So I was interviewed about Twitter on RT TV. And you should watch.
New Cartoon Auction, New Idea
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I’m trying something new for a new cartoon auction: You bid on the original artwork for your favorite of next week’s cartoons. If you win, I send you JPEGs of the three for next week and you pick the one you want. Kinda chancy, kinda not.
LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Arizona Gives the Business
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I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: An Arizona business group will fly 100 chief executives to Arizona to try to lure their companies into leaving California.
Oh Petraey, We Hardly Knew Ye
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I was listening to NPR’s “On the Media,” a favorite show that has never had me on despite my favorable review of Brooke Gladstone’s book in Columbia Journalism Review, and the Snarky Duo was going on about how the media universally admired General David Petraeus until his affair exposed him as having feet of clay. (Never mind running an organization dedicated to mass killing in the service of big oil.) Then I remembered this 2007 cartoon for the now-defunct website Iraq Slogger, which ran me for a time:
So not exactly everyone was above rolling their eyes and making fun of all the adulation. Of course, that’s a cartoonist’s job—to be skeptical of “universally acclaimed” heroes, and then join everyone else in being surprised when they fall.
Although, honestly, being outted as a slut is probably the best thing the general has ever done with his life. If nothing else, it might eventually lead to tighter email privacy laws.
Hamas’ “Indiscriminate” Missile Fire a Matter of Budget, Not Morals
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One of my favorite Israeli talking points about the conflict with Gaza/Hamas is that Israel holds the moral high ground because it can afford advanced weapons systems, many provided by the United States military.
Hamas, we are told, fires its rockets “indiscriminately” into Israel whereas Israel uses “targeted strikes” intended to reduce civilian casualties.
From Commentary magazine, for example: “Standing beside the UN secretary general yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted again that every rocket from Gaza is a double war crime, since each reflects: (1) an intentional indiscriminate attack on civilians, while (2) hiding behind a civilian population for protection.”
I have no doubt that Hamas would prefer to use Israel’s more-sophisticated (and expensive) targeted missiles and helicopter gunships against its enemies in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Perhaps, to be fair, Israel or the U.S. would be willing to give them some?
I didn’t think so.
If the roles were reversed, and Hamas had better arms, who doubts that Israel would be forced to resort to the use of “dumb” missiles that “indiscriminately” targeted civilians? The use of indiscriminate bombing against the British, after all, led to the eventual establishment of the State of Israel.
If Hamas is evil, make a moral argument—not a tech one. By that standard, I’m morally superior to someone who uses a five-year-old Dell laptop because I’m typing this on a months-old MacBookPro.
P.S. “hiding behind a civilian population” is the standard talking point used by state actors against indigenous resistance organizations which hide among the people because they ARE the people. Israel should come up with a better line; this one is old and shopworn.
Video: Ted Rall Grouses About Clifford Winston’s NY Times Op/Ed About Airlines
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In which Ted Rall grouses about Clifford Winston’s op/ed in the New York Times stating that the only solution to the monopolization of the airline industry is to allow foreign carriers to compete domestically. There are other possible solutions—a national carrier, price controls, regulations that require U.S. carriers to serve small cities—but they’re not mentioned in the Paper of Record, which blocks all leftist voices, even though they are agreed with by 47% of the country.
Thoughts and Prayers, Again
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“The United States strongly condemns this terrorist attack [the bombing of a bus in Tel Aviv] and our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and the people of Israel.” —Hillary Clinton, today
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Awaiting a Slut Moment
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Everybody Cheats. When Will We Admit It?
We need a Slut Moment.
As CIA director, David Petraeus led an organization that carries out extrajudicial assassinations, overthrows foreign heads of state and fires drone missiles at innocent civilians. For his performance as a leading state terrorist, General Petraeus received four stars, 28 motorcycle policemen to escort him to a girlfriend’s house, and nearly universal acclaim.
For cheating on his wife, he was forced to resign in disgrace. (Since his lover, a West Point graduate, was not a spy, national security was not at issue.)
What is wrong with our values?
I wouldn’t lay it on quite as thickly as John Prados, senior research fellow at the National Security Archive did in The Washington Post: “Because of an affair that had already ended, the nation this month lost the services of a highly skilled public servant. The hysterical reaction to the news of then-CIA Director David Petraeus’s liaison with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, has done more to harm national security than the affair itself.”
I’d hate to think that one man’s departure would hurt the CIA’s assassination and coup productivity.
Still, I agree with Prados’s broader point. What happened to Petraeus—and Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer and Bill Clinton and Larry Craig and John Edwards—was stupid.
Whether you’re a small-government conservative or a liberal libertine, one thing all Americans ought to agree upon is that we’re entitled to privacy in our sex lives.
As long as the sex is consensual, what happens in the bedroom—or the coffee room off the Oval Office or the Minneapolis airport men’s room—is nobody’s business but the two people involved. Or three. Or seven.
Maybe a mongoose. With verifiable consent.
Cheating on your spouse shouldn’t cost you your career. Especially when so many of us do it.
Laws and social mores that don’t reflect the behavior of the vast majority of the population do more harm than good, corroding respect for government and society while turning too many people into criminals and pariahs. That’s why Prohibition failed: too many Americans drank. (One study found that alcohol consumption increased by 60% to 70% under Prohibition.) It doesn’t matter that booze causes problems. It’s just too popular to ban.
As Aharon Barak wrote, “When social reality changes, the law must change too.”
Like drinking, cheating is so popular and widespread that punishing people for sleeping with more than one officially recognized partner—enforcing an outdated monogamist “norm” through law and public slut-shaming—is counterproductive.
“Estimates today find married men cheating at rates between 25% and 72%,” writes Eric Anderson, author of The Monogamy Gap. For example: “In a 1991 study, sex researcher Shere Hite found that 70% of married women have cheated on their partners; a 1993 follow-up study found that 72% of married men have as well.”
When anywhere from a quarter to three-quarters of a population does something, it’s not a moral failing. It’s standard human behavior. And it shouldn’t be punished.
Yet the gap between reality and expectation is growing rather than shrinking. “More Americans today (80%) say infidelity is “always wrong” than in 1970 (70%). And a full 99% of Americans say they expect their spouse to be faithful. Monogamy, at least as an ideal, is stronger than ever in this country even as it slips elsewhere,” Bret Schulte wrote in U.S. News & World Report in 2008.
How do we stop this madness?
We need a Slut Moment—a public self-outing by a popular celebrity. Someone who stands up and tells the world: I am a slut. I enjoy sex with more than one partner.
America needs someone courageous like Magic Johnson, who called a press conference in 1991 to announce that he had HIV. Johnson made it OK to be HIV-positive. And, though he denies it, presumably bi. If a cool guy like Magic had guy-guy sex, gays couldn’t be all bad.
Ellen Degeneres’s 1997 statement that she was a lesbian was important for similar reasons: She was attractive, likeable and apparently “normal.”
Celebrity revelations do a lot of good. When Ronald Reagan released a 1994 statement saying he had Alzheimer’s Disease, the media and public response benefited millions of others. Michael J. Fox helped normalize public reaction to Parkinson’s in 1999, when he said he had the disease.
Imagine if, instead of denying that he had sex with “that woman, Monica Lewinsky,” Bill Clinton had looked straight into the camera and told the truth, not merely “coming clean” but unashamedly stating that yeah, he had had sex with a woman who was not his wife, and so what? He would have avoided impeachment and, more importantly, made the point that our sexual choices have nothing to do with our other roles in life. FDR cheated and JFK was a slut; both are considered to be great presidents. Nixon and Dubya, faithful hubbies both, were failures.
His military and government careers in ruins, General Petraeus missed an opportunity to make history. Rather than slink off with “I messed up” as his terse professional epitaph, Petraeus ought to have ditched the Scarlet Letter and stood tall.
The general’s surrogates have been ordered to say he’s “ashamed” and working on his marriage and sucking up to his betrayed wife.
Which is ridiculous. He certainly wasn’t ashamed while he was rolling around naked with Paula Broadwell—and rightly so. He was having some harmless fun—the same kind of fun enjoyed by up to three out of four Americans, few of whom dare to admit it. Or maybe he was in love. Whatever.
A few short decades ago, gays and lesbians were outlaws, hated, reviled, without rights. Now, partly due to brave souls like Magic Johnson and Ellen Degeneres, they can get married, adopt and serve openly in the military—and yet, civilization hasn’t collapsed!
Someday a famous slutty celebrity will liberate us from the shackles of phony BS monogamism, freeing us to reveal ourselves for who we really are: a nation of sluts.
May that day come soon.
No pun intended.
(Ted Rall‘s is the author of “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL
