The ongoing, escalating roaring of bloodthirsty racism in support of Israeli thuggery in Gaza — speaking of mass shootings — put me in mind of a book of cartoons entitled “America’s Black & White Book”, published during World War I by an artist named William Allen Rogers, in particular one of the “greatest hits” from that book, a ripe little nugget entitled “Another Case Of Wiping Hands On The American Flag”, a classic rendition of the “Filthy Dirty Huns Kill Children” genre of the WWI era. Rogers was arguably one of the most raving, drooling, jingoistic warmongering editorial cartoonists of that era — sort of a poor man’s James Montgomery Flagg — and drew for the New York Herald, arguably one of the most raving, drooling, warmongering newspapers in the US of that era.

Their presentation nowadays may be slicker, their media more sophisticated, their rhetoric a little more refined, their approach a little classier, but if you strip it to the core it’s the same old shit they’ve been serving up since the Spanish-American War, at least: filthy dirty Huns are killing babies, filthy dirty Huns are throwing babies out of incubators, dirty filthy Huns are beheading babies… you get the idea.

11 x 16 inch high-res color .jpg image, 1.7mb

Continue reading "Wiping Hands On The Flag (after William Allen Rogers, 1917)" »

When the US first set out inflicting two decades of destruction and misery on Afghanistan the Liberals, true to the old Phil Ochs song, were never more red, white and blue — and the Liberals’ most appallingly cynical appeals for support for that debacle came from the “imperial Feminists” who tried to tug our heartstrings with horror stories about burqas, illicit nail salons, and no HBO.

So, it was no surprise when America’s Imperial Feminists picked up where they left off, joining the chorus of bitching, pissing, moaning and sour-graping about their being run out of Afghanistan, reviving the tired old bromides about women’s rights and how the US “left women behind” when it dragged its bloody ass out of the place after twenty years in the Graveyard Of Empires.

The most unctous of these was an article in The Atlantic which dragged out every one of those tired old arguments, hoary old horseshit so old it’s got SCSI ports on the back. What was merely appalling twenty years ago is absolutely godawful today, considering the current abuse of working-class women in the US, and in US satellite states like Saudi Arabia:

One reason that we stayed in Afghanistan so long with nothing to show for it except the safety of women, @CaitlinPacific writes, is that for all of our sins, our default position is freedom.
—The Atlantic, @theatlantic on Twitter, 08.19.2021

Says on the author’s profile that she traffics in “thought crimes for all occasions”. I wouldn’t know about that, but that article of hers sure is a goddamn crime, I’ll tell ya that for free.

10×17 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 993kb

Continue reading "Afghan Women’s Liberation no. 2 (or, Won’t Somebody Think Of The Women?)" »

I present for you now, ladies’n’gents, my very first cartoon of the 2024 Presidential campaign — and leave all hope behind…

Human remains were reportedly found in the landing gear of a US military plane after it departed Kabul airport, with harrowing unverified footage purporting to show a person trapped on the plane’s exterior as it took off…

…In footage too graphic to publish, presumably filmed through a window by a passenger on board the plane, the person was seen trapped outside the craft in mid-flight, though it is unclear exactly when the video was captured or how long after the C-17 took off.

— RT.com, 08.17.2021

…and the tweet in question has since been pulled for “violating the Twitter rules” — though, luckily, that evil, terrible old Russian-controlled media nabbed us a frame or two. I wish I’d jumped on it and downloaded a copy of the video as soon as I saw it — barely 7 months in, and we already have a disgustingly apt visual metaphor for the entirety of the Biden Years.

This is your future, working-class America.

11×12.5 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 901kb

Continue reading "This Is Your Captain Speaking…" »

Elvis has left the building. At last.

…and as the band was playing him out, the Beltway chattering class was in a mass conniption over all those poor, helpless collaborators we left behind, and our lack of political will, and how, if we could only piss away another trillion or two and tough it out until mid-century, we could lick those mean old Taliban once and for all.

In the days leading up to Elvis’ departure from the building, the press was full of screeching and howling about how this wasn’t going to be like the evacuation of Saigon, honest it wasn’t, seriously, for real — and the louder they howled, the more convinced I was that it would be like the evacuation of Saigon, except even more awesome.

I was 18 when I watched terrified Embassy flunkies being plucked off the roof by the choppers on TV. The draft had officially ended around 1971 or so, but I still had to register. Got a ready-to-burn card and everything. The day Saigon fell, I was about two weeks from graduating high school, and classified 1-H.

Turn out the lights, the party’s over…!

11×18 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 660kb

Continue reading "Miss Kabul" »