I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: California’s progress in relieving its teeming prisons has slowed so much that it probably won’t comply with a court-ordered population reduction, and judges have raised the prospect of letting some inmates out early.
Romney-Ryan Extremism Could Revive Liberal Support for Obama
Soviet citizens had to be Kremlinologists, studying subtle linguistic and tonal shifts in state propaganda, noting the seating order of party leaders at official functions, in order to predict the future direction of their lives. So too are we Americans, for without any way to really get to know our politicians—their press conferences and interviews are too infrequent and carefully stagemanaged, unchallenged by compliant journalistic toadies—we are reduced to reading signals.
Even to an alienated electorate, the tealeaves are easy to read on the Republican side.
Between Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, his team of Dubya-rehash economic advisors (because that worked out so well) and Tea Party favorite Chris Christie as keynote speaker at this year’s Republican National Convention, the Republican Party is in danger of doing something that seemed impossible just a few months ago: strengthening support among the liberal base of the Democratic Party for President Obama.
Granted, disappointed lefties will not soon forget Obama’s betrayals. Guantánamo, the concentration camp that supposedly holds “the worst of the worst” terrorists, remains open—although, now that the White House is reportedly negotiating with the Taliban to exchange captured Afghan ministers for an American POW, one assumes they’re not all that bad. The drone wars against Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere are an affront to basic morality, logic and decency. On the economy, this tone-deaf president has yet to propose a jobs program, much less try to push one through Congress.
But many progressives, until recently threatening to sit on their hands or cast votes for a third party, are reconsidering, weighing disgust against gathering terror as they read the signals from the gathering storm in Tampa. Where Obama fails to inspire enthusiasm, the Romney team seems determined to generate as much fear as possible that he plans to shove the needle even further to the radical right than Reagan or Bush.
Romney, who abandoned his history as a centrist Massachusetts Republican and is running as a right-winger, chose to balance his newfound extremism with Paul Ryan, an even-more-right-winger. Ryan is a vicious, overrated ideologue whose greatest achievement, his theoretical budget proposal, paints a picture of America as a dystopian hell where an infinitely funded Pentagon wages perpetual war and the top 1% of the top 1% party on tax cuts while the elderly and poor starve or succumb to treatable diseases, whichever kills them first. (In the media today, this gets you lionized as “smart,” “wonky,” and “an intellectual heavyweight.” Ryan = Sartre.) Lest you wonder whether the Ryan selection is an anomaly, wonder not—from Christie to the stump speeches to the men first in line to join a Romney cabinet, everything about Team Romney screams Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Ayn Rand minus the cool atheism and elitism.
This is a Republican Party that Barry Goldwater wouldn’t recognize, batso nutso, stripped of the last veneer of libertarianism, completely owned by and in thrall to figures whom the media would characterize as “extreme nationalist” or “neo-Nazi” if they spouted the same nonsense in other countries.
If I were advising Romney, I would tell him that cozying up to the lunatic fringe of American pseudoconservatism is not a prescription for victory in November, when the outcome hinges upon seducing that 5% or 10% of voters who swing both ways. Ryan isn’t as crazy (or bold) of a choice as Sarah Palin, but what Republicans don’t understand is that conservatives will vote Republican regardless of who is the vice presidential running mate or, for that matter, who is the Republican nominee for president. Lack of enthusiasm among the base wasn’t Romney’s big problem, it was Obama’s.
Romney’s biggest albatross is that he’s a terrible candidate, a guy who obviously doesn’t like people. And his campaign sucks. The deficit may or may not represent an looming existential threat—unemployment and the environment are more urgent—but “take your medicine” austerity isn’t much of a sales pitch, especially when two-thirds of the people are already feeling squeezed. Voters reward candidates who present an optimistic vision, a future in which they see themselves richer, happier and with fuller, more lustrous hair.
The fact that Romney can’t manage to put forward a credible economic program doesn’t help either. Since his entire campaign is predicated on the argument that he’s the economy guy and knows how to fix it, he needs to cough up a plan.
However, my real concern is that Romney’s gangbusters right-wing extremism lets Obama and the Democrats off the hook.
If all Democratic strategists have to do to attract progressive voters is to frighten them with greater-evil Republicans, when will people who care about the working class, who oppose wars of choice, and whose critique of government is that it isn’t in our lives enough ever see their dreams become party platform planks with some chance of being incorporated into legislation? In recent elections (c.f. Sarah Palin and some old guy versus Barry), liberals are only voting for Democrats out of terror that things will get even worse. That’s no way to run a party, or a country.
(Ted Rall’s new book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com. This column originally appeared at NBCNews.com’s Lean Forward blog.)
COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL
Get an early peek at my column this week – go to NBC news.com’s lean forward blog! (It helps if you do)
In today’s New York Times, Tina Brown takes no responsibility for screwing up Newsweek. However, she did not understand the most basic thing about print media. News breaks online. Print is for long, detailed analysis pieces. Like in the New Yorker. Like in the Economist. This is so simple, yet she tarted up Newsweek with a bunch of worthless charticles and photographs.
There is still a place for print. The problem is not the medium. The problem is that the people in charge of it, the gatekeepers, don’t know what they are doing. Remember, print started suffering in the early 1960s. No Internet until the 1990s.
Hi, so if you’ve read The Book of Obama and liked it, please head over to post a review on Amazon. It really helps!
Gun Control Advocates Look Foolish, Dishonest and Weak
You know the ritual: gunman goes berserk, liberals call for gun control, regulation eventually ensues. The modern gun control movement began in 1981 after the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. Press secretary James Brady, shot and paralyzed in the same incident, successfully lobbied for the passage of the Brady Law, which imposed a background check and waiting period of up to three days for gun buyers. The 1999 shooting spree at Columbine High School resulted in new laws making it illegal to buy a gun on behalf of a criminal or a child seeking to evade the Brady Law requirements. Congress funded state-run databases of the mentally ill, also prohibited under Brady, after the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech.
Two weeks ago, a man used multiple weapons, including a semi-automatic rifle with a 100-round magazine, to murder 12 filmgoers in Aurora, Colorado. (The clip jammed after he fired 30.) This week, a white supremacist and washed-up U.S. soldier mowed down six people attending services at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Every day, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg reminded us, 34 Americans are shot to death.
So what new gun control laws can we expect?
None.
Neither White House nor Congressional Democrats has any appetite for taking on the powerful NRA during a close election year. Polls show the public sharply split on the issue. After the shooting at the Sikh temple President Obama offered nothing more than pabulum: “terrible, tragic events are happening with too much regularity for us not to do some soul-searching to examine additional ways that we can reduce violence.”
Soul-searching. Right.
Either you’re serious about eliminating gun violence, or you’re not. “Soul-searching” isn’t going to block the next bullet fired by a madman—but the law, coupled with rigorous enforcement, can.
I am a pro-gun leftie. Here’s why: 60 million Americans own 200 million firearms.
Who are they? Right-wingers, mostly. There are about 25 percent more gun-owning Republicans than gun-owning Democrats. Some of these conservatives send me death threats. As long as they’re are allowed to buy and possess guns, I’ll be damned if I let the government pass a law that stops me—from defending myself if one of them comes after me.
I trust me. You, not so much.
This is an arms race. The only way I’ll turn against the Second Amendment is if the cops go door-to-door, confiscate and destroy everybody’s guns. All of them. Even the tiny little lady pistols.
Even then, I’d still be nervous. Because state security apparatus would then have a monopoly on firepower. We’re not there yet, but given the relentless rightward drift of our politics from democracy into police state authoritarianism toward neofascism, and given what we’re already seeing—legalized torture, concentration camps, police department drone planes, a president who says he has the right to assassinate U.S. citizens without trial—one can easily foresee the day when we might be forced to fend off the jack-booted thugs of a future rogue American state.
But that’s my personal, possibly paranoid, take about a possible dystopian future. As a nation, here and now, there’s a valid argument to made that we’ve outgrown the right to bear arms. We’re no longer a frontier society. We’re urban and suburban, not rural; less than two percent of Americans still live on farms. 95 percent of us don’t hunt; those who still hunt do it for fun, not food. We haven’t had to repel a land invasion by foreign troops since 1812. Why do we need guns?
The NRA may sound hysterical—they’re certainly opportunistic, having called for donations three days after Aurora—but they’re right about gun control advocates. Anti-gun liberals say they favor “common-sense measures that protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens but make it harder and harder for those who should not have weapons under existing law to obtain them, ” as Press Secretary Jay Carney says Obama want.
Proposals to tighten controls on automatic “assault rifles” and reduce the number of bullets per clip merely nibble around the edges of a serious issue.
There are too many guns already out there (200 million!), too many legally purchased weapons that can be sold privately without being subjected to the Brady Law, for such half-measures to have any effect beyond possibly—theoretically—slightly—reducing the body count of the next group killing.
If you’re serious about putting an end to America’s bloody love affair with guns, you’re going to have to repeal the Second Amendment. Everyone, including Democrats, knows that. But it’s hard to get behind a gun ban that’s only supported by 26 percent of the public. (That’s a record low, down from 60 percent in 1959.) Liberal gun opponents must either embrace such a radical and unpopular measure—the only one that might stand a chance of having the desired effect—or keep proposing wimpy little changes that make them look foolish, half-assed, and intellectually dishonest.
(Ted Rall’s new book is “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com. This column originally appeared at NBCNews.com’s Lean Forward blog.)
COPYRIGHT 2012 TED RALL
I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: Sheepish California officials keep finding millions of dollars in secret accounts. Budget crisis? What budget crisis?
I went to Quebec late last month to cover the huge, militant student protest movement that the American media has been studiously ignoring. Right now I’m working on a comics journalism project for Cartoon Movement and The Los Angeles Times about what I saw. Here are some photos I took in Montreal during the run-up to and during a huge demonstration on July 22.
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