Publisher’s Weekly: Ted Rall’s Next Books

I’d hate to have you read it in Publisher’s Weekly first. So here it is:

Rall’s Two-fer

Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House has closed two graphic novel deals for Pulitzer finalist political cartoonist Ted Rall (who’s also president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists). The first, for two projects, is with Terry Nantier of NBM. Nantier took world rights to Rall’s trilogy, the first of which is called The Year of Loving Dangerously, the cartoonist’s memoir about being a Columbia dropout in 1980s New York City. Nantier also nabbed world rights to Rall’s The Die is Cast, his comics adaptation of John-Paul Sartre’s existential work about two star-crossed lovers in Paris who don’t meet until the afterlife, Les Jeux Sont Faits. The second deal, with Dan Simon at Seven Stories, is for The Post-American Manifesto, Rall’s updated take on Marx’s Communist Manifesto, in which he, per Heifetz, offers a “call to action for Americans ready to move toward a new system where the average person is society’s top priority.”

Majorities: The New Minority

Yesterday’s New York Times illustrated its coverage of the Uyghur uprising in western China with a map titled “Minorities in China”. The print edition had a similar map.

Move the dial up to 50 percent and you’ll notice a funny thing: according to the Times, Uyghurs are actually a majority in Xinjiang (or, as they call it, East Turkestan). Same thing with Tibet: Tibetans are a majority in Tibet.

(Actually, neither of these statements are probably true. The Chinese government has sent so many Han Chinese colonists to the West that Uyghurs and Tibetans may have already lost their majority status. But I digress.)

The point is: Where they live, Uyghurs are a majority. Yet they’re dubbed–in the title–minorities.

Imagine a state that was 55% African-American. When discussing the regional struggle for control WITHIN that state, would it be accurate to call African-Americans a minority? A national minority, sure. But not just a plain old minority.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Fog of Obama

Why Can’t Obama See His Wars Are Unwinnable?

Robert McNamara, one of the “best and the brightest” technocrats behind the escalation of the Vietnam War, eventually came to regret his actions. But his public contrition, which included a book and a series of interviews for the documentary “The Fog of War,” were greeted with derision.

“Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” editorialized The New York Times in 1995. “Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.”

McNamara’s change of heart came 58,000 American and 2,000,000 Vietnamese lives too late. If the dead could speak, surely they would ask: why couldn’t you see then what you understand so clearly now? Why didn’t you listen to the millions of experts, journalists and ordinary Americans who knew that death and defeat would be the only outcome?

Though Errol Morris’ film served as ipso facto indictment, its title was yet a kind of justification. There is no “fog of war.” There is only hubris, stubbornness, and the psychological compartmentalization that allows a man to sign papers that will lead others to die before going home to play with his children.

McNamara is dead. Barack Obama is his successor.

Some call McNamara’s life tragic. Tragedy-inducing is closer to the truth. Yes, he suffered guilt in his later years. “He wore the expression of a haunted man,” wrote the author of his Times obit. “He could be seen in the streets of Washington—stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind—walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare.” But the men and women and boys and girls blown up by bombs and mines and impaled by bullets and maimed in countless ways deserve more vengeance than a pair of ratty Nikes. Neither McNamara nor LBJ nor the millions of Americans who were for the war merit understanding, much less sympathy.

Now Obama is following the same doomed journey.

“We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes,” McNamara warned long after the fact, speaking of “America’s enemies” but really just about people—people who live in other countries. People whose countries possess reserves of natural gas (Vietnam) or oil (Iraq) or are situated between energy reserves and deep-sea ports where oil tankers dock (Afghanistan and Pakistan).

Why can’t President Obama imagine himself living in a poor village in Pakistan? Why can’t he feel the anger and contempt felt by Pakistanis who hear pilotless drone planes buzzing overhead, firing missiles willy-nilly at civilians and guerilla fighters alike, dispatched by a distant enemy too cowardly to put live soldiers and pilots in harm’s way?

“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo—men, women and children,” McNamara said. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He—and I’d say I—were behaving as war criminals.” 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all.

At least Japan started the war. What of Afghanistan and Iraq, where approximately 2,000,000 civilians have been killed by U.S. forces? Neither country attacked us. Shouldn’t Bush, Rumsfeld and the rest be prosecuted as war criminals? Why not Obama? After all, Obama is leaving 50,000 troops in Iraq after the war there is supposedly coming to an end. He’s escalating the unjustifiable, unwinnable tragedy in Afghanistan—there are 68,000 U.S. troops there now, probably going up to 100,000 by next year—while spreading the conflict into Pakistan.

“Make no mistake, the international community is not winning in Afghanistan,” concluded the Atlantic Council in 2008. Things have only gotten worse as U.S. troop presence has increased: more violence, more drugs, less reconstruction.

Like McNamara, Obama doesn’t understand a basic truth: you can’t successfully manage an inherently doomed premise. Colonialism is dead. Occupiers will never enjoy peace. Neither the Afghans nor the Iraqis nor the Pakistanis will rest until we withdraw our forces. The only success we will find is in accepting defeat sooner rather than later.

“What went wrong [in Vietnam] was a basic misunderstanding or misevaluation of the threat to our security represented by the North Vietnamese,” McNamara said in his Berkeley oral history.” Today’s domino theory is Bush’s (now Obama’s) clash of civilizations, the argument that unless we fight them “there” we will have to fight them here. Afghanistan and Iraq don’t present security threats to the United States. The presence of U.S. troops and drone planes, on the other hand…

In fairness to McNamara, it only took two years for him to call to an end of the bombing of North Vietnam. By 1966 he was advising LBJ to start pulling back. But, like a gambler trying to recoup and justify his losses, the president kept doubling down. “We didn’t know our opposition,” concluded McNamara. “So the first lesson is know your opponents. I want to suggest to you that we don’t know our potential opponents today.”

Actually, it’s worse than that. Then, like now, we don’t have opponents. We create them.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Financial Times Plagiarizes Ted Rall

You don’t have to be a regular reader to know that I’ve been depicting Barack Obama in Hello Kitty regalia for about one year: flags, banners, you name it. Most recently, I did an Obamaman cartoon that depicts our lame superhero president wearing a Hello Kitty logo on his chest.

Now a sharp-eyed FOR points out that an illustrator for the Financial Times has rather brazenly ripped off my meme.

Usually, these things are less than cut and dry. But it’s pretty hard to believe that any illustrator could be unaware of my use of the Hello Kitty imagery to define Obama–it ain’t as branded as Generalissimo El Busho yet, but come on. This one fails the smell test.

Suffice it to say that, if this sort of thing annoys you, it is possible to email the Financial Times a letter to the editor.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Sorry, Mr. Bush

The Poor Get Poorer, Presidents Get Worse

I miss Bush.

Stop the presses and shut off the RSS feeds: the bashiest of the Bush-bashers is starting to appreciate the Exile of Crawford.

I haven’t forgiven George W. Bush for stealing two elections, starting two wars, bankrupting the treasury and doing his damnedest to turn the U.S. into a fascist state. He deserves one of hell’s hottest picnic spots for refusing to lift a finger to bring the 9/11 murderers to justice. Bush was stupid. He was vicious. He should be in prison.

He was the worst president the U.S. had ever had. Until this one.

On major issues and a lot of minor ones, Obama is the same as or worse than Bush. But Bush had an opposition to contend with. Obama has a compliant Democratic Congress. Lulled to somnolent apathy by Obama’s charming manners, mastery of English (and yes, the color of his skin), leftist activists and journalists have been reduced to quiet disappointment, mild grumbling and unaccountable patience.

I don’t care about window dressing. Sure, it’s nice that Obama is intelligent. But policies matter—not charm. And Obama’s policies are at least as bad as Bush’s.

Guantánamo was but the beginning of Obama’s betrayals. First he ordered the camp closed—not immediately but in a year. Now he’s expanding the U.S. concentration camp at Bagram—where 600 innocent men and children are being tortured—so he can send the 245 Gitmo prisoners there. In the Bush era, Gitmo POWs received legal representation. Obama has ordered that the POWs sent to Bagram not be allowed to see a lawyer.

You saw the headline: “OBAMA BANS TORTURE.” But it was a lie. Obama’s CIA director told Congress that there’s a “review process that’s built into [Obama’s] executive order” that allows torture to continue. Leon Panetta said the Obama Administration will keep using at least 19 torture techniques against detainees. In addition, Team Obama will “look at those kinds of enhanced techniques to determine how effective they were or weren’t and whether any appropriate revisions need to be made as a result of that.”

As editorial boards of liberal newspaper tut-tut and the feds convene committees, the screams of the victims pierce the night.

Bush was the biggest spender in history, running up a $1.8 trillion deficit with wasteful wars and tax cuts. But next to Obama, Bush was a tightwad. Glamour Prez hasn’t been around six months, yet the Congressional Budget Office reports that he already has quadrupled the deficit by an extra $8.1 trillion. “The total debt held by the public [will] rise from 57 percent of GDP in 2009 to 82 percent (!) of GDP in 2019,” reports U.S. News & World Report.

Obama is sinking us into financial oblivion 72 times faster than Bush.

Where’d the money go? Mostly to insurance companies. Banks. Brokerage firms. Who used it to redecorate their offices and give themselves raises.

Against logic and history Obama claimed his bailout package would create jobs. Instead, unemployment has risen by 1.3 million. Has Obama’s plan saved a single homeowner from foreclosure? Reporters can’t any.

I liked Bush better. He wasted our money when the economy wasn’t quite as sucky. And he didn’t insult us by pretending to care. Come on, Barack, smirk! Truth in advertising!

I know: he’s a politician. Politicians break promises. As the presidential scholar Stephen Hess says: “There are some pledges that a candidate reverses when he becomes president because things look different. He knows things that he didn’t know then.”

“Some”? Obama hasn’t even tried to keep a single major promise. He hasn’t gotten rid of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” His ballyhooed “cap and trade” law on emissions is toothless. Remember Obama’s pledge to renegotiate NAFTA to strengthen environmental regulations? Forgotten.

In Obama’s case, “things look[ing] different” has meant giving in to entrenched dirtbags, like the spooks who read your emails and the entrenched Pentagon torturers who don’t want us to see photos that make Abu Ghraib look like child’s play.

(An official familiar with the photos in question tells me they include, among other atrocities, U.S. personnel sodomizing a child.)

Obama has done more damage than Bush. And no one’s stopping him. Which makes him worse.

Sorry, Mr. Bush. If I’d known what was coming, I would’ve been nicer.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

keyboard_arrow_up
css.php