and Donald Ducks.

So, anyway, outfits like the Drudge Report (has anybody informed that bonehead that the '90s are over?) get hold of this and, in their own predictable, inimitable fashion, proceed to blow this up into some kind of bogus "scandal" and throw it to the rightist k00k crowd like so much fresh, raw meat. Still, you've got to love Drudge, if only because he carries on in the finest shrieking tabloid tradition -- never let the facts get in the way of a good story -- along with providing us all with some good cheap laffs.

Now, just to refresh your memories, one more time, here's the video of a small group of black youth selling little plastic flags at the September 12 Teabaggers' rally being threatened and harassed, and accused of being "ACORN People" (as if there were something wrong with that in and of itself)...

Death Panel

That's right, gang; looks as if Sarah Palin may have been right about the "death panels", though perhaps only in the same way a busted clock is still right twice a day -- that is, for the entirely wrong reasons.  The recent push to eliminate even "public option" -- having only the barest, slightest whiff of national healthcare to it -- has confirmed my own suspicion: the "death panel" is real. Here they are now, rendering a recent decision affecting healthcare access not just for your wizened grandma, but for your own personal self.



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Capitalism Works Best When Left Alone

At the Capitol Hill Teabaggers' Rally this past July 4th, I spotted more than a few signs saying "Capitalism Works Best When Left Alone", and it got me thinking, what vast new entrepreneurial opportunities have been denied owing to government regulations and petty tyrannies such as the Clean Water Act, The Pure Food And Drug Act, or the Glass-Steagall Act...?

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Teabagger

The recent Teabaggers' Shindig over at Senate Park(viewable above) has certainly left me inspired, to say the least. Never did I hear a gang of astroturfers yell more loudly about not being astroturfers even as they were funded by big, fat rightist PACs run by characters like Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, and never did I hear more yelling from a group about how they aren't about Left or Right, even while they never missed an opportunity to slag the Left -- or even on ordinary Liberals, for that matter -- as the lot it was my fortune to cover this past Fourth Of July.



Even more hilarious was their total ignorance of the causes and effects of events that happened before January 20, 2009 -- forgetting, for instance, that the current corporate bailout fiasco was pushed by George W. Bush. Listening to the howls from the stage and checking out the composition of the crowd, it was as if the single reaction from the Teabagger Massmind boiled down to "OMFG, the President is a N1GG3R!" -- like the old-timer in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, hollering from the top of the church steeple, "Here comes the new sheriff, and he's a big..." ...and it sure as hell didn't help any as their event was organized and staged by members of a well-known White Power band, Pokerface.

So, considering all this, I thought to myself, "Self, it's time you did a poster that announces the imminent arrival of the National Teabaggers' Convention coming to town on the 12th of September, and maybe inspire some of the local anarchists and antifascists to organize a little welcoming committee." So, I did.

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Deportation: the Day After

So, it seems a bunch of yahoos in various state and county legislatures are bound and determined to rid the place of "illegal" immigrants -- "illegal", that is, in the sense of legality randomly pulled out of some racist politician's ass about a century or so ago. Of course, "illegal immigration" probably ranks right up there with "intellectual property" on the all-time list of concepts totally pulled out of the asses of politicians.



So, Fine. Just fine. Go ahead, make life so miserable for them that they leave. Hell, why not just deport 'em while you're at it, if it'll make you feel better...?

Great. They're gone. Congratulations. So, who's going to build your houses and fix your streets? Who's going to clean your office building at night? Who's going to do your landscaping work? Who's going to be your nanny -- especially at the wages they're paid for these jobs, and considering the crap they have to put up with from employers. Most of your average Americans sure wouldn't take those jobs because of that; either that, or -- more likely -- they're all on their sofas waiting for their phones to ring with an offer to be Donald Trump's Apprentice, or perhaps keeping their options flexible in case that lucrative position as an American Idol Winner comes open.

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"Birth Pangs of a New Middle East"

Is it just me, or did Secretary Of Snake Condolee-ee-ee-eezza Rice make one of her weirdest statements ever last weekend -- even weirder than that NBC "Today" interview where she said "freedom is on the march" about half a dozen times? Oh, and I love the part where she says that "We're going through a very violent time." "WE"? What do you mean "we", white woman?



All in all, though, quite a bout of birth pangs, there; shame it couldn't have been a more quiet, serene and peaceful birthing experience, like Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise's baby.

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Stay the Course!

Finally, a Plan For Victory! Oh, sure, the GOP may not have any real plan -- and the Democrats may be even worse -- but at least the Bushites have the good sense to put up big signs all around the stage reading "Plan For Victory" whenever President Chimp gives a speech. All the Democrats have is Howard The Duck, living in a party he never made.

Seriously, the Bush Regime flacks must have assumed Americans are even stupider than they actually are to serve up that old Reagan-era bromide "Stay The Course" when, in fact, there were a goodly number of us who remember that load of bullshit from back when it was still fresh and steaming. The war in Iraq is shaping up to be a Fail even more epic than Vietnam, and all President Chimp can think of is to say "Stay The Course". What was that old Pete Seeger song... "waist-deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says..."



In 1989, one Dr. Francis Fukuyama penned what had to be one of the most conceited loads of triumphalist blathering ever, The End Of History, in which he claims that the fall of the USSR and its satellite regimes in Eastern Europe heralded the end of the struggle between Good and Evil (aka Capitalism and Socialism, or the absurdly distorted, simplistic media images thereof). What I found especially laughable was Fukuyama's treatment of the USA as a state that was somehow immune to collapse and above it all, the "winner" of the aforementioned struggle when, in fact, even as US politicians and pro-capitalist idealogues celebrated the victory of "freedom", the first rumblings of the collapse of the USA could be heard in the form of NAFTA and George I's initiation of renewed imperialist adventurism in Panama, Iraq, and Somalia.

The end of history? No, sorry, Dr. Fukuyama, what you heard in '89 was just the first shoe dropping. Seriously, Dr. F, didn't you realize that if a regime the size of the USSR could end up as historical roadkill, it could just as easily happen to the USA? Jeezus, what is it with these goddamn' Harvard jerks?

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New York City 2004 GOP Convention Protest Poster

Here's another one of those gags that pretty much drew itself. On hearing the news that New York City would have the dubious honor of hosting the 2004 Republican Convention, this image slammed into my head like a runaway train and refused to go away:



This was my part towards inspiring locals and visitors alike to hit the streets and give the GOP a good old-fashioned New York City welcome, and to let the Bush Mob know that the people of NYC weren't going to allow themselves to be cast as "extras" in a fascist corporate infomercial (which is basically what the Republicratic and Demopublican Conventions had become by this time).

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Show Us Your Tits!

Am I the only one here who was totally gob-smacked at the spectacle of politicians, freelance guardians of public morals and the Federal Communications Commission Board all simultaneously crapping their drawers at the reports of Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl Halftime Show baring one nipple in an instant so quick, so fleeting, that the only way you could really see it was to watch the super-slo-mo replay? Am I the only one here who's more than a little bit annoyed at seeing all these people howling over a nipple being exposed for one one-hundred-thousandth of a second while our manuafacturing jobs are being sucked away by China, our IT service jobs being siphoned off by India, our Bill Of Rights being shredded, and the US is up to its armpits in an illegal imperialist war of aggression in Iraq? Am I the only one here who's more than slightly disgusted at all the hypocritical shrieking about obscenity and sexuality at the Super Bowl Halftime Show while our airwaves and cable are flooded with Desperate Housewives, Real Housewives, Sex And The City, and beer commercials full of frolicking hotties -- not to mention the supreme irony of scantily-clad NFL cheerleaders prancing on the sidelines during the actual Super Bowl game itself? Is there not one woman in this country who's tired of being driven insane trying to live up to the US entertainment and advertising industries' official standard of feminine beauty, i.e., emaciated stick insects with visible ribcages and silicone-injected ta-tas big enough to choke a horse?



Well, consider this cartoon a call to action to every woman who's tired of being told by advertising that her body is inadequate, and told by the Federal Communications Commission that her body is just plain dirty, to write her favorite brief, simple, elegant, dissident message across her chest and take it to the streets.

At every protest, at every media event, get your average, non-beer-commercial-like body into the streets and flash your message at every opportunity. Going to the IMF/WB/Pro-Choice actions in DC this spring? Cruise the streets, look for remote live TV news crews, manuver your way into the near background, and bam, let 'em have it, your message about censorship and media hypocrisy, emblazoned across your entirely non-Swedish Bikini Team-like bare chest -- or, if you're the shy type, mix up the ol' paste bucket and hit the streets with this provocative poster while leaving your shirt on the entire time.

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Bush/Saddam '04

The George II re-selection campaign is kicking off with a bombshell (so to speak) -- they're ditching Dick Cheney for a guy who knows how to use both sides of his face: that long-time Washington insider himself, hanger-out with Don "Rummy" Rumsfeld – Saddam "Saddam" Hussein! The media, of course, is always on the lookout for some meager shred of good news out of Iraq; NBC presented us with a free GOP political ad in the form of their "Saddam Captured Marathon" spanning the entirety of NBC's Sunday morning blabfest programming.



President Junior may have been abjectly stupid, but once in a while had those rare flashes of brilliance -- like using the head of state of an "enemy" nation as his unofficial running mate, just as his old man tried to do in '92. Of course, it didn't hurt that the Donkeycrats -- weak-assed and dickless, as usual -- ran a phone-in campaign with a nominee that made Lurch (from the "Addams Family") look positively scintillating by comparison, thereby cementing the Donkeycrats' reputation for being craven dive artists.

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No Child Left Behind, no.2

As the more transparently sleazy, odious, and second-rate features of President Junior's "No Child Left Behind" program became known, the sarcastic nicknames began to fly -- among them my own favorites, "No Child Left Unrecruited" and "No Child Shall Escape". Indeed, no child shall escape the State's program of psychiatric drugging, captive-audience mass-marketing, military recruitment and political indoctrination. Education? Who said it?



By this time, as well, military recruiters' encroachment into high-school campuses had markedly increased, along with more aggressive tactics ranging up to and including harassment, threats, and telephone harassment of students' families at home. Student resistance escalated in kind, including the blockading of military recruiting office in downtown DC; in at least a couple of cases, young men in the process of enlistment got the message and backed out on the spot.

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Let's Roll!

A friend of mine noted that it'd been quite some years since I did one of my good old-fashioned blood-spattered antiwar cartoons, so I came roaring back with "Super Service", and the even more brutal piece here. As I recall, it was about this time that Lisa Beamer, wife of a 9/11 victim, went on a whirlwind promotional victimhood-pimping tour including a stop on the NBC Today Show plugging her book, and -- what really sent me over the top, inspiring this cartoon -- her attempt to register a trade/service mark on the phrase "Let's Roll". Sweet friggin' Jayzus, I thought, does this goddamn' woman have any shame at all?



While pretty much everyone I knew in the antiwar activist community was totally down with the message, many found the imagery disturbing (much to my delight). Washington DC media activist Zoe Mitchell wrote:

...the argument he chose to present his argument with disturbs me. It's violent. It's bloody. It makes me sick. Unfortunately, it's dead-on accurate. US soldiers driving SUVs have shot and killed Iraqi civilians. Contrary to the US Media's imagery, Persian Gulf War 2.0 is violent and bloody. It should make us ALL sick.

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We're Still Hiring

About this time, the implosion of the Dot-Com Bubble was really starting to ripple through the economy, causing an uptick in unemployment and a "recession-ette" -- nothing like the massive Fail we're experiencing now, of course, but still quite a jolt at the time.

In the midst of all this was the run-up to Iraq War v2.0 -- batshit-crazy Neocons throwing absurd lies and fabrications at the wall in hopes something will stick, craven Democrats fighting each other to be first in line to support Bush's lunacy, and an increase in aggressive military recruiting tactics -- i.e. stalking high-school kids coming out of class or at the shopping mall, threatening kids with imprisonment in Guantanamo when they attempted to back out of enlistment.



In this piece, I'm sort of wondering aloud about whether or not the Neocon Mob were actually banking on the increase in unemployment to supply them with the volunteer cannon fodder they needed to properly stomp on Iraq and steal its resources and destroy its culture. Need a job, kid? No prob, dude; the Army is still hiring!

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What Has Ariel Sharon Learned from the Holocaust?

The State of Israel -- headed at the time by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, architect of the 1982 brutalization of Lebanon as Israeli Defense Minister and quite possibly with the largest overall girth of any world leader -- was going on another one of its recent periodic ass-stomping parties in Palestine, this time directed at the towns of Ramallah and Jenin. It was starting to look more and more like the Nazis moving into Warsaw every day, to the point where the comparison was far more accurate than your average overblown "Godwin Rule" Nazi analogy rant on Usenet. While comparisons to Warsaw 1940 and 1960's South Africa are today made by everybody and their cat -- including former US President Jimmy Carter -- in early '02, with the big Crusade still going on in Afghanistan, to dare compare Israeli State behavior in Ramallah and Jenin to the Nazi occupation of Warsaw was taking a huge-ass chance not only with the rightist/zionist factions among Jewish America, but with the then-highly intimidated US Left as well.



A lot of folks here will also remember this piece in the context of the infamous Danish cartoon brouhaha because this fracas spawned the now-legendary Holocaust Cartoon Competition sponsored by Hamshahri, the major Iranian daily paper out of Teheran. As you recall, the contest called on cartoonists around the world to submit Holocaust-themed cartoons as a challenge to people who claim to support free speech to put their money where their mouths are. Iranian president Ahmadinejad, himself a Holocaust denier, was expecting to see cartoons denying the Holocaust; what he got instead was an outpouring of cartoons critical of US/Israeli policy on Palestine, cartoons which compared the Israeli aggression in Palestine to the Holocaust — cartoons which, by their very nature, assumed not denial but acknowledgement of the historical fact and reality of the Holocaust. As I recall, there was a grand total of one — count ‘em, one — cartoon actually denying the Holocaust in the entire competition.

I, along with five other Americans, were participants in this contest and exhibition, to which I submitted the cartoon you see above, which basically asked what Prime Minister Sharon and others of a generation of Israeli leadership old enough to have lived through the Holocaust, exactly what they’d leared from it; my own answer was that they’d learned precisely the wrong things, as both history and recent events had shown they’d become that which they themselves hated generations ago.

Needless to say, I caught a shitstorm of howling criticism from not only the reactionary right-wing Zionist factions, but the reactionary US right wing, in the form of interviews I gave on a couple of right-wing talk-radio programs whose hosts bitched and fumed at me for being “anti-Semetic”, when anyone with two brain cells to rub together could see that the cartoon was not a slag on Judaism or Jews but a direct, pointed criticism of Israeli state behavior in Palestine. Talk about your great truth beginning as blasphemy; here we are three years later, and everybody from the UN to former US President Jimmy Carter is comparing Israel’s behavior in Palestine to the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, and to South Africa’s apartheid era.

It was tough going for a while, there, but man, it sure is nice to be right.

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Six Degrees of Separation

Y'know what really got me about all this was how everybody in the public and the media seemed to forget all about the great honking wad of cash that the Bush Regime gave to the Taliban, early in the Chimp's Presidency, ostensibly for the purpose of "fighting drugs" in Afghanistan. This was, of course, right about the time the Taliban were catching worldwide hell for doing things like destroying old Buddhist temple ruins and such.



Afghanistan, needless to say, was full of militant Muslim militia/guerrilla types who were trained by the CIA to resist the Soviet invasion back in the day, including an especially notable ex-CIA asset named Osama Bin Laden. It must not have occurred to the US "spooks" that folks like the Taliban or the Mujahideen see any outside invasion as a threat, not just the Soviets. Talk about more blowback than you can handle.

We first hit the streets with this one in early November, while the shit was just starting to fly hot and heavy here and in Afghanistan, and had an amazingly easy time considering the climate. Around Adams-Morgan, we'd just finished hitting a Washington Post box and were about half a block down the street when I happened to glance back to see a couple of women checking it out, and overheard one saying to the other, "yeah, we all know Bin Laden.".

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America's Towers O'Terror

Tragic though the event may have been, I got tired quickly of all the TV talkers howling about the thousands who died at the Pentagon and World Trade Center without once considering the USA was responsible for at least a hundred times as many over the course of Hiroshima/Nagasaki, ten years of Vietnam, the 1991 bombing of Baghdad, and the decade of sanctions against Iraq following Iraq War I.



Also -- stop me if I'm wrong -- but didn't Bin Laden's targeting of the World Trade Center classify as targeting on a "military asset" under the Pentagon's own current rules? Was he really doing anything different from the US in Iraq Wars I and II, or the US/NATO action against Belgrade?

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Madness of George II

This is one of the pieces I was happiest about, in terms of people getting the literary/dramatic reference in the context of the initial mass Tourette's outburst of almost WWI-like zaniness from the US Government and society at large in the weeks after 9/11. I honestly didn't think enough people in my audience would've seen The Madness Of George III to get it, but it turns out lots of folks had. I was rather embarrassed to have forgotten that the kind of people who collect my work aren't going to be the kind of people who like films with hot babes, high-speed chases, robots turning into airplanes, and stuff blowing up.



It was another weirdly poignant piece: done originally for the October issue of The Progressive (without the headlines and captions) it dealt with the emerging imperialistic tendencies of the then-early Bush Regime and drawn a good month or so before 9/11.

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Fall 2001 IMF/World Bank Series

The Fall 2001 IMF/World Bank mobilization was to be our blockbuster sequel to A16, rumored by many to be the biggest mass mobe in town since Vietnam -- Lord willing and the creek don't rise, barring any sudden freakish turn of events -- such as, say, a large airliner or two or three diving into a few really large buildings.

Needless to say, the wheels pretty much came off The Movement's™ wagon very soon after 9/11; the Mobilization for Global Justice and Ruckus Society practically tripped over each other while backing out, citing (as I recall) "respect for the victims" -- even as the neocons and other right-wing freaks at the time were preparing for endless war overseas and endless abuse of the Constitution at home, also out of consideration for "the victims". Luckily, there was ANSWER, which went on with its events, shifting to a pro-civil liberties, anti-war focus for what was previously an anti-globalization mobe, so at least the Left hadn't been totally bullied off the streets by the Neocons and their brownshirt pals in Free Republic and Gathering Of Eagles.

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Inaugurauction!

At the time I was doing posters for the Counterinaugural, the Florida freak show was still playing out in the courts and in the streets. Besides, our message didn't really depend on the results; the message for the Counterinaugural protests was that people need to organize and take action on their own behalf and look among themselves for "leadership" instead of depending on "elected" politicians and the results of an "election" rotten to the core with hypocrisy and corruption, and so mobbed up with corporate cash that its results couldn't possibly be legitimate no matter who "won".



Ironically but happily, the scene depicted here came quite close to being what actually happened at one of the feeder-march rallies headed up by a group including the Rev. Al Sharpton. I'd gotten used to having huge historic events right here in the same city, so when several thousand folks gathered just half a block from my house, within sight of my front stoop, at Staunton Square on Capitol Hill, that was some treat. The climax of the whole rally, just before marching past the Supreme Court and on downtown, was a "mass swearing-in" of all the folks present, a mass affirmation that the People are supposed to be the real "leaders".

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