It’s amazing what four words uttered by a little pig-tailed girl in a comic strip can stir up. The character, Carmen, is a regular in the "Prickly City" cartoon strip that appears daily on Stars and Stripes’ Opinion page. In the May 29 entry, an elephant representing the Republican Party is seen getting smaller panel by panel, until in the last one Carmen calls it "the party of torture."

That offended Lt. Col. John Nugent, who wrote to Stripes from Bagram, Afghanistan. "The cartoon was not funny or even satirical," he wrote, accusing Stripes of lacking journalistic standards for printing it. "The Republican Party is our president’s and commander in chief’s political party."

That letter was attacked by two other readers. Eddy Collins, of Mehlingen, Germany, accused Nugent of being "motivated by a political affiliation and not logical reasoning." The Republican rank-and-file didn’t object to "the torture continuance" and thus the party as a whole was responsible, he argued.

Tech. Sgt. Alvin L. Cooper Jr. (retired), from Fussa, Japan, also disagreed with the lieutenant colonel. "After years of being inundated with right-wing political satire, it seems the former ‘accusers’ don’t want to become the current ‘accused,’ " he said in his letter to the editor.

So far it looks like we have a clear liberal-conservative split, with Nugent on the right and the cartoon’s author, Scott Stantis, along with the other two letter writers, Collins and Cooper, on the left.

Not so fast. Stantis, in truth, may have more in common with Nugent than with the other two. He is, after all, an avowed conservative, as regular readers of "Prickly City" would have discerned. (He’s been poking fun at both John McCain and Barack Obama lately, with the Democrat getting significantly more hits.)

I asked Stantis to explain.

"I can no longer consider myself a Republican because I am a conservative," he wrote in an e-mail. "I mean, good lord, when did Republicans become statists?"

Referring to the comic strip, the author said: "All I can say is the Republican Party is bereft of ideas and endorses the use of torture as part of our war on terrorism. A discussion I cannot even fathom we are having in this great country. One of our greatest weapons in our fight and victory over the greatest threat of the 20th century was our clinging to our basic morality."

Stantis summed it up: "By igniting a conversation about the issue I have done my job."

The anonymous agnostic

Staff Sgt. David L. Quinn thinks he found a bit of "scurrilous journalism" in Stars and Stripes. In a letter to the editor, he commented on a Washington Post story, picked up by Stripes, that said the American Civil Liberties Union was threatening to sue the U.S. Naval Academy. An ACLU official said some midshipmen felt coerced to participate in the daily lunchtime prayer, and the ACLU believes that is a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

The story quoted a recent graduate of the academy, an agnostic, as saying she objected to the prayer but was pressured to take part in it. Quinn, writing from Camp Bucca, Iraq, noted that the person’s name wasn’t used.

"How does your publication feel about quoting anonymous, unnamed sources?" he asked. "If the midshipman really felt this way, print her name. … [E]ach of us letter writers puts his or her name out there on public view."

The staff sergeant has a point, in my opinion. The Post story was edited for space and thus a line explaining the anonymity was cut ("because she feared her military career might be affected"). Still, the statement was accusatory, the person could be included in an eventual suit (in which her name would automatically be made known), and the nature of the alleged pressure sounded vague. The story’s quote should have had a name attached.