Ted Rall | Ted Rall's Rallblog

Hope? Don’t Bother

December 7, 2009•

Why anyone cares about Copenhagen is beyond me.

First: The debate about economics vs. the environment is meaningless. There is no higher priority than the environment. We can easily do without all the world’s armies. That should raise some cash to reduce carbon emissions.

Second: The debate revolves around reducing the rate of increase in carbon emissions…which is transparently ridiculous.

Anything short of a radical reduction in total global emissions doesn’t stand a chance of making a difference. And it may already be too late anyway.

So really, who cares? And why?

Part II of Chicago Red Eye Interview

December 4, 2009•

Ted Rall

Check it out here.

Chicago Red Eye on YOLD, TAAB

December 4, 2009•

Ted Rall

There’s an interview about YOLD and a look back at “To Afghanistan and Back” eight years later with Chicago Red Eye newspaper.

From the lede:

“It was a disaster. Like Bush, he didn’t have anything new to say–just more of the same. There’s no end in sight, no point to the carnage to come, and still no reason to be in Afghanistan. Obama reminds me of Nazi Germany. Here’s how: Even at the bitter end, the Germans were using trains they needed to transport troops to the front for the Holocaust instead. It was pure insanity! The U.S. is dead broke, possibly on the way out, just like the USSR–and we’re expanding an optional war? What the hell is wrong with Obama? What the hell is wrong with us for putting up with him?”

That was the response I got from Ted Rall when I asked him for his thoughts on President Obama’s address about Afghanistan this week. A provocative statement to say the least, but Rall is quite accustomed to saying things that people may not want to hear.

Political Cartoonist goes “To Afghanistan and Back”

December 4, 2009•

Ted Rall

Political Cartoonist goes “To Afghanistan and Back”
Red Eye, Chicago
December 4, 2009

Publishers Weekly Interview on YOLD

December 2, 2009•

Ted Rall

Publishers Weekly magazine has published an interview with me about “The Year of Loving Dangerously”:

Remember the 80’s? The legwarmers and the feathered hair and the cheesy guys named Chad? Remember Ronald Reagan and Bernie Goetz and the very first hints of the AIDS epidemic? Well, Ted Rall does and, along with artist Pablo Callejo, he’s wrapped it all up into a gorgeous whirlwind of a memoir. The Year of Loving Dangerously (published this month by NBM) tells the story of what happened to Rall in 1984, when he was kicked out of Columbia University and found himself very close to living on the streets of New York City.

Having just been dumped by Philippa, the love of his life until then, Rall goes on the romantic lam. He meets ladies in bars and pizza joints, and, with a combination of cheerful opportunism and terrified despair, trades nights of love for a place to crash. Rall is known first and foremost for his political cartoons, but, man, he knows how to tell a story, too. Through his travails, YOLD not only paints a sharply detailed portrait of the Reagan era, with its slick trading floors and its back-alley addicts, abandoned by society, but also tells a larger human story of getting by. To see the young Rall hustle for survival in a cold-hearted city is to feel what it’s like when you’re yanked from your comfort zone, and forced to come up with all the answers on the fly. PW Comics Week was able to talk with Rall, an accomplished cartoonist, about collaborating with an artist for the first time as well as revisit life, fashion, love and politics in the 1980s.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: War, More War or Morer War

December 1, 2009•

Ted Rall

Debate Freezes Out the Majority View: Get Out Now

The headline ran in The New York Times a month ago, on November 7th: “All Afghan War Options by Obama Aides Said to Call for More Troops.” According to White House insiders, Obama considered three choices for digging our way deeper into the “graveyard of empires”: General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the occupation forces, asked for 40,000 additional soldiers. Defense Secretary Robert Gates wanted 30,000 more. Other generals wanted to send 20,000 more.

Obama, reports U.S. state-controlled media, has chosen the “middle option”—30,000 more troops, bringing the total American occupation force to 98,000.

Obama is many things: cool, calm and collected. What he is not is unpredictable. Give the man a middle course, a happy median and a compromise to choose from, and he’ll split the difference every time. “Hope”? “Change”? Awesome campaign slogans. The posters will make handsome collectibles.

The weirdest aspect of this Afghan spin game is that everyone is buying into it. Most American voters, after all, are against the war in Afghanistan entirely. (52 percent say the war isn’t worth fighting, according to the latest ABC News-Washington Post poll. 44 percent say it is.) Objectively, therefore, the “middle ground” is immediate withdrawal.

(I don’t know what’s to the left of that. Retroactive withdrawal? We’d need Superman to do his flying around the world superfast thing for that, though, and I hear he got laid off last year.)

The real “middle ground” sure as hell isn’t Obama’s prescription: 30,000 more troops and completely out by the year 2017, by which time there’ll be flying cars and stuff, and he won’t be president anymore, and maybe the U.S. will be just a memory, so he’s writing a check he won’t have to cash.

What a joke! When you ask a bunch of generals and the secretary of defense for advice about a war, the results are pre-determined: more bang bang, more soldiers, more planes, more bombs, more coffins. The amazing part is how far we’ve traveled down the path towards all war, all the time: Obama didn’t even have to pretend to consider pulling out of Afghanistan. He didn’t even have to appoint a token peacenik to his cabinet. He didn’t even have to talk to one.

Which perfectly mirrors the media. You could read newspaper after newspaper, listen to hour after hour of radio and watch day after day of television news, and never once be exposed to the opinion that the Afghanistan war sucks and should be ended yesterday.

“I’ve seen the public opinion polls saying that a majority of Americans don’t support the [Afghanistan war] effort at all,” Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on August 26th. “I say, good. Let’s have that debate, let’s have that discussion.”

Nice sentiment. Very small-d democratic. And if you support the war, it’s essential—no society can win a war without strong support on the homefront. But we haven’t had any debate whatsoever, as notes Steve Rendell. “Rather than airing a full range of voices on the war, prominent media have downplayed proponents of withdrawal in favor of a debate that reflects the narrow range of elite, inside-Washington opinion,” Rendell reports in Extra!, the magazine of the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.

Fareed Zakaria, a Washington Post columnist whose prognostications have consistently proven wrong since, well, always, encapsulated the corporate media’s blackout of antiwar opinions in his September 14th column. He began: “It is time to get real about Afghanistan. Withdrawal is not a serious option.”

Which is exactly what they used to say about Vietnam. Until we withdrew. And guess what? Nothing happened. Southeast Asia didn’t turn communist. The dominoes didn’t fall. Nowadays, even ex-“sky pirate” John McCain receives a warm welcome when he visits Hanoi. Of course withdrawal is a serious option. It’s the only sane one.

The nation’s two leading newspapers set the tone for the lack of debate in Washington. “In the Washington Post,” found a FAIR study of op-ed pages during the first ten months of 2009, “pro-war columns outnumbered antiwar columns by more than 10 to 1: Of 67 Post columns on U.S. military policy in Afghanistan, 61 supported a continued war, while just six expressed antiwar views.”

It’s the same story—or lack of story—a six-hour drive up I-95. “Of the New York Times‘ 43 columns on the Afghanistan War, 36 supported the war and only seven opposed it—five times as many columns to war supporters as to opponents. Of the paper’s pro-war columns, 14 favored some form of escalation, while 22 argued for pursuing the war differently.”

There was only one major exception to the “bring ’em on” din. Times columnist Bob Herbert, said the report, is “by far the loudest antiwar voice in the study period, and the author of the majority of the Times’ seven antiwar columns.”

Alas, as it was in George Orwell’s Oceania—where the “resistance” was a figment of the ruling Party’s imagination—so it is in our own Ministry of Truth-run publications. Even though Herbert’s December 1st column opposed Obama’s escalation, he parroted the official state media line that Afghanistan had once been, in pundit parlance, the “right war at the right time.”

“There was every reason for American forces to invade Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001,” he wrote. “But that war was botched by the Bush crowd, and Barack Obama does not have a magic wand now to make it all better.”

Actually, there was no reason whatsoever for the U.S. to invade Afghanistan after 9/11:

On 9/11 Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He has been there ever since.

There were only two Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan on 9/11. Both had been closed. There were, and remain, hundreds of camps in Pakistan.

There were very few Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan on 9/11—by some estimates, fewer than two dozen. All were low-level. The big fish and the big numbers were and remain in—you guessed it—Pakistan.

This information has been known by experts on South and Central Asia, all of whom—not coincidentally—oppose the U.S. war against Afghanistan. But none of them have ever been invited to the nation’s op-ed pages…much less a meeting with the president.

(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue “To Afghanistan and Back” and the book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?” His website is tedrall.com.)