Hi, I’m Vast Left, and thanks to Ted for having me as a guest blogger!
I was a longtime donkey-party partisan. But the Democrats’ rejection of the 2006 and 2008 mandates for real, leftward change made a true unbeliever out of me.
Despite recognizing Obama’s Reaganite tendencies, I voted for him as a statement against the GOP and for the first-black-president milestone. Seeing how he’s governed, dragging a country hungry for leftish reform back to the right as perhaps no one else could have, I sorely wish I’d voted for Cynthia McKinney instead.
I declared myself “2L4O: Too Liberal for Obama,” making t-shirts that said so (also in a “2L4O: Too Left for Obama” version). Ted Rall and other luminaries wear 2L4O shirts, which make great starters for an important conversation: the realization that the ObamaDems are part of the problem.
A couple of years back, I added a cartoon feature to my blog, named “American Extremists” (archive site here). The name is an ironic take on the mythology that America’s political system is a tug-of-war between an extreme right and an extreme left—the latter of which simply doesn’t exist in our mainstream politics.
Over the next few days, I’ll be sharing a “best-of” series of American Extremists ‘toons.
Unlike Ted and the other gifted cartoonists in his blogroll, I can’t draw a lick. So, most installments of AE are simply the same talking, truncated-oval heads.
Against all odds, these can’t-draw cartoons have been featured on sites including Salon.com and Naked Capitalism, and it’s a real honor to be able to share some of them (and perhaps some textual posts from time to time) with Ted Rall readers!
If you’ve had your fill of rationalizations, denial, and other tribal foibles in the Age of Obama, perhaps you’ll enjoy them. Either way, I look forward to discussing them and related topics with you in comments, if you’d care to.
This one is called “National Man of Mystery”:
