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Obama

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Ted Rall

Barack Obama could not be more wrong about the war against the people of Afghanistan. No country has successfully invaded another one since the 19th century and, believe me, Afghanistan–of all places!–isn’t going to be the first.

Barack Obama is wrong about Iraq. We don’t need a negotiated settlement. Immediate withdrawal is the only prudent, sane, and rational solution to a problem that we shouldn’t have created in the first place.

Barack Obama doesn’t seem to understand how bad the economy is, or that nothing short of radical solutions–like my idea to bail out homeowners and renters–has a prayer of working. A national infrastructure program–I’d start with high-speed rail–would be nice, too.

Barack Obama has been too silent on the pressing moral issue of our time–torture. Nothing demonstrates how badly our values have been corrupted than the fact that our government has legalized torture, and that the American people never talk about it.

I am going to vote for Barack Obama tomorrow morning.

Normally, I am not one to vote for a candidate with whom I disagree on so many key issues. Because Al Gore was so close to W. on so many issues in 2000, I cast my vote for Ralph Nader. This time, however, is different for me.

Riding the New York subway, I see so many African-American commuters wearing Obama buttons. Around the Obama button table at 7th and 34th, a nervous and excited crowd, mostly black, gathers every day. They can feel it–they might get one of their own people (albeit not a descendant of slaves) into the White House. I’m voting for Obama for them–because, if I don’t, I’ll never be able to look black people in the eye again.

I read a recent poll that shows Obama polling 51 percent of white men. Frankly, it’s no big deal that black people are voting for Obama. THe fact that so many white guys are willing to reach outside their comfort zone or, better yet–have black people inside their comfort zone–sends a message to blacks. We white guys aren’t all a bunch of racist shits. Many of us, yes. But not all.

Obama’s Muslim background–yes, he did grow up in Indonesia, he did hear the call to prayer every morning, and had a Muslim father–will also send a clear message to the world that America is prepared to renounce the Muslim-bashing (and -torturing, and -murdering) policies of the past eight years. Symbolism matters. The next time I travel abroad, I won’t have to explain why “we” elected a neofascist moron as president (or allowed him to steal the presidency).

Someone drew an editorial cartoon of John McCain’s face with “Best if used before 2000” stamped across his face. McCain is well past his due date though, truth be told, he just doesn’t have the calm, measured, careful temperment of a president. He is rash and emotional and, obviously, doesn’t know shit about personnel decisions. As president, he would be a disaster. As president, he would not last long. Sarah Palin would likely succeed him in a short time. That thought alone should be enough for Republican voters to cast their vote for the Libertarian candidate, or simply stay home.

So I am voting for Barack Obama, not because he’s the best candidate, or even the best of the original field (that was John Edwards, with or without his horniness). I’m voting for him because Obama means a symbolic change, and that’s a change we need.

Don’t be surprised, however, if I’m as hard (or harder) on the Democrats than I was on Bush and the Republicans. Republicans, after all, are evil. Democrats know better, and I expect more of them. I was brutally hard on Bill Clinton, although it’s largely forgotten now (I’m working on expanded cartoon archives that will eventually go back to 1991, and you’ll see how mean I was). You wouldn’t believe how many hate emails I get talking about how I was OK with Clinton, but not Bush. As if. But I digress.

There’s a lot to dislike about Obama’s accommodationist, wimpy self. But I will toast his victory just the same.

As Shah Massood said–he was the Northern Alliance warlord who united the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion in the 1980s–first, we kill the Russians. Then we kill each other.

Vote for Obama. Then fight for real change.

I Predict: Obama by 3.7 points

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Ted Rall

As I told The Washington Post, I predict Obama will win the official vote count by 3.7 points. Let’s see how I do.

Bear in mind, of course, that Obama is leading by 10 points in most polls. The 6.3 percent discount is for sleazy Ohio vote challengers, the Bradley effect, and the blocked/purged voter registrations documented ably by Greg Palast.

Awesome Sarah Palin Animation Out Soon!

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Ted Rall

Master animator David Essman and I are about to unleash our second animated editorial cartoon. This one is about a certain vice presidential nominee and her aspirations to the highest office in the long. Stay tuned…we’re looking to release it Monday morning.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Don’t Think About Reelection

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Ted Rall

Why Obama Should Consider Himself a One-Term President

Barring some unforeseen cataclysmic event, Barack Obama will be elected president Tuesday. Please allow me to be the first to congratulate you, President-Elect Obama, on an historic victory following an extraordinarily disciplined campaign. Are you sure you’re really a Democrat?

Enough BSing.

As a student of history and the American presidency and a guy who plans to vote for you despite serious doubts, here’s the best advice I can give you: Starting on Inauguration Day, consider yourself a one-term president.

This isn’t exactly an original idea. When John McCain launched his own run for the Republican nomination, he originally planned to center his entire campaign around a promise not to seek a second term. “Less than a day before he was set to speak in New Hampshire on April 25,” The Atlantic magazine reported, “McCain ordered his aides to excise…the pledge.” But McCain was on to something. Voters want a president who isn’t constantly triangulating, studying polls, and sucking up to contributors.

I realize that telling anyone you’re a one-termer would be dumb. Why tie your own hands by declaring yourself a lame duck on Day One? So don’t.

I’m suggesting that you privately adopt a state of mind. Back in 2007, you laid out three guiding principles to your campaign: “Run the campaign with respect; build it from the bottom up; and finally, no drama.” It worked. Now it’s time to transmit a new guiding principle to your cabinet officers: “We don’t care about 2012.”

With one exception, I’ve never understood why presidents worry about getting reelected. The “second-term curse”–the tendency of lame-duck presidencies to flounder in scandal, blowback and impotence–has prevented every modern president from accomplishing anything worth bragging about during years five through eight.

Harry Truman squandered his credibility by playing footsie with McCarthyism and doubling down on a disastrous stalemate on the Korean peninsula. Johnson screwed up in Vietnam and on the burning streets of American cities. Nixon had Watergate; Eisenhower and Reagan succumbed to virtual senility and scandal (the U-2 spy plane affair and Iran-Contra, respectively). Of course, Clinton had Monica.

The exception, of course, was George W. Bush. His quest for a second term was understandable. “Bush knows that he did not carry the popular vote in 2000,” Gus Tyler wrote in The Forward in 2003. “He ran a half-million votes behind Democrat Al Gore. He knows that he really did not carry Florida to give him his thin edge in the Electoral College.” Dubya wanted to win in 2004 because he lost in 2000.

Technically, 2005-to-2008 was Bush’s first term. Nevertheless, the second-term curse struck again. Bush had an ambitious agenda, but it was thwarted by both circumstance and the consequences of policies he pursued during his first four years. Privatizing Social Security, tort reform, stricter test standards for high school graduation–all abandoned and forgotten in the fires of Iraq and the maelstrom of Hurricane Katrina. Bush’s approval rating is now 23 percent, the lowest in the history of the Gallup Poll. He wasn’t even invited to the Republican National Convention. He seems destined to be added to the short list of our worst leaders.

So forget that second term. They never do anyone any good.

George Clinton said, “Free your mind and your ass will follow.” Give up the hope you can’t believe in and embrace the reality you have already achieved.

So, President-Elect Obama: It’s true. You face challenges: Iraq and Afghanistan (which you are wrong wrong wrong about) and torture and our international standing and–obviously!–the economy. But think of what you’ve got going for you. You are young and sharp-minded and vigorous. The electorate is desperately worried, and thus more willing to embrace big changes. Your party will enjoy a commanding majority in Congress–I’m guessing 58 seats in the Senate and 268 (to 167) in the House, the biggest since Watergate. I’m pretty sure you’re going to pick a team of top officials that will make Americans wonder how they ever tolerated intellectual midgets like Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice–the Best and the Brightest for the new millennium. The rest of the world already loves you, and you haven’t even begun.

But be careful. The second you move into 1600 Penn, you will be surrounded by people, many of them your close friends, who will want nothing more than to keep the cool jobs you give them for as long as possible, i.e. eight years. Beware the “permanent campaign”–the drive to make every decision based on how they will affect you and your party’s chances for reelection. “[Pollster] Dick Morris even asked voters where Bill Clinton should go on vacation,” remembered Joe Klein in Time.

“[The permanent campaign] has been a terrible thing,” Klein continued. “Presidents need to be thinking past the horizon, as Jimmy Carter belatedly proved. Some of his best decisions–a strict monetary policy to combat inflation, a vigorous arms buildup against the Soviet threat–bore fruit years after he left office and were credited to his successor, Ronald Reagan.”

Radical problems require radical solutions. Guess what? We have radical problems. Your kids-only healthcare mandate concept would be a Band-Aid where major surgery is required. Iraq and Afghanistan don’t need another division of Marines here, another detachment of Special Forces there. Nothing short of immediate pullout will satisfy the world, our ruined national budget or, for that matter, the Iraqis and Afghans. Your 90-day proposed moratorium on foreclosure evictions is nice as far as it goes–well, 90 days–but it’s going to take years of direct government assistance to millions of Americans to save the country from economic disintegration.

Even with a bully pulpit and a Democratic Congress, it’s going to take some serious nads to ignore the special interests. Big insurance companies like the current healthcare “system” just the way it is. Defense contractors are psyched about our serial preemptive wars against anyone and everyone (except those who actually attack us). And the banks aren’t going to stop taking people’s homes unless you take over the banks. It isn’t going to be easy.

But running the country as if you had nothing to lose–running your first term as if it you knew it will be your last–will make it a little easier. For all you know, it might make a second term more likely.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

A Totally Irrelevant Quote

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Ted Rall

From Mark Mazower’s “Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe”:

The early 1940s are thus a prime example of how the violence of war—especially when short-sighted and ideologically driven political leadership is combined with overwhelming military superiority—may lead to an almost limitless escalation in the use of force and a constant revision of rules and norms. The Nazis embraced the idea of pre-emptive war and did not regard themselves as generally bound by international law; as a result, only their own ethical constraints (which intense racial nationalism weakened where non-Germans were concerned) set limits to what they regarded themselves as justified in doing. Yet if war allowed the regime to conquer territory, it was also a means—as Hitler himself well understood—to change the Germans and their values.

Totally irrelevant.

BBC News in Spanish

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Ted Rall

There’s an interview with me and several other U.S. editorial cartoonists on the BBC’s Spanish-language website. Scroll to the middle of the page and click the cartoon graphic.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: President Obama—Shut Down This Camp!

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Ted Rall

Next President Should Shut Gitmo on January 20

* Camp has become its own raison d’être
* Hundreds locked in legal limbo
* Jerking around detainees and their families
* Gesture would resonate around the globe

François Mitterand brought civilization to France. One of his first acts as president was to end the death penalty. A guy named Philippe Maurice had his date with the guillotine cancelled.

Amazing but true: the country that gave the world “The Rights of Man” was still lopping off heads in 1981.

Fortunately, things change. Other countries followed France’s lead. Today, just a quarter century later, fewer than a quarter of the world’s nations still carry out capital punishment. Nations that do can’t get into the European Union.

Our next president–probably Barack Obama–has a similar opportunity to create a transformative moment toward a fully civilized United States. I’m not talking about abolishing executions, though that is long overdue. President Obama (or McCain) should close Guantánamo.

Not after appointing a commission to look into it. Not after finding a nation willing to take the detainees. Like Mitterand, he should do it immediately.

After years of denial, Bush Administration officials now admit that hundreds of men and children–as young as 13!–have been tortured and otherwise abused at Gitmo. Inmates were penned up in dog cages, denied exercise, and waterboarded.

One guard vehemently denied urinating on a prisoner’s Koran. His defense? “The guard had left his observation area post and went outside to urinate,” according to a Defense Department report. “He urinated near an air vent and the wind blew his urine through the vent into the [prisoner’s cell].” You see, he wasn’t trying to pee on the Koran. He was trying to pee on the prisoner. His urine stream had inadvertently splashed off the man onto the book.

Not surprisingly, a lot of the inmates–who’d been sold to U.S. troops by Afghan warlords, locked up for years without being accused of anything, denied access to an attorney or their families, denied most of all of hope–freaked out. Some hung themselves. Others went on hunger strike. The military’s response? Suicide, they said, was a diabolically clever act of “asymmetrical warfare.” They strapped the hunger strikers into special chairs, pried open their jaws and jammed feeding tubes down their throats so roughly that they vomited blood.

Most of this kind of fun, the government claims, no longer happens at Club Gitmo. But there’s no way to verify that. Reporters and human rights groups are denied access to the facility and its misérables. Wherever there’s a secret, there’s something to hide. Like the detainees, Guantánamo should be presumed guilty until it is proven innocent.

Life at Guantánamo has entered a weird second phase. Originally dedicated to the forceful extraction of information about impending terrorist attacks, prisoner interrogations now torture inmates in order to obtain information on activities within the camp itself. “The primary focus is the safety of the detainees as well as the detainee guard force, and that’s why we have this intelligence activity,” said the camp’s commander, Navy Rear Admiral David Thomas in August. In other words, the circumstances of the prisoners’ incarceration necessitate further incarceration.

Kafka would have loved it. We keep them in Gitmo, not to keep us safe, but to keep Gitmo itself safe.

As anyone who has spent time behind bars will attest, uncertainty is worse than abuse. Bruises heal; urine dries. Not knowing whether you will ever again be free to walk down a street, sit in a café or hug your children is constant torment. You deaden your emotions in order to survive, wondering whether you’ll ever be able to get them back.

Perhaps the most sinister aspect of America’s premier gulag, however, is its use and abuse of military and civilian courts to jerk around inmates and their families. The quasi-judicial system set up to process the detainees is itself a paragon of psychological torture characterized by sadistic glee and aggressive indifference.

There is, of course, the case of the Uyghurs, Muslims who live in China’s far west Xinjiang province, which is part of Central Asia. I was one of the first American commentators to champion their cause. Guantánamo’s Uyghurs are members of the East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM), encouraged by U.S.-financed Radio Free Asia to rise up against Chinese occupation. They obtained weapons training at camps in neighboring Afghanistan. After 9/11, however, China threatened to use its U.N. security council veto to stop the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan unless the Bush Administration threw its pet Uyghurs under the bus.

The U.S. promptly reversed its policy, not only declaring ETIM an officially-designated “terrorist organization,” but agreeing to dispatch its leaders to Guantánamo. Bush even invited officers from China’s Ministry of State Security to interrogate the Uyghurs at Gitmo, softening them up with torture before the Chinese arrived.

The Uyghur prisoners cooperated with interrogators. The Pentagon concluded they weren’t anti-American. “[The Uyghurs] were transferred to Guantánamo more than six years ago and were cleared for release in 2004,” according to Newsweek.

Proven innocent, the U.S. has kept them at Gitmo for the last four years. They can’t go back to China. Why? “The U.S. government credibly feared they would be tortured.” Well, they would know.

Except for Albania, which agreed to take five Uyghurs in 2006, other countries don’t want to validate Guantánamo by accepting those released through its illegal military tribunal system. “The Bush Administration has conceded that none of the Uyghurs is an enemy combatant,” reports Newsweek. A federal judge ruled that 17 Uyghur detainees be freed from Gitmo and brought to the United States. And that should have been that.

But when it comes to Gitmo, that is never that.

Government lawyers persuaded an appeals court to stay the ruling, arguing that the 17 Uyghurs are dangerous. Get this–they’re dangerous to America because, the Justice Department argues in court documents, the Uyghurs “were detained for six years by the country [the U.S.] to which the district court has ordered them brought.” They may not have hated America before–but they might now.

This week the Pentagon decided not to pursue charges against five other Gitmo prisoners. Apparently government prosecutors were afraid that the trials–even those conducted by the military’s kangaroo courts–would publicize how people are treated at America’s Devil’s Island. “They have been cornered into doing this to avoid admitting torture,” said Claire Algar, executive director of the legal group Reprieve.

So the lucky five go free, right? Wrong. “There are no plans to free any of the men, and the military said it could reinstate charges later,” writes the Associated Press.

Bush, it came out recently, “never considered proposals” to close Gitmo. Both Obama and McCain say they want to shut it down, but neither has said when. Their reticence stems from the mentality expressed by a Bush Administration official: “The new president will gnash his teeth and beat his head against the wall when he realizes how complicated it is to close Guantánamo.”

There is nothing complicated about it. Gitmo is useless. It’s evil. It–and the secret detentions at Bagram, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere–have destroyed America’s reputation far too long.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

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