After three weeks of chaos and uncertainty, the Republican House of Representatives finally settled on a speaker, right-wing Louisiana representative Mike Johnson. All they wanted was a warm body; what they got was a loose cannon.
Except for the Facts, Why Worry?
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The contents of the Hunter Biden laptop have been authenticated by mainstream media organizations as well as the FBI. Yet many Democratic voters pretend like it’s a fringe story from the far right with few possible implications for the current administration.
On This One Thing We Can Agree
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After months of denial and censorship, main stream media is finally admitting that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a real thing. But will it really matter?
Demented Thinking About Joe Biden
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The president is suffering from dementia.
I’m a cartoonist and a writer and I am most assuredly not a gerontologist. I did not go to medical school. If I am not an expert in aging and cognitive decline, how do I know Biden has dementia? The same way I and you and everyone else know things to be true despite our lack of credentials: experience and pattern recognition.
I don’t need to be an ornithologist in order to identify a blue jay.
I’m not a doctor yet I was right and my doctor was wrong when I told her I had a hernia and she said I didn’t; I’d had one on my left side in 1999 and this felt like that, but on my right. Knowing your own body sometimes counts for more than formal education.
I didn’t go to NYU film school. Despite my lack of official accreditation in cinema I know, as do you, that Meryl Streep is a better actor than Brendan Fraser. We know this to be true because we have seen a lot of movies.
When my car’s wheel well issues a rubbing sound that gets faster when I accelerate I know it’s probably an issue involving a) brake pads, (b) ball bearings (if the car has significant mileage) or (c) wheel alignment. I’m not a mechanic. But I’m 57, I’ve driven since I was 15 and had rubbing-something sounds enough to have learned what it probably means.
When I watched Biden’s first presidential press conference last week I didn’t have to have an M.D. or Ph.D appended to my name to recognize the clear, painfully obvious signs of dementia. My mother died of Alzheimer’s a little over a year ago. The president looked and acted like my mom about two years before she died: valiantly struggling to hold it together, moments of lucidity and occasionally of brilliance alternating with terrifying brain freezes, random rambling in search of connection and reaction and cringy rhetorical crashes when the fremdschämen-o-meter shot to 11.
It took five reporters a question and four follow-ups to make Biden understand that he was being asked whether he favored the elimination of the filibuster, a question at the top of political news since he came into office. Here’s what the commander-in-chief finally came up with: “If we could end it with 51 [votes], we would have no problem. You’re going to have to — the existing rule — it’s going to be hard to get a parliamentary ruling [my emphasis] that allows 50 votes to end the filibuster, the existence of a filibuster.”
Abdicating journalism, corporate media outlets dutifully transcribed Biden’s response despite its glaring wrongness. Whether or not the filibuster-as-we-know it survives has nothing, nada, zip to do with a Senate Parliamentarian ruling. Paradoxically, a simple 51-vote majority could kill the filibuster.
Biden’s answer was, had to be—there’s no other possible explanation—the product of dementia. Pre-dementia, after all, Biden was as intimately knowledgeable about Senate rules and procedure as any human being on earth. He served 36 years as a senator and 8 years as vice president/president of the senate—a total of 44 years. Pre-dementia, there was no world in which Biden would have said anything so totally, crazily, amazingly incorrect. Not drunk, not asleep, not at all.
Dementia frustrates. As its victims’ inner life becomes harder to articulate to others, they occasionally lash out in disproportionate anger. We’ve seen this more and more with Biden, watching a famously affable guy with a patented aw-shucks grin deteriorate into nervous hardness and even rage.
And dementia befuddles. It mixes your knowledge and memories and opinions into a blender; though you often sound OK what spews out of your mouth increasingly approaches randomness. That’s what happened to Biden during his presser. He obviously conflated two bits of news—the parliamentarian’s ruling that a proposed minimum wage increase be stripped from the coronavirus relief bill, which grabbed news attention, with the question about the filibuster. Vice President Biden would never have done that. Senator Biden wouldn’t have either. He knew/knows this stuff too well.
Everyone forgets stuff. It happens more with age. What’s happening to Biden isn’t the occasional senior moment, nor is it stuttering—as Biden himself has said. Biden crashing and burning on a question about senate procedure would be like me messing up questions about Photoshop or Central Asia, two things that have been central to most of my life. If I start mixing up RGB and CMYK and Ashkabat and Astana, topics I know forward and backward and about which I am obsessed, that will point not to whatever-no-biggie but to worrisome cognitive decline.
Biden supporters who deny the visible signs of Biden’s mental deterioration are acting no more rationally than the Trumpies who made excuses for the former president’s crazy behavior. You can feel relief that Trump is gone and believe Biden to be an improvement while conceding that Biden isn’t up to the job and should step down in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris. This is the U.S. presidency. Good enough is anything but.
The fact that “Biden has dementia” is an RNC/Fox News talking point does not make it incorrect. Denying obvious truths—Trump is a racist jerk, climate change is real and caused by mankind, masks help fight COVID, Biden has dementia—makes you look stupid and silly and no one should listen to you.
Trump’s war against truth was toxic; his supporters and enablers undermined decency and logical rhetoric, essential foundations of civil discourse. Democrats who refuse to watch Biden’s dismal unscripted public appearances and who fail to question the president’s unwillingness to face the press at the same rate as his predecessors, and who omit mention of his frequent mental breakdowns, are no better than Trump and the Republicans.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Left, Center and Right: We’re All in Denial About Climate Change
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The political left, center and right do share something in common in today’s polarized America: we’re all in denial. The first step in 12-step programs begins with admitting that you have a problem for a reason: you can’t tackle a challenge whose existence you refuse to acknowledge. “From a psychoanalytical viewpoint, denial is a pathological, ineffective defense mechanism,” doctors M.S. Vos and J.C. de Haes observed in their 2006 study of cancer patients. A stunning 47% of the patients they polled denied that they had cancer! Denial reduced their chances of seeking treatment and then following through.
“On the other hand,” Vos and de Haes observed, “according to the stress and coping model, denial can be seen as an adaptive strategy to protect against overwhelming events and feelings.” Denial lets you feel better.
We think of climate change denial as a right-wing phenomenon. Indeed, only 56% of Republicans accept the scientific consensus that the earth is heating up; fewer still believe that humans are responsible, compared to 92% of Democrats who agree with scientists.
Those who deny that climate change is real are engaging in what psychologists call “simple denial.” But those on the left aren’t much better. Liberals who think global warming is real often resort to “transference denial”: they blame the right and corporate polluters even though we’re all responsible. The scale of the climate crisis and the level of sacrifice and disruption that would be necessary to mitigate it feels overwhelming. A widely-reported analysis predicted that human civilization will collapse in 30 years. Others say it’s already too late to save ourselves.
“We’re doomed,” predicts Mayer Hillman, a senior fellow emeritus at University of Westminster’s Policy Studies Institute. “The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. There are no means of reversing the process which is melting the polar ice caps. And very few appear to be prepared to say so.”
He’s probably right.
Bernie Sanders recently proposed the most ambitious assault on greenhouse gas emissions ever floated in U.S. politics, a $16.3 trillion plan to transition out of carbon-based fuels by 2050. By that time, though, we’ll be dead.
As aggressive as Sanders’ plan is, it doesn’t go nearly far enough or fast enough. Yet Republicans and some Democrats say it’s too expensive. No one in corporate media is taking Sanders’ idea seriously. It’s stillborn.
Liberals post their concern to social media. Some even attend protest marches. But they’re hardly acting like we face an existential crisis.
The 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg told world leaders: “I don’t want you to be hopeful, I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day and then I want you to act.”
Panic? Our “leaders” don’t give a crap. They’re too bought and too stupid to act.
The bird population in the U.S. has collapsed by 29%—a total of 2.9 billion fewer birds—over the last 50 years. During that same period we lost half the world’s fish. Insects are on the way out too. “No insects equals no food, [which] equals no people,” says Dino Martins, an entomologist at Kenya’s Mpala Research Centre.
None of this should come as a surprise. We were warned. “The oceans are in danger of dying,” Jacques Cousteau said in 1970. Life in the oceans had diminished by 40 percent in the previous 20 years.
If you really believe that the planet is becoming uninhabitable, if you think you are about to die, you don’t march peacefully through the streets holding signs and chanting slogans begging the corrupt scoundrels who haven’t done a damn thing for decades to wake up and do something. You identify the politicians and corporate leaders who are killing us, you track them down and you use whatever force is necessary to make them stop. Nothing less than regime change stands a chance of doing the job.
Nothing else—the struggle for income equality, gun control, abortion—matters as much as attacking pollution and climate change.
Anything short of revolution and the abolition of consumer capitalism is “minimizational denial“: admitting the problem while downplaying its severity. Anything short of a radical retooling of the global political system that establishes state control of the economy with environmental impact as our first, second and third priorities is a waste of time that dooms the human race to extinction.
There is no middle ground, no splitting the difference, no compromise. “Good enough” isn’t good enough. Mere progress won’t cut it. Human survival is a pass-fail class. The final exam is tomorrow morning—early tomorrow morning.
Time to get serious, godammit.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Mass Shootings Are The New Normal. Get Over It.
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What is wrong with Americans?
Okay, that’s a very open-ended question with many potential answers.
What I’d like to talk about this time is: why is it that Americans only begin to get serious about a problem after it’s too late to solve it?
Currently, I’m thinking about the latest, depressingly predictable response to the Orlando massacre.
As usual, right-wingers like Donald Trump want to restrict immigration. But even setting aside the obvious moral and practical economic objections to nativism, how would that prevent future mass shootings (in part) in the name of the Islamic State? Orlando shooter Omar Nateen wasn’t an immigrant. He was born in Queens, New York; his parents were from Afghanistan. If the Republicans’ goal is to get rid of potentially self radicalized Muslims, it’s too late. There are 3.3 million Muslims in the United States. Many are full-fledged citizens.
Any group of people that numbers in the millions includes some who are mentally ill, some who are politically radical, some who are religious fundamentalists, and some who are some combination of all three. Since it’s illegal to deport U.S. citizens, millions of whom are Muslim, a few of whom are crazy – and the United States insists on pursuing an endless “war on terror” against Muslim countries – there’s no way that a policy of reduced immigration can prevent future attacks by homegrown Islamists.
On what passes for a Left, Democrats like Hillary Clinton are pushing for tighter restrictions on guns. As usual.
Indeed, it’s hard to argue that civilians require military grade weapons like the semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifle used to kill 49 people at the Pulse nightclub. Hunters don’t use them. If the AR-15 is legal, why not hand grenades? Had Nateen been forced to use a pistol or long gun instead, his bullets would have been smaller, the death toll lower. Some of his victims might have been able to overpower him as he tried to reload.
Here again, however, it’s too late to fix the problem. The cat is out of the bag. Two years ago, the national sport shooting foundation estimated that there were between 5 million and 8.2 million assault-style rifles in American homes. Sales of these weapons always spike after mass shootings, so it’s a safe bet that that number has risen by at least 1 million or two since then.
Even if Hillary Clinton were to succeed beyond her wildest dreams, assault weapons were banned permanently, what about those millions of AR-15’s already in circulation? Would she be willing to send jackbooted federal thugs door to door to search every home until every last one of them, or at least the lion’s share, were rounded up and melted down? Of course not.
The truth is, this ship sailed back in 2004 when Congress allowed the federal ban on assault weapons to expire without being renewed. Congress’s failure to act over the last 12 years has transformed the United States into a nation awash in military hardware.
Mass shootings are the new normal. Get over it.
“It’s too late to do anything about it, now let’s act” mania appears to have become as much of a part of our national character as the myth that everyone is a member of the middle class.
Progressives and liberals who form the base of the Democratic Party, most of whom supported Bernie Sanders during the primaries, are engaged in a robust debate over whether to switch over to Hillary Clinton this fall, support a third-party candidate like Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein, or stay home on election day. It’s the same old question: Do you vote for the lesser of two evils? Isn’t that voting for evil?
Democrats for Clinton are trying to convince Bernie Sanders voters that November represents an existential threat, that if Donald Trump is elected everything we know and love about America will be destroyed. They don’t get it.
What the Clintonites don’t understand is that it’s already too late. Yes, if Donald Trump gets in, there’s a strong danger that what’s left of American democracy will yield to something radically new and terrifying, full-fledged authoritarianism. But Hillary Clinton also represents something horrible: a continuation of the neoconservatism that led to the invasion of Iraq, has made the United States a target of Islamist terrorism, complete capitulation to the banking class whose power structure relies upon the vast majority of American workers toiling for longer hours and shrinking wages – in effect, the last nail in the coffin of the idea that ordinary people have the right to imagine themselves and their children living better than they have in the past.
The existential battle isn’t in November. It was a couple of weeks ago, when Hillary Clinton appeared to nail down the Democratic presidential nomination. Whatever happens now, whether authoritarian Trumpism or steady-as-she-goes downwardly mobile Clintonism, we are screwed.
Perhaps no issue better illustrates my point than climate change.
I remember watching Jacques Cousteau on television in the 1970s, when he repeatedly warned that the oceans (along with the rest of the planet) were warming, and that it would soon – might already be – too late to stop it. The politicians and corporate executives, of course, ignored him and the other scientists who said the same thing. Now, finally, the political class is giving lip service to the crisis, though action remains in short supply.
The fact is, Cousteau was probably right. It was probably too late to save the planet back then. It’s certainly too late now. The climate science is clear. The polar ice cap is never coming back; Antarctica is melting away. The process can’t be reversed. Even if every internal combustion engine in the world stopped running tomorrow morning, human beings have pumped too much energy into the closed system that is our atmosphere to reverse global warming.
My intention isn’t to bum you out. All I’m saying is, let’s stop focusing on problems we can’t do anything about and work on those we still can.
(Ted Rall is the author of “Bernie,” a biography written with the cooperation of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. His next book, the graphic biography “Trump,” comes out July 19th and is now available for pre-order.)
Settled Science
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Does the Earth go around the sun, or does the sun go around the Earth? When asked that question in a poll, 1 in 4 Americans surveyed answered that the sun revolves around the earth. But hey, we have to respect their feelings too.
The Four Stages of Revolution
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Supporters of Obama go through the classic stages of grief after they realize that they’ve been cheated.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Obama Was Bad From The Start
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President’s Right-Wing Policies Revealed Years Ago
We used to love Obama. Now we don’t. What a difference two years makes!
But not really. We may have changed. But Obama hasn’t. It was obvious from the beginning that Mr. Hopey Changey was devoid of character, deploying a toxic blend of liberal rhetoric and right-wing realpolitik. We were in denial.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane.
Obama made a name for himself by speaking out against the Iraq war. “I am certain that I would have voted to oppose this war,” he said in 2007. Meanwhile, in the U.S. Senate, he voted to fund it. Repeatedly. Aye. Aye. Aye. Never voted no. Tens of billions of dollars down the rat hole. Thousands of dead U.S. troops. Hundreds of thousands of murdered Iraqis.
Asked to explain his hypocrisy on Iraq, Obama replied: “I have been very clear even as a candidate that, once we were in [office], that we were going to have some responsibility to make [the Iraq war] work as best we could, and more importantly that our troops had the best resources they needed to get home safely,” Obama explained. “So I don’t think there is any contradiction there.”
Who are you going to believe? Me or my lying voting record?
That was back in 2007. We knew Obama was a weasel. We knew before the first presidential primary.
After he won, we learned he was at least as much of a right-winger as Bush.
Within days of his November 2008 election victory Obama backed away from his campaign pledge to close Guantánamo and restore due process to kidnapped and tortured Muslim detainees. Instead, he announced, he would create extralegal “national security courts.” Even Bush didn’t dare stray that far from the rule of law.
Obama didn’t appoint a single liberal to his cabinet. Against good sense and common ndecency, in the midst of the worst financial crisis since 1929, he hired pro-business hacks Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geitner to lead his economic team. Fighting proposals to create jobs programs, they expanded Bush’s bank bailouts instead.
Obama asked Bush’s defense secretary to stay on because, you know, he was doing such an awesome job with the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. I suppose it could have been worse: Obama’s first choice to run the CIA was John Brennan, a pro-torture Bushist.
As Inauguration Day approached the hits kept coming.
Obama claimed to be against the Iraq War. “Unlike Senator John McCain,” Obama wrote in June 2008, “I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president.”
By December, however, the Weasel-Elect had re-revealed his pro-war stripes. “Even though the [U.S.] agreement with the Iraq government calls for all American combat troops to be out of the cities by the end of June [2009],” reported the Times on December 22nd, military planners are “now quietly acknowledging that many will stay behind as renamed ‘trainers’ and ‘adviser’ in what are effectively combat roles. In other words, they will still be engaged in combat, just called something else.”
When Obama announced his choice to deliver the invocation at his inauguration, it was yet another unpleasant surprise: Rick Warren, the right-wing, gay-bashing pastor of the Saddleback megachurch. Gay leaders were annoyed. And did nothing.
The indignities continued a day or two after the new prez moved into 1600 Penn.
Liberals hoped for accountability. Obama had promised it. Once in the Oval Office, however, Obama said America needed “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” He ordered his Justice Department not to investigate Bush Administration war crimes. No one would be prosecuted—not even the military psychos who anally raped Afghan children at Gitmo with flashlights. Obama traveled to CIA HQ to tell the spooks to keep on torturin’: “I don’t want [CIA agents] to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering up.”
So it went.
Obama expanded Bush’s domestic spying program. He sent 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan. He allowed torture to continue in CIA prisons and signed an executive order granting him the right to assassinate anyone, including a U.S. citizen, on his say-so alone.
Six days into the Obama presidency, I’d seen enough.
“Give the man a chance?” I asked on January 26, 2009. “Not me. I’ve sized up him, his advisors and their plans, and already found them sorely wanting. It won’t take long, as Obama’s failures prove the foolishness of Americans’ blind trust in him. Obama isn’t our FDR. He’s our Mikhail Gorbachev: likeable, intelligent, well-meaning, and ultimately doomed by his insistence on being reasonable during unreasonable times.”
I was mistaken. Two years is too long for people to figure out what Obama is all about.
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL
