A Blast from the Past

Every now and then, you come across something that missed the memory hole. Here, for your reading pleasure, is a piece by Loren Jenkins that ran in Salon back in 1998.

My favorite passage:

For while there is little doubt that bin Laden is a sworn enemy of the United States with the financial means to put some teeth in that enmity, his exact role in anti-American terrorism is unclear. The administration’s claims are based more on conjecture — mostly bin Laden’s own braggadocio and the bad company he apparently keeps — than hard and convincing evidence.

Clinton and his security staff have now blamed bin Laden for being behind almost every terrorist act in the past decade — from plotting the assassinations of the pope and the president of Egypt to the planned bombing of six U.S. jumbo jets over the Pacific, with massacres of German tourists at Luxor and the killings of U.S. troops in Somalia, fatal car bombings of U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia and this month’s truck bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam thrown in. Not since the ’70s heyday of the terrorist Carlos has there been such a Prince of Darkness, if the allegations are to be believed.

But so far, for all of the accusations, no government, not even that of the United States, has established enough credible evidence against bin Laden to conclusively prove his direct participation in, much less leadership of, any of the ugly plots and acts he stands accused of. To date no formal request for his extradition has ever been made, either to the Sudanese government that once housed him or to his current hosts, Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders.

In other words, the US government has never presented the American public with any hard proof that Osama bin Laden has carried out a single terrorist attack against us. Yet both President Clinton and Generalissimo El Busho have used him as a bête noire responsible for everything from bad food to bad music.

Though much has been made of the fact that from his safe-houses in Afghanistan bin Laden has forged a loose alliance with perhaps a dozen different Islamic groups in the Muslim world from Algeria to Bangladesh, he seems to be more of a spiritual leader and financier than the sort of terrorist mastermind being alleged.

“Bin Laden is a true believer and a funder of Islamic causes, rather than a planner and active participant,” says Professor Shibley Telhani, a Middle East scholar from the University of Maryland who has followed his career. “His real influence is not as a mastermind of terrorism but as a person who is using a personal fortune to encourage others to wage war against the American interests in the Middle East he finds so objectionable.”

Even if we captured Osama, in other words, we wouldn’t be nabbing the guy who hit our embassies, or the Cole, or the World Trade Center. And what about the groups that actually carried out those attacks?

Bush won’t even talk about them, much less try to bring them to justice.

Nazis

People are angry. People are annoyed. It’s all because I had the timerity to draw a cartoon, this week, depicting SS officers hanging around a café in an occupied European nation (I was thinking France, but it could be anyplace the Germans occupied during World War II) talking about how much the locals love them, the kids wave at them, the schools are open again and how everything is just hunky dory.

“Bush is an idiot,” one guy wrote me. “He hasn’t sent anyone to concentration camps.” Well, not exactly true. Gitmo IS a concentration camp; if the Administration has its way and begins executing the inmates there, it’ll become a death camp. But it is a concentration camp; there’s no other term that fits, regardless of your politics. So a Nazi comparison is certainly applicable.

But that’s not why I drew the cartoon.

The point I’m trying to make is that occupiers ALWAYS wanna think the locals love them to death. They delude themselves that, because a few whores sleep with them and a few profiteers suck up to them, they’re accepted. Of course, it ain’t so–an occupier is a foreigner is an exploiter is an enemy. Always. If Canada invaded the US and brought us the blessings of universal health care, I’d be the first to spend my nights picking off Canadian occupation police from Manhattan rooftops. If you read memoirs of German soldiers fighting during World War II, you’ll find many accounts of how well they got along with the locals.

Then there are the Internet geeks who would prohibit any comparisons, no matter how apt, between Nazism and post-World War II events. Sorry, but I never signed up for that rule, which is stupid. It just so happens that Nazism was anything but a unique phenomenon in history. It wasn’t an aberration, and the undercurrents of oppression and totalitarianism that characterized Hitler’s regime exist in every modern Western society. There isn’t a huge jump between a guy like Adolf and a guy like GWB, and I’ll be damned if I’m not allowed to say so.

Random Reagan Thought

Let me be the first to say it: the former president will likely die soon, and will unjustly be lauded as the man whose profligate spending brought down the Soviet Union and created the economic boom of the ’80s. Of course, neither of these assertions are true. The Soviet Union, as most experts will attest, had been economically undermined by the CIA for years–my favorite operation involved dumping millions of dollars in cash in Moscow restrooms to destabilize the ruble. If anything, Chernobyl was the final straw. As for the ’80s boom, what boom? Sure, a tiny percent of super rich enjoyed growing incomes during the decade, but the ’80s were a period of increasing disparity of wealth. Poor and middle-income people did not benefit under Reagan; quite the opposite.

Bottom line; Reagan was a stupid, vicious scoundrel who deserved prosecution for his role in Iran-Contra and October Surprise. He hurt America by turning its people against each other, by turning them selfish. He shan’t be missed, and he shouldn’t be mourned.

I’ll be away from the blog until Monday.

Today in Vegas

I’ll be signing my books and giving a talk with slides of my cartoons today in Las Vegas. The book signing is from noon to 12:30; the discussion starts at 3:15. You should also come see Tom Tomorrow, in the same place, at 1:45.

Location: Liberty Point Complex, 200-280 South Green Valley Parkway, Henderson, Nevada.

Washington DC Radio

I’ll be on Washington DC radio station WMAL, AM 630, tonight at 11 pm to discuss the censoring of cartoons, Aaron McGruder’s “Boondocks”, and “Doonesbury.”

Vegas Valley Book Festival

I’ll be speaking about and showing my cartoons, and answering questions, at the Vegas Valley Book Festival in Henderson NV tomorrow, Friday, Oct. 24th, from 1:00 to 2:30 at the CCSN West Charleston Campus, in the D Building Auditorium.

No, I have no idea where that is, but I’ll get there somehow.

Did I Call It or What?

Last week, on October 16th, I did a cartoon called “Presidential Swap Comics,” that guessed what would happen if GWB and FDR switched places, i.e., Bush was president at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. So imagine my surprise to read that our own little Piehole went to visit Pearl Harbor his own bad self!

From the AP:

White House officials drew parallels between Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 with al-Qaida’s attack against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. The campaign against terrorism was the main theme of Bush’s Asian trip, and he reminded the world not to let down its guard.

Indeed, as I pointed out in my cartoon, had Bush been in FDR’s place he would have ignored the real threat – Japan – the same way Bush has ignored the real military threats to American security, the real Axis of Evil – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea. Perhaps he would have attacked countries that, like Afghanistan and Iraq, posed no danger to us, and instead gone after Mexico and Bolivia. What a meathead – I still can’t believe his gang of dumb-as-rocks neocons has missed the opportunity presented by 9/11 to cozy up with Iran and Turkey – our natural allies in the Muslim world.

But that’s Bush for you – attack the meek, run away from the strong. A typical bully, and a damned dumb one at that.

The Complete Far Side

Behold, it is here: the ultimate collection of cartoons by Gary Larson, whose “Far Side” revolutionized comics. “The Far Side” brought irony, non-traditional drawing styles and dry wit to the daily comics pages and inspired a generation of cartoonists, including yours truly, to try new approaches to the form. And now, for a mere hundred bucks, you can own an OED-thick collection of every single Far Side strip, a thousand of which you’ve never seen in another collection.

Many of the previously uncollected strips aren’t quite as funny as the ones you’ve seen in the calendars, T-shirts and older collections. But they’re still damned great, and they provide a better-rounded picture of the strip and its artist than the “greatest hits.” And there are a few gems you probably haven’t seen.

I would never go so far as to call a book that weighs 22 pounds “essential,” but this one is about as close as it gets.

Oh, the Irony

From today’s Associated Press:

On Wednesday, [North Korea] branded as “a laughing matter” Bush’s offer of a written pledge from five countries not to attack if the communist nation scraps its nuclear weapons program.

En route to Australia, Bush reacted to Pyongyang’s dismissal with a shrug. “This requires a degree of patience,” Bush said during a 35-minute session with reporters aboard Air Force One. “Kim Jong Il is used to being able to deal unilaterally with the United States. The change in policy is that he must deal now with a number of nations.”

“He has been saying he wants a security guarantee. We’re all willing to sign some sort of document — not a treaty — that says `we won’t attack you.’ But he needs to abandon his nuclear program and do so in a verifiable way.”

“A degree of patience”? For a country that has nukes and has threatened to turn the West Coast of the United States into a feiry, irradiated pit?

Iraq, of course, didn’t have nukes. Didn’t threaten the U.S. Wasn’t a danger to us…at all. Which is why we attacked. Because, in the end, Bush is every bit as much of a goddamned coward as he was when he ducked the draft back in 1972.

An aside: Some conservatives have written me to ask why lefties–the term should be retired in favor of “people who can both read AND think”–didn’t hold Clinton accountable for his draft-dodging the way we’re all over Bush for his. Here’s the answer:

Because, dumbasses, Clinton dodged the draft for a war he was against. Bush dodged a draft he was for. It’s called hypocrisy.

Brian Lehrer Show, WNYC Radio, New York

If you’re in New York City and near a radio, you may want to know that I’ll be talking about my book “To Afghanistan and Back” and the war in Iraq with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer tomorrow morning, Wednesday, October 22nd, from 10:05 am to 10:25 am.