Glenn Beck is sunk into his chair, as relaxed as a Vito Corleone on the day of his daughter’s wedding. Sarah Palin sits at attention. Beck, the Rick Warren of the Tea Party phenomenon, is about to test the former governor of Alaska’s orthodoxy.

“Who’s your favorite Founder?”

“Uhh, well…y’know, well, all of them, because they came collectively together with so much diverse…”

“Bullcrap. Who’s your favorite?”

Palin looks into her lap, blubbers a bit, tries to work “diversity” into her answer somehow, then finally arrives at George Washington, Beck’s chosen Founder, as disclosed moments earlier. She has kissed the ring.

Palin’s January 12th interview with Beck was easily the most embarrassing  one she gave in the whirlwind tour of the Fox News studios that the half-term governor  undertook last week, which included appearances under Hannity and O’Reilly’s spotlights as well. The three biggest egos in Right Wing television, all vetting her at once; all part of Palin’s coming out ceremony to celebrate her premier as an official Fox News commentator, 

But it is Beck’s interview which was the most interesting, not for again revealing the thimbleful of substance contained in the oil drum that is Palin’s celebrity, but for his attempt to hogtie her and drag her into the strange cult of the Founding Fathers that has become the centerpiece of Beck’s Tea Party movement. Palin’s floundering answer, akin to her repsonse to Katie Couric’s crippling inquiry as to what magazines she reads, disclosed that Palin is no more interested in the puffed-up brilliance of the  powdered wigs that attended America’s birth than she is about the print media. But in Beck’s world, and the world of the tea bags, you are either with the Founders, or against them.

As mid-term fever heats up, expect ever increasing flashbacks to the Revolutionary War, and ever more D-list celebrities appearing in tricorns and cravats. This is because the beating heart of the conservative movement, Reagan worship, is now deader than disco. Conservatism has been vandalized beyond repair by the fiasco of Bush/Cheney and the Rubber Stamp Congress, its ego smashed by economic policies that could have been written by Kim Jong Il,  its conscience molested by waterboarding, Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. And though it is considered uncouth by both parties to give more than an over-the-shoulder glance backwards to the outgoing era, lest our full memory kick in, the conservatives are left with nothing to pride themselves on after nearly a decade of life in the Owner’s Box. They’d sought that grip on power for so long, but America was a dear, precious puppy, and their grip was that of  Lennie Small.

Fortunately, since the darkling usurper took power in the White House, the conservative’s have wasted no time in reinventing themselves. And their approach, while not entirely novel, makes up for its lack of ingenuity with its naked aggression. Our times are genuinely troubled. The nation, while not in a great depression, is in a genuine depression none the less. The homesteads are being seized while the rich dine on the People’s caviar. It is clearly not morning in America, and will not soon be. More than a smiling old man will be needed this time. A whiff of grapeshot is called for! We must return…to the Revolution!

This is the kernel, and more or less the full corncob, of the Tea Party phenomenon. Populist rage which should correctly be funneled at our entire government and its ossified parties, but funneled (naturally) by the party out of power into a campaign designed to return them to their rightful thrones, dressed up in the only garb of  dissent from our history that does not naturally polarize the masses, the breeches and stockings of the Minuteman. 

As one NPR commentator put it, we are seeing “grass roots with an expensive lawnmower.” Real public discord matched with empty patriotism, a vacuous grasp of history and a Republican party that thrives on both. How many of the tea bags know more about the Revolution, its origins or its philosophies than that there was a Boston Tea Party and, later, a Declaration of Independence? 

You can sense the dangerous nonsense the Tea Party effort could really become when you realize all that the Declaration of Independance contains for them. “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are imbued by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This is the Tea Party shibboleth. That any words precede this statement, or that a great deal follows, is mostly an alien and irrelevant notion to these angry conservatives. That the Declaration of Independance is not a religious tract, or a call to arms, but a thoughtful and quite specific announcement of a new order and what has required it, is the farthest thing from the mind of a person scribbling a Hitler ’stache on a picture of Barack Obama. This movement is not about ideas, but about feelings. It’s membership does not need to think, only rant and heckle.

Matthew Spalding, an author and historian at the Heritage Foundation, sums up the conscience of a tea bag in a story he includes in his book “We Still Hold These Truths”, about a soldier in the Revolution whose only education was the bible, and whose only motivation to fight the most powerful military in the world was that Americans wanted to govern themselves, and that the British” didn’t mean that we should.”

While this simple creed sounds great coming from the mouth of one of  the men who fought to build this nation, it has very little relevance to the screaming or weeping fucknuts forming random hordes at town halls or on the National Mall. What are they fighting for exactly, except to guarantee that health insurance companies can continue to hold the nation in a choke hold, or to multiply the cameras, sniffers, wire taps and all-nude x-ray scanners intruding on our lives in the name of security?

The walk to go with this revolutionary talk is, in actuality, nowhere to be seen. Rumors of third parties burn off like so much morning fog, despite the multiplicity of conservatives declaring themselves to be independents. O’Reilly, Beck… even Palin has tiptoed away from the Republican party, at least in words. But don’t worry, she isn’t going that rogue. Neither are the others. For no sooner have the words “third party” hit the air than it becomes clear that there is no third party, nor will there be, and certainly no one at Fox is going to proffer the names of any candidates or (massive, ear splitting snort) endorse one for anything more important than a school board race.

Their third party candidates are the faces on the money. Washington, Jefferson, maybe Franklin when he isn’t talking about how people who give up liberty for security deserve neither. The Founders, into whom all hope may be poured, and whose legacy–of being smarter by an order of magnitude than any of the phoney bags of shit who worship them–may be invoked by one congressional candidate after another, until the world is made right, and the wealthy are once again taxed at the rate which God intended.

As we all know, this Facebook thing is the biggest thing to hit the Interthing since Twister or whatever that other big thing was. So if you are a fan of this site and want to be my buddy in a lurid way that this website alone cannot provide, get your ass to my Facebook page and friend-request me! You’ll be glad you did! Or not. One or the other.

I’m putting my most recent Weapon Brown page up for sale on Etsy. I’ve only done a little Etsying in the past, but I’d like to do more, especially if I can develop an interest among you fans for owning the original Weapon Brown pages.

As you will see from the the page I am offering this week, it contains panels from this week’s and last week’s strips, which will occasionally be the case. Other times, the strip you read will be the entire page.

I am also thinking about offering prints of the lettered pages, should that prove to be something people want. If you Blockheads (see? I’m using it!) want to weigh in on the kind of original art or art products you would like, the floor is open!  And naturally, if there is an existing Weapon Brown page that you want to get your hands on, please e-mail me.

CBS has brilliantly demonstrated why censorship is not only immoral, it is just plain head-up-your-ass stupid.

In covering the recent attack on a Danish cartoonist and his family by an axe-wielding terrorist who apparently couldn’t find any exploding underwear, CBS takes pains to blur out the actual years-old cartoon of Mohammed wearing a turban bomb, lest Jihad Inc. take offense.

Spineless, yes! But wait, there’s more! Apparently CBS is as confused as the rest of us in trying to figure out what makes a muslim time bomb tick. In their segment, they distort one image showing the specific cartoon that artist Kurt Westergaard inked, but later show an undistorted newspaper page with all the offending Mohammed cartoons, including Westergaard’s!

Whether CBS was trying to avoid setting off Islam’s volcanic temper or just trying to protect themselves from being visited by a muslim land shark of their own, they blew it on both counts. Wake up, fucktards! You can bury every copy of that cartoon in a steel drum or you can embroider it on the American flag. Nothing we do is going to keep the next guy from trying to hide a stick of dynamite up his ass while flying JetBlue to Disneyland.

Look, I normally would never force a criminal suspect to watch as his grandmother is eaten alive by fire ants, but I’m warning you terrorists: any one cartoonist is more evil than all of Sunni Islam and the Khmer Rouge combined. Ever read Happiness is a Warm Puppy? There are more coded instructions from Satan in that book than the Necrinomicon. Don’t piss us off.

UPDATE: Speaking of evil cartoonists, how evil am I that it took me this long to note the passing of cartoonist David Levine, a caricaturist who had an influence on me when I was very young. Farewell, David. Your jihad will live on! 

Merry post-Navida, humans. I am blogging to you today from New Year’s central, aka my fortified apocalypse shelter.

No mere fallout shelter this! I am the proud owner of a Judgement Day Deluxe, the only doomsday shelter endorsed by Tim LaHaye!  Originally available only to the inner circle of the Trilateral Comission, the JDD is the last word in end times luxury. Nuclear or Mayan, there isn’t an apocalypse yet conceived that this baby can’t ride out!

Right now I’m sitting pretty behind 51 inches of osmium-reinforced concrete and enjoying the nectar of the most expensive urine-to-potable water converter ever to come out of the Netherlands (where they can taste urea at 1 part per trillion). I am fully stocked up on a 12-month supply of  canned beans, rice cakes and armor-piercing bullets, and my entire set-up is safety rated against nine different types of horde, from radioactive cannibal to rage-addled, and three kinds of undead!  New Year’s, do your worst!

My New Year’s preparations may seem a little paranoid, but I’ve been preparing for this since Y2K, our warning apocalypse. And now with the Nigerian “Taint Bomber” reminding us that pointless acts of murder are going to still be the rage in the new decade, and movies like 2012, The Road and The Book of Eli warning us that God’s finger is surely poised to poke us, I’m not rolling the dice on any more above ground New Year’s Eves.

Oddly, these are the perfect circumstances for putting out a comic, since an interruption-free, cave-like environment is the womb from which great cartoons are birthed. And after the sky falls, I should have lots of awesome reference for drawing Weapon Brown! A few of you may even make it into the story as I sketch you skulking around mass graves looking for rats to eat.

The first order of business for the New Year will be, of course, completing Deep Fried #4. I have tantalized you recently with the promise of a December release, but it looks like I will have to bump this to January, since getting this product done right is going to require that extra few weeks of unanticipated commitment that makes freelance cartooning such a wrist-slitting joy. However, what won’t change is that special fans-only edition that I have promised, with a brand new Weapon Brown story available for a limited time. I know that you are licking your eyeballs for it, so keep the faith!

2010 will bring more than just Deep Fried and skin-melting sleet storms. Blockhead’s War will conclude this year, hopefully before the summer, in a power-packed final arc that will debut CAL-v.1N and HOBS, Chuck’s ultimate enemies. This throw-down was the point of the entire story right from the beginning, so you know that you are going to be getting masturbation-quality work out of me in the months to come. Those who have stuck around this long are not going to regret it!

Once Blockhead’s War wraps there will, of course, be the graphic novel, loaded with more googaws than the birthday booth at a Hard Rock Cafe. I can’t wait to begin designing it. You’d better warn the other books on your shelf that its coming.

Will this spell the end of comic joy on this website? Hell no! Beepo, Roadkill, Squints and some new friends will rise from the grave like so many gamma-irradiated deadlings to renew the joy that is Deep Fried! The comic with no shame will be sailing into some uncharted and hilarious waters as the gang each get some me-time and reveal facets of their personalities that you never wanted to know. Meanwhile, a new trade paperback collecting the second volume of Deep Fried is in the offing, featuring some never before printed material, including a new Clarissa story guaranteed to twist your emotions into pretzels of agony.

I’ve got some other things up my sleeve as well, but patience! You will know these things when I feel the time is right. In the meantime, feed. Feeeeeed…

Last item! For just the longest time I have wanted to have a proper name to refer to you Weapon Brown fans. Rather than try and yoke you with one of my own, I open the floor to suggestions! Who are you people? What is your kind called anyway? Throw some ideas into the comments section and let’s see what sticks!

In the meantime I’ll be checking my scanner for any reports of inbound missiles or Nigerians. Happy New Year, victims!

For those of you who still have no idea what Weapon Brown is about, if my fathom-deep archive of strips has left you perplexed, perhaps my new YouTube pimpage will set the matter straight.

A few people have expressed interest in a new tee based off the stylin’ CAL-v.1n graphic from my recently debuted stickers, meant to compliment the classic Chuck image from the Weapon Brown tee.

So, I wanna know! Do you guys want another tee shirt? And if so, which of these designs makes you happiest? 

Version “A”…

…or version “B”

Make your voices heard! It’s a democracy, dammit! If the response is good enough I’ll do one of my famous pre-order incentive offers for this.

The Weapon Brown T-shirt continues to own the Interwebs! Here is its latest appearance, covering the oversized nipples of fellow comic creator Rene Castellano in an interview on Video Outhouse.

What are YOU doing to spread the fame??

Today, Crooks and Liars brings us some commentary on a television piece done by Phoneix, AZ’s local Fox affiliate on Neo Nazis, but they miss the subtext.

In an investigative piece, Phoneix’s Fox 10 reports on the shennanigans of J.T. Ready, a blubbery local Nazi and his tribe of disaffected meth addicts and unemployed baby daddies, but the reporter’s lead-in gives the game away:

“The signs, the flags, the pins, the websites. Everywhere you look, Socialist, Nazi, Skinhead… by any name they are here.”

Now, anyone who doesn’t think Fox knows what it  is doing when they incorrectly identify Nazis as socialists just isn’t paying attention. Indeed, though the rest of the segment correctly refers to the uptick in National Socialist hate-mongering, the excessive use of that very term is a bit suspicious in itself, as if Fox prefers it to Nazi, or even neo-Nazi.

Paranoid? Nitpicky? I think not. Propaganda is not a thing which is always represented by its broad strokes. Small moves are needed as well, sort of like poking a fire with a stick to nudge the wood back into the flame. In recent months, “Nazi” and “Socialism” are terms that have dominated the output of the national Fox network. Why then would their affilaites not want to get in on the act?

And really, what percentage of Fox viewers do you think even understand the difference between Socialism and National Socialism, especially after Glenn Beck and the D-Bag movement have worked so hard to marry them?

The massacre last Thursday at Fort Hood has resulted in a more tamped-down xenophobic reaction from the Right than I expected. Oh sure, Fox News and talk radio have all weighed in with bitter grumblings about how political correctness prevented someone or other from sending this guy to Gitmo while we had the chance. Still, the the fact that Michelle Bachman hasn’t intorduced a Constitutional ammendment to have all Americans of Arab descent loaded into a space shuttle and shot into the sun may be the first sign that Obama deserved that peace prize.

Of course, it could also be because another shooting rampage took place the very next day in Orlando.

That shootin’ gallery turned out to be a less sexy story, since the gunman only killed one and wounded five; the piece probably appeared in your paper right below a coupon for Ragu. But it is a reminder to anyone who  thinks that Nidal Malik Hasan is a terrorist because he shouted “Allah Akbar!”*  during his spree instead of “Yippee kai yay, motherfuckers!” that workplace slaughter is as American as apple pie.

Or maybe the reason the Republicans have moderated their tone ever so slightly is the purported reason Hasan snapped: he didn’t want to go to Afghanistan. Who the fuck would?

And speaking of the residue of 9/11, last Monday the Navy unveiled a new assault ship built with steel salvaged from the World Trade Center. And while it is too bad that Ground Zero remains an undeveloped pit after so many years, it is good to know that the building that once stood there has been turned into such a nice weapon of war. Now if only our enemy had a navy…

* still unconfirmed