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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Liberal Democrats and the Depersonalization of Evil

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Ted Rall

The email was from someone who generally supports me. And it was generally supportive: “I’m glad you still have a platform.”

Me too! But the generally nice email contained a qualifier.

“I do find a lot of your opinions repugnant.”

Whoa. Repugnant? Such a strong word. The Holocaust was repugnant. What did I write or draw that was so disgusting?

“[Your] most repugnant stuff is portraying powerful people as unmitigated evil,” my otherwise supportive correspondent elaborated. “Everyone is human, and some of them are even nice humans, which is actually a greater hazard since there’s no question that some of what they do is evil. But someone has to navigate these insane political terrains and actually lead/serve, even if they wind up being completely alien from who they started to be.”

I shan’t identify the letter writer. Partly, this is because I like him/her. (Generally supportive, you know.) Mainly, though, I suspect that many people — particularly liberal Democrats — feel the same way as she/he does about my cartoons and writing. If people are turned off, I want to know why. I appreciate feedback. Seeing such criticism spelled out forces me to take a step back, reconsider whether I’m being unfair or wrongheaded — in this case to the “powerful people” whom I portray as “unmitigated evil” — and either change my act…or double down.

This “I support you, but” writer is right about my work. Especially in my cartoons, I often portray powerful politicians and business executives as bad people. I drew George W. Bush, first as a deranged dictator complete with Augusto Pinochet-like epaulettes, sash and silly tyrant hat out of a Terry Gilliam movie, and then, after 9/11 and the beginning of the war on terror, as a hideous monster drooling coke snot over his fangs.

I’m so subtle.

I’ve been graphically kinder to Barack Obama — though some disagree — but in content I’ve been as mean to him as to Bush. I undermine his image as calm and reasonable with cartoons that show the cold-blooded automaton rubbing his hands with glee as he presides over one assassination-by-drone after another, and surrounds himself with luxury (golfing, hanging out at his multimillion-dollar summer vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard) while ordinary Americans lose their jobs and their homes. Obama, in Rallworld, is a murderous bastard who doesn’t care about you. As were Bush and Clinton.

The titans of capitalism come under heavy fire too. If you’re the CEO of a major company, pretty much the only feedback I’m going to give you is that you’re a greedy employee-firing price-gouging turd who exports American jobs to foreign hellholes because you don’t care about anyone else.

Guilty as charged: I do depict the rich and powerful as pure evil.

I don’t care about your intent. I don’t buy “gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet” justifications. If you have a hand in starting and/or continuing a war, an optional war of aggression, you’re a mass murderer. If you order killer robot planes to blow up people who haven’t been convicted of a crime in any court, and those killer robot planes blow up those people and other people who just happen to be nearby when the missile hits, you’re an evil person who did an evil thing, and it doesn’t matter one little bit that you have a winning smile, that you say you’re trying to keep America safe and strong, that you’re fighting “them” “there” so we don’t have to do it here, that you’re funny at the White House Press Correspondents Dinner, that you look adorable alongside your two beautiful daughters, or that you’re the first black president.

Save the qualifiers. You’re evil and I’ll draw you evil.

“We are condemned to be free,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre — free to choose between good and evil or, as in much of his literary work, between less evil and more evil. As such, he elaborated, we are defined by our worst act: a man who acts cruelly is, by definition a cruel man.

Sartre’s existentialism works for me better than any other codified system of philosophical or religious belief. I agree with him on most ethical issues. Killing thousands of people is evil, so people who order thousands of people killed are evil. Osama bin Laden is morally indistinguishable from Barack Obama.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be defined by the worst things we’ve ever done. Yet we are. As you read this, well over two million Americans are behind bars because they stand accused or convicted of a crime. Many of those inmates — probably most of them — have donated to charity, helped a stranger in need or donated blood. Very few people who have done bad things have mostly done bad things. Nearly 200,000 are military veterans, yet their service didn’t mitigate their fate. Their judges didn’t care because, as Sartre said, we are all defined by our worst act.

The lower your status in society, the more harshly you will be treated by the justice system. The darker your skin, the longer your prison sentence. The poorer you are, the higher the fine. The fewer resources you have to get through life — like, if you suffer from mental illness — the more brutality you will experience at the hands and fists of police and prison guards.

This, I believe, is the exact opposite of how it ought to be.

I’m with Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben: with great power comes great responsibility. (The corollary, which also serves as a handy definition of what it means to belong to the political left, is that with little power comes little responsibility.) If you’re privileged — rich and/or white and/or male and/or blessed with resources — you should be judged more harshly.

Which brings us back to my portrayals of the rich and powerful.

It is not actually true that “someone has to navigate these insane political terrains and actually lead/serve,” i.e., join and work inside and for the system — at least not as the point of the spear.

No one has to “actually lead/serve.”
True, opting out of the system entirely — refusing to pay taxes, for example — is so hard and carries such harsh penalties that it isn’t reasonable to expect of the average citizen. But it not asking much to suggest that we boycott the really horrible crimes the system commits. After all, most Americans do opt out.

Most Americans do not enlist in the armed forces. Yay, non-servicemembers! Most Americans do not harbor political ambitions. Good for you! Few Americans are corporate executives or in a position to ever become one. Your hands are relativelt clean!

Most Americans are, therefore, not evil.

By their nature, the biggest evils are those carried out on a grand scale: genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass poisoning by pollution, destroying the environment, huge frauds, systematic theft, racism, gender discrimination and so on. The only people capable of executing these humongous evils are those who possess wealth and/or power. If we don’t/can’t/shouldn’t call out the rich and powerful people who commit these terrible crimes because, hey, someone has to lead/serve, we are effectively saying that no one is responsible. That these crimes are authorless.

Depersonalization of crimes, absolving everyone of responsibility, is a historical whitewash and an insult to the victims. If there’s no criminal, did a crime occur? Logic says no. The fact that no one has ever been charged with a crime in connection with torturing Muslim detainees at Guantánamo concentration camp signals to the world that the torture either never really happened, that we can’t be sure whether it happened, or that if it did it doesn’t matter.

What about mercy? Don’t people, even powerful people, deserve a pass when they make mistakes? As I say above, more is expected of the rich and powerful. The ethical bar is higher. But yes, mercy is an important societal value, one that should be extended to the rich and powerful — when appropriate.

To me, you’re more deserving of soft treatment if you’ve learned from your mistakes. One of the reasons that I despise Hillary Clinton is that she has never met a war she didn’t like: Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and then Syria and Libya under her direct watch. She supported them all. None were morally or legally justifiable. With the possible exception of Bosnia, they spread misery and chaos, and hurt American interests. She’s stupid and mean. If anyone deserves a pass for warmongering, it isn’t her.

Like the former community organizer Barack Obama, former children’s rights advocate Hillary Clinton has become “completely alien from who they started to be”: a member of the board of the hideously anti-worker megacorporation Wal-Mart, a corrupted politico who sells influence to the highest bidder, an assassin.

She’s repugnant. I’m merely calling her out.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net and SkewedNews.net, is the author of “Snowden,” about the NSA whistleblower. His new book “Bernie” about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, is now available for pre-order. Want to support independent journalism? You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

SYNDICATED COLUMN: I Am So Damn Anxious I Feel Like I Am Going To Have a Heart Attack

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Ted Rall

index I never thought I’d live to be this old (52). I never thought that, if I lived to be this old, I’d still be so scared.

I’m white, male, able-bodied, educated, tall. Got a solid resume. I’m relatively adaptable. I started out as one of hundreds of professional political cartoonists. Now there are fewer than 20. Yet I’m freaked out.

I’ve survived poverty, getting mugged and being shot at and managed to remain pretty calm. But I’m more worried now.

Given how relatively good I have it, I can’t imagine how freaked out everyone else must be. Like, for example, black people when they get stopped by cops. Or Tamir Rice’s parents.

There are countless anxiety-inducing news stories tailor-made for this news junkie with a special interest in economics and the Middle East. This week alone, the Saudi-Iranian proxy war in Yemen widened into a full-fledged Sunni-Shia diplomatic rift over the execution of a Shia cleric. Scary. Then there’s the falling stock market, which controls me, over which I have no influence, and against whose effects I am unequipped to protect myself. The boom-bust cycle of capitalism is giving us bigger, more frequent troughs punctuated by shorter boomlets whose benefits all go to the top 1%.

I can’t believe anyone likes capitalism. Most people are a paycheck away from homelessness. Jobs are scarce. Jobs keep paying less. Bosses keep getting meaner. Everything gets more expensive.

Capitalism is so depressing it makes one nostalgic for Soviet-era queues for toilet paper.

In what is in danger of becoming a pattern for me, I have to apologize to the Baby Boom generation, specifically for rolling my eyes when Boomers whined about turning 50. That’s when you lose your job, can’t find a new one, struggle to care for aging parents while feeling your own body start to fall apart. They were right. The fifties are a bitch. (Though fiftysomething Gen Xers have less cash than they did.)

To mangle Hunter S. Thompson, last year got weird. I’m trying to go pro, but I’m not sure what that means.

2015 was the year when what used to be my boring safe job, drawing political cartoons, became more dangerous than my other job, part-time war correspondent.

Psycho gunmen slaughtered my colleagues at Charlie Hebdo, making France the nation where a journalist was most likely to get murdered in 2015. More psycho gunmen tried to shoot up a right-wing anti-Muslim cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, only to get themselves killed by the local SWAT team. There were always death threats; now they’re scarier and more specific.

After Charlie and Garland, you’d think newspapers and magazines would have rallied around what’s left of American editorial cartooning. There is zero, zip, nada support for American cartoonists by editors or publishers. Post-Charlie, they all wrote passionate editorials defending free speech. They said nice things about cartooning. While they fired more cartoonists. Refused to hire any. Stopped printing them.

The cowards didn’t even reprint the Charlie cartoons so their readers could see what the fuss was about.

The annual convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists in Columbus inaugurated the new normal: police police police, police dogs, police snipers on the roof. When I went on tour to publicize my book Snowden, security became a routine part of the equation — for the first time in nearly 20 books.

No wonder no one under 30 wants to become a political cartoonist. Not only is there no work and no respect, your impoverished ass might get shot with an AR-15.

So then a few weeks ago I looked at my chest. I probably do this more than you do, because a wart on my chest once nearly killed me. I noticed a new bump. A growing new bump. I found myself in the somewhat ridiculous role of the first male in three weeks to pass through the automatic doors of the rhodamine-pink special Breast building at my hospital. I’m anti-sexist. Still, it does something to a man to be quizzed about his menstrual and lactation histories. Not to mention worrying about the possibility of becoming one of the couple of thousand American men who get breast cancer each year — you just know the system isn’t set up for that.

Fortunately, I dodged that bullet. Just a lipoma.

A bullet that hit me square in the chest last year, albeit metaphorically, was fired by Nick Goldberg, an editor at The Los Angeles Times. He accused me of lying in his newspaper, a grave offense in journalism unless your name is Bill O’Reilly, and fired me. I hadn’t lied. He was wrong. After I presented proof that I’d told the truth, the Times — under pressure, since the Internet was going crazy due to their disgusting refusal to reconsider — didn’t issue a retraction or hire me back. Presumably fearing a lawsuit, they doubled down. Goldberg still draws a salary. Not me.

I used to be a sound sleeper. Head hit the pillow, I was gone until morning.

No more. Insomnia is my new normal. I’m jittery, nervous, distrusting. Lots of nightmares. If you can be so totally wronged, libeled by a corporation that’s literally trying to destroy your career because of its opaque conflict of interest with outside parties (the Los Angeles Police Department), and it doesn’t make any difference when you prove you’re innocent, where common sense and human decency no longer hold sway, well, that’s a weird, unsettling world where you can never relax. If I get four hours a night, that’s better than most.

The thing that surprises me most about workplace shootings is that there are so few of them.

Under the doctrine that 2015 sucked so hard, 2016 has got to be better, I’m cautiously optimistic about the coming year. Yet anxiety remains.

My new graphic biography Bernie is about Bernie Sanders. Sales figures will be directly proportionate to the senator’s performance in the primaries. There’s cause for optimism in New Hampshire but the South is a challenge and now you’ve got The New York Times skewing expectations by suddenly claiming that the Iowa caucuses are do or die for Bernie, even though no one thought he was going to win there before. It’s Hillary’s campaign to lose. I knew that. But it was hers to lose in 2008, and she did.

What if Bernie crashes and burns? Then my book dies. Or what if Bernie becomes the nominee, and the book gets huge — will there be enough security? If not, I die. Anxiety turns everything into a lose-lose.

Behind all that anxiety, of course, is money. Not enough of it.

Every month that I manage to pay all the bills is a miracle. I move money around, scare up just enough extra work, hustle hustle hustle. My colleagues marvel at my energy. What’s my secret? Being tired all the time, and depressed, and not knowing how I’ll be able to eat in 10 years, much less retire. Probably like you.

Like most Americans, I don’t have substantial retirement savings. If I don’t work, I live maybe a year or two before moving to the great outdoors.

I fantasize about a soft landing. Maybe some magazine or website or newspaper will take me on full-time. Maybe with benefits? It’s OK, I don’t need benefits.

Or an academic gig — teaching journalism or cartooning or history somewhere. It would be fun. I’d be good at it. But where? How? You can’t apply to a college or university; the academic job application process is insanely time-consuming and the reply is always a rejection. An offer has to come to you.

One must trust in the universe. The philosopher Eckhart Tolle says the universe will provide what you need.

Unless it doesn’t.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net and SkewedNews.net, is the author of “Snowden,” about the NSA whistleblower. His new book “Bernie” about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, is now available for pre-order. Want to support independent journalism? You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2016 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Cops Are Too Crazy To Be Trusted with Guns

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Ted Rall

We’re not supposed to question juries. They’re our peers. They put in long hours, working hard essentially for free. Most of all, they see all the evidence. We don’t. We have to assume that they know what they’re doing.

Sometimes, however, a jury verdict relies on so many false assumptions, baseless assignments of privilege and twisted logic that you have to call it out. The decision of a Cleveland grand jury not to indict the cop who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice to death is one such time.

Tamir Rice was playing outside his apartment building with a toy gun when a nosy neighbor took it upon himself to do the one thing you should never do in America unless you’re absolutely certain there is no other option: call the police. Tamir, the caller told 911, was “probably a juvenile” and that the gun was “probably fake.” According to Cleveland police, 911 dispatch didn’t relay that information to the two officers who responded, amped up and loaded for bear.

Officer Timothy Loehmann blew Tamir away between 1.5 and 2.0 seconds after arriving at the scene.

Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinty called Tamir’s killing the result of a “perfect storm of human error, mistakes and miscommunications.”

Stuff happens. (Let’s hope the moron who called 911 is happy.)

I don’t need to have been a fly on the wall in the grand jury room to conclude they made a bad call.

First: what’s with this ridiculous assumption that, if a cop fears for his life, he is justified in instantly escalating the use of violent force to the nuclear option — firing his semiautomatic pistol into an American citizen?

McGinty, who made it abundantly clear he didn’t want anyone indicted, told a press conference that Loehmann feared for his life. So what if he did? Fearing for your life comes with the job, a job that requires common sense and sharp instincts to do well. Like, take a little time to assess a situation before speeding your cruiser up to a possible suspect and popping him faster than it takes to read half this sentence.

Second, whether or not the dispatcher passed on the info that Tamir was probably a kid with a probably fake gun is irrelevant. Who cares what a random nobody who calls 911 says?

There’s a phenomenon called “SWATting,” in which pranksters (often gamers) call 911 hoping that a heavily-armed paramilitary force descends on an address and freaks out the inhabitants, or perhaps kills them. Callers can understate a threat as well. What if Tamir Rice’s gun was real, and he wasn’t a kid, and dispatch had failed to forward that information along to the officers? Big duh here: cops need to use their brains to figure out what, if anything, is actually happening at the scene when they respond.

Third, Cleveland’s ersatz prosecutors made an awful lot of their assertion that Tamir was “big for his age” and looked older than 12. This is important because, how many 12-year-old boys go on shooting sprees? It can happen. But’s it’s rare. After I read this Tamir the Giant argument, I looked at his recent photos and was puzzled. He looks exactly like a 12-year-old kid. On the bigger side, sure. But 12. Why did Officer Loehmann think he was older?

Well, his highly abbreviated assessment time — about 1.75 seconds between screeching to a halt and unloading his service pistol — may have had something to do with it.

Also, studies have shown that white cops tend to radically overguesstimate the age of black males. “Black 13-year-olds were miscategorized as adults by police officers (average age error 4.59 years),” according to The Washington Post. Yet another argument in favor of insisting that urban cops live in the communities that pay their salaries — they’ll learn what black kids look like.

Nothing can bring back Tamir. But we can learn from his murder. We can take back the assumptions that killed him and countless other young black men.

From The New York Times: “Even with indictments, juries will remain reluctant to convict police officers absent evidence of malice, said Eugene O’Donnell, a former officer and prosecutor who now teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. ‘Tremendous incompetence, the worst kind of training, disregard for people is really not enough,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to go beyond that because the police are different.'”

Or we can decide that really, the police are not different. That cop lives do not matter more than civilian lives. That cops won’t enjoy the benefit of the doubt any more than the rest of us. That prosecutors will work just as hard to indict them as they do to indict someone for shooting a cop.

Cop privilege must die.

Which means no more acceptance of ridiculous excuses (“no one told me he was a kid”) for crazy behavior (shooting someone less than two seconds after sizing them up).

Congress is considering making it impossible for mentally ill people to buy guns. Until our cops become sane, they shouldn’t be trusted with weapons. (By the way, Officer Loehmann’s psychological profile indicates he wasn’t all there when Cleveland PD hired him.) Taking away sidearms and Tasers, given how well unarmed police forces work all over the world, is something the United States should seriously consider.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net and SkewedNews.net, is the author of “Snowden,” about the NSA whistleblower. His new book “Bernie” about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, is now available for pre-order. Want to support independent journalism? You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2016 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

This Weekend’s Access Problems

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Ted Rall

My apologies for the problems accessing Rall.com over the New Year’s weekend. Without getting into the boring technical details, this originated outside of my control, and serves as a reminder of how fragile digital infrastructure really is.

It’s also another reminder of why it’s better to rely on the Ted Rall Subscription Service to get my stuff!

 

Support Good Cartooning and Punditry – Join the Ted Rall Subscription Service

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Ted Rall

It’s that time of the year again: time to sign up for the Ted Rall Subscription Service. Your wages haven’t gone yup, so neither has the the TRSS: still a bargain at just $30 a year! (Your wages have risen if you’re a 1%er – but if you’re a 1%er, you’re probably not reading this.)

If you value independent cartooning and political analysis, not to mention war correspondency, please consider subscribing.

You’ll get my cartoons, illustrations and columns delivered directly to your email in-box – before anyone else on the Internet! Not only that, subscribers can buy my original artwork and new books at substantial discounts! Something to consider as my new biography Bernie is about to come out…

Thank you for reading and for sticking with me through these, as always, challenging times.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Welcome to the Digital Dark Ages: Movies and Books Get Deleted as Selfies Pile Up

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Ted Rall

          Historians and archivists call our times the “digital dark ages.” The name evokes the medieval period that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, which led to a radical decline in the recorded history of the West for 1000 years. But don’t blame the Visigoths or the Vandals. The culprit is the ephemeral nature of digital recording devices. Remember all the stuff you stored on floppy discs, now lost forever? Over the last 25 years, we’ve seen big 8” floppies replaced by 5.25” medium replaced by little 3.5” floppies, Zip discs and CD-ROMs, external hard drives and now the Cloud — and let’s not forget memory sticks and also-rans like the DAT and Minidisc.

We’ll ignore the data lost in computer crashes.

Each transition has seen the loss of countless zillions of documents and images. The irony is that, even as we’re generating more records than any civilization ever, we’re destroying so much important stuff that future generations will hardly know we ever lived.

Google Vice President Vint Cerf recently mused about Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln: “Such a book might not be possible to write about the people living today … the digital content such as emails that an author might need will have evaporated because nobody saved it, or it’s around but it’s not interpretable because it was created by software that’s 100 years old.”

I got to thinking about our civilizational priorities the other day, while managing the photos on my iPhone. Few of us realize it, but the default settings of electronic devices like a smartphone is to keep, rather than erase. Take a photo or video, and Apple wants to send it and save it to all the gadgets on your Apple Store account. If you’re like me (and in this respect, most people are), you take lot more photos than you delete. But even your “deleted” stuff isn’t really deleted — it’s merely moved to a “Deleted Photos” folder. And it lives in the Cloud, like, forever. To really really delete something, you have to double-triple-delete it. Most people don’t bother. So all those mundane iPhone photos — countless pics of your kid at the school concert, boarding passes, the image of the wine you mean to get more of — accumulates.

Partly due to my failure to edit crap like that, some experts a looming data capacity crisis of epic proportions.

Keeping everything is a phenomenon of the digital age. Analog photos were expensive to develop and print. So we took fewer of them. And we didn’t develop them all.

More irony: Even as we’re keeping triplicates of, let’s face it, zillions of documents and images we will never, ever look at again, digitalization is erasing cultural works of epic importance en masse.

Of the 80,000 to 90,000 films considered to be in print on DVD in the United States, only a small fraction have made the leap to streaming. For the most part, this is because companies like Netflix can’t or don’t want to buy the rights for movies whose copyright holders want to get real money. The result is, if you want to see such classics as “The Bicycle Thief” or “Marathon Man,” your only hope is to buy an old used DVD on eBay (assuming you still have a DVD player). Of course, each change of format has left films, many of them important, unavailable to cinephiles. Many great films never made it from VHS to DVD.

Format transitions are also murdering our musical and literary legacies.

When I peruse music streaming services like Apple Music, I’m surprised how many albums by my favorite bands available: sorry, Lords of the New Church. This isn’t new: music geeks hunt down rare 78s for old-timey music that never made it to 33-rpm record. Tons of tunes got lost in the move from vinyl to CD. Maybe it’s the stuff that I like to listen to, but it feels like format loss has been more devastating this time around, as music storage goes from physical to ethereal.

It’s easy to forget how many books aren’t making the jump, especially when corporations sell products like Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, which lets you read any of 600,000 titles for a fee. Many titles, including some by big-name authors like Philip Roth and John Updike, aren’t there.

In case you were wondering, there were 129 million books in the world as of 2010.

Subscribe to Kindle “Unlimited,” then, and you’ve got access to less than 0.5% of the world’s books. But don’t worry, you’ll always have those photos of the school play.

Until you get a new phone.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net and SkewedNews.net, is the author of “Snowden,” about the NSA whistleblower. His new book “Bernie” about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, is now available for pre-order. Want to support independent journalism? You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

 

6 Crazy Things Donald Trump Says That Are Absolutely Right

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Ted Rall

Originally published by SkewedNews.net:

Donald-Trump-9002Donald Trump has surged to the top of the Republican heap by saying outrageous things, issuing over-the-top insults, and making ridiculous proposals. Some of his utterances, like his sexist remarks about Carly Fiorina’s looks, are offensive. His nativist demagoguery, calling for mass arrests and deportations of Latinos and a visa ban to Muslim visitors, are outright fascist.

Trump also says stuff that other politicians, and the media are afraid to say and need to be said. Here is a sample of the top six.

  • Invading Iraq was stupid. The pundits say San Bernadino changed everything, at least the race for the Republican nomination, replacing pocketbook issues with foreign policy and terrorism as voters’ main concerns. If that’s true, if hawkishness is king, then why is the GOP frontrunner doing well despite his consistent opposition to invading Iraq — the most significant Republican-led foreign policy initiative of the last 30 years? “Right now we have ISIS, which is worse than Hussein. Hussein did one thing: he killed terrorists,” Trump said in May. “We are in worse shape than we ever were. It’s a mess.” Most American people agree — but even Democrats don’t come down as hard on Bush’s Iraq War as Trump. (Maybe that’s cuz Hillary voted for it and Bernie, supposedly the wild socialist of the campaign, voted to fund it.) Everything else aside, Trump deserves points for hammering away at this.
  • Interventionism in the Middle East is stupid. Bernie Sanders criticizes America’s penchant for “regime change,” but Trump uses a sledgehammer where Sanders is content with calm analysis. Trump is also more willing to say that a secular socialist dictator beats the after-me-the-deluge play-it-by-ear approach we’ve seen lately, creating power vacuums filled by radical Islamists. “She is the one that caused all this problem with her stupid policies,” Trump said December 13, referring to Hillary’s tenure as secretary of state. “You look at what she did with Libya [assassinating Moammar Khaddafi and funding Benghazi-based rebels, including many radicals], what she did with Syria [supporting the Free Syrian Army, parts of which became ISIS]. Look at Egypt, what happened with Egypt, a total mess. [The Obama Administration secretly supported the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, then yielded to buyer’s remorse and backed the military coup that overthrew Mohamed Morsi, the nation’s first democratically elected president.] They don’t back — we don’t back any of our allies. You look, she was truly, if not ‘the,’ one of the worst secretary of states in the history of the country. She talks about me being dangerous. She’s killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity.” “What do you mean, hundreds of thousands?” a TV host asked, clearly shocked at his candor. “She was secretary of state. Obama was president, the team,” Trump replied. “Two real geniuses.” Trump has it right — dead right.
  • Good relations with Russia would be a good thing. Reading and watching corporate media, you could easily forget that the Berlin Wall ever came down or that the Cold War ever ended. Never mind that post-Soviet Russia has never directly confronted the United States in its sphere of influence. To his credit, sees the wisdom of not picking fights with a nation with the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, a colossus that spans nine time zones and possesses vast natural resources. “I believe I’ll get along fine with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Trump reiterated “I believe I’ll get along fine with other leaders. Obama doesn’t get along with Putin. Putin can’t stand our president and it’s causing us difficulty. And, frankly, and I said it a long time ago, if Russia wants to bomb the hell out of ISIS and join us in that effort, I am absolutely fine with it. I think that’s an asset, not a liability.”
  • Electoral politics in America are corrupt. “I will tell you that our system is broken,” Trump said during one of the debates. “I give to many people. I give to everybody, when they call I give, and you know what? When I need something from them, two years, three years later, I call, they are there for me.” No one else, certainly not Hillary or his rival GOP contenders who are on the take, has the credibility of a guy who can personally attest to using his billions to buy Congressmen and Senators.
  • We need more legal immigration. As noted above, immigration policy is where Trumpism goes off the rails. Even so, Trump makes one reasonable point: we need less illegal immigration and — this next parts gets lost a lot in the furor over his calls for magical walls he’ll somehow get Mexico to pay for — more legal immigration. “Build a wall with a big beautiful door for legal immigration,” Trump said. Granted, he has flipflopped on the issue. But increasing legal immigration is still a conversation we need to be having — even though a lot of the new arrivals ought to be (sorry, Donald) Muslim refugees from places we screwed up, like Syria.
  • Common Core sucks. Like many of Trump’s stances, he’s on the right side of Common Core for the wrong reasons — he doesn’t like federal control of education. (Frankly, all the countries the U.S. is falling behind have centralized educational curricula.) But the Common Core standards enacted by the Obama Administration really have been a “disaster,” as Trump says. “I believe Common Core is a very bad thing,” he says. Last year, most students failed the way-too-difficult test in 49 states, destroying confidence and self-esteem among millions of American children. Meanwhile, teachers — who can be fired if their kids don’t do well — are spending scores of hours teaching to this stupid test as opposed to, you know, teaching actual knowledge. You won’t get this straight talk on Common Core from Hillary Clinton, or even Bernie Sanders.

For Skewed News, I’m Ted Rall.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: In Defense of Donald Trump’s Namecalling

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Ted Rall

Donald Trump likes to call people “stupid.” And/or “loser.”

Obviously, it’s juvenile.

Also obviously, Republican primary voters are into it. They like Trump’s short declarative sentences — the secret sauce of which is namecalling.

Trump’s namecalling, so loud and so short on specifics, drives the establishment political writers who dominate corporate media crazy. I suspect this is because it doesn’t give them much to do: no 12-point plans to debunk, no statistics to factcheck, no rhetorical rabbit holes in which to run around in circles at 50 cents a word.

I think it’s fabulous.

Not his politics. Those are reprehensible. For the purpose of this week’s column, however, let’s focus on The Donald’s namecalling.

First, though, I’m not at all into the “loser” thing.

Consider the source: it’s hard not to win when you inherit a fortune from your dad. Trump started the marathon of life at mile 25-1/2.

Competition does more harm than good, especially the way we do it here in America. Consider athletics: everyone who doesn’t win a gold medal or get ranked first in his or her sport is technically a loser. But those “losers” include a lot of superb athletes, many of whom are separated from the gold by random hundredths of a second in some race that easily could have gone another way. Not to mention, competition is subject to the corruption, nepotism and bad taste that determines that neither Patti Smith nor Public Enemy deserve a Grammy while Toto and Milli Vanilli do. If Patti Smith is a “loser,” there’s something wrong with the dictionary.

There is, on the other hand, something wonderfully refreshing about Donald Trump’s gleeful deployment of the S-word.

“She is the one that caused all this problem with her stupid policies,” Trump said, referring to Hillary Clinton. “You look at what she did with Libya, what she did with Syria. Look at Egypt, what happened with Egypt, a total mess. She was truly — if not the — one of the worst secretaries of state in the history of the country. She talks about me being dangerous. She’s killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity.”

Trump is absolutely right. Hillary voted for the invasion of Iraq, which killed a million people. As I’ve pointed out, it wasn’t just an immoral decision — it was a stupid one, since anyone with a half a brain could see at the time that Saddam probably didn’t have WMDs, and that Bush’s war would be a disaster.

As secretary of state, Clinton never met a war she didn’t love. Under her watch and following her counsel, the United States armed radical jihadis who are now terrorists, helped topple Moammar Gaddafi, expanded a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Libyans and reduced one of the most advanced nations in Africa into a failed state. Then she turned around and did the same exact thing to Syria.

Stupid.

Let Hillary’s supporters take offense. How is it unfair, wrong or intemperate to call out a foreign policy record that fits the dictionary definition of “stupid” — doing the same thing over and over, even though it never works? Stupid is as stupid does. Hillary is stupid, especially on foreign policy, and Trump is right to say so.

Winner or loser, Trump has done political debate in America a huge favor by freeing “stupid” from the rhetorical prison of words and phrases polite people aren’t allowed to use.

Interestingly, stupid people aren’t all losers and losers aren’t always stupid in Trumpworld. Hillary Clinton has one hell of a resume, which she has parlayed into a big pile of cash. She is, by Trump standards, a winner (albeit a stupid one). If I met Trump, I’d ask him if a smart person can be a loser (possible example: he called the obviously smart Russell Brand a loser, but also a “dummy”).

Pre-Trump, American politics and culture suffered from a lack of stupid-calling. I am serious.

“There has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western countries,” Ray Williams wrote last year in Psychology Today. Insults reflect a society’s values. Americans value macho masculinity, good looks and youth, so our top slurs accuse their victims of being effeminate, weak, ugly, fat, old and outdated. In France, where the life of the mind is prized so much that one of the nation’s top-rated TV shows featured philosophers and auteurs discussing politics and culture over cigarettes, there are few things worse than being called stupid and having it stick. A society that ranks “stupid” as one of its worst insults lets it be known that being smart is at least as important as being tough or hot or buff.

So, Donald Trump, thanks for dropping those S-bombs.

But I’m not voting for you.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net and SkewedNews.net, is the author of “Snowden,” about the NSA whistleblower. His new book “Bernie” about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, is now available for pre-order. Want to support independent journalism? You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

Donald Trumpism Explained: It’s Free Trade, Stupid

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Ted Rall

Originally published at Skewed News:

Skewed News — Donald Trump is a nativist asshole. Why is he leading in the polls, and what does this say about Americans and/or Republicans?

Analysts and pundits are obsessing over these questions even more now that the real estate developer billionaire candidate seemed to have jumped the political shark with his statement that he wants to ban Muslims from emigrating to or even merely visiting the United States as tourists. Some writers called that the beginning of the end, yet his poll numbers shot up as a result.

Are likely Republican primary voters a bunch of xenophobes and racists? Yes, that’s part of it. The GOP has a long, sorry history of race-baiting and bigotry. A 2012 AP poll found that 79% of Republicans are racist, compared to 32% of Democrats.

There’s nothing new about Republican racism. But Trumpism, being increasingly compared to fascism, is clearly a new phenomenon in modern American politics, which had seemed to be moving away from the charismatic populist Huey Long and Ross Perot types and increasingly toward the bland European postwar technocrat model epitomized by President Obama.

Experts are struggling to explain the effectiveness of Trump’s special sauce — militant xenophobia with a dual focus on keeping out Muslims (because some might be terrorists) and throwing out Mexicans (because some are rapists). He’s soaring, month after month, despite being untelegenic, way short on specifics, obviously ignorant, and being repeatedly caught lying.

Why is he having so much success, despite his shortcomings?

Mark Krikorian of the anti-immigration group Center for Immigration Studies comes the closest of anyone to the answer — but even he doesn’t fully get The Donald’s appeal.

“Every society needs elites, but our elites have come to reject the basic worldview of the people they purport to lead,” Krikorian writes. “We have, as the late Samuel Huntington wrote, a patriotic public and a post-American, post-national elite that is mystified, at best – and disgusted, at worst – at the public’s demand that our government put the interests of Americans first. This disconnect is why immigration policy is at the core of Trump’s success.”

Absolutely right. But then, he goes a little off the rails:

“Mass immigration is perhaps the most potent symbol of the elite’s unconcern with America’s sovereignty and the well-being of ordinary people. Many Americans – not just Republicans but also independents and some Democrats – want policies that promote America’s sovereignty and self-determination. Our elites are more out-of-step with the public on immigration than on any other issue. The Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs surveyed both the public and opinion leaders on a variety of issues broadly related to foreign policy and found the biggest gaps on immigration policy. Even questions like support for the United Nations or support for foreign aid didn’t show as big a gap as immigration. Surveys of specific constituencies found the same thing. Whether union leaders vs. union members, religious leaders vs. their members, or minority leaders vs. minority voters, the results were the same – huge gaps between the demands of ordinary people for tighter borders and commitment to American workers vs. elite preference for amnesty, loose borders and increased immigration.”

Krikorian is right: illegal immigration is a symbol, but it’s not the big problem itself.

Numerous studies have shown that illegal immigration has a neutral or even upward effect on the wages of legal citizens working in the United States. Overall, however, real wages of U.S. workers have been stagnant or declining since the 1970s, while the richest 1% and superrichest 1% of 1% have seen a massive surge in income and wealth.

Elections are mostly about pocketbook issues, and 2016 is no exception. Adding to pressure on average American workers is the fact that, since the 2008-09 financial crisis, credit has been extremely difficult to obtain. Not only are you losing ground to inflation year after year, you’ve maxed out your credit card and the banks aren’t sending you any new ones.

Worries about declining living standards are at the top of the concerns of American voters. But neither the Democratic nor Republican parties are talking, much less doing anything about, people’s fears that they and their children will keep finding it harder and harder to pay their bills.

It is true that the borders have been open for years, as Trump says. The two parties have long been perfectly fine with this. The Republicans’ business allies like the cheap labor and Democrats think second-generation Latinos are likelier to vote for them. But as I said above, open borders are only a symbol, particularly now that the U.S. economy is so bad that more Mexicans are going back home than coming here.

Both parties have also been in cahoots on free trade. From NAFTA to the TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership), the Ds and Rs in Congress have rubberstamped every proposal to liberalize trade. But these deals are terrible for American workers, not least because they outsource U.S. jobs overseas.

Trump is the first major candidate in years to oppose free trade deals, saying he would kill both NAFTA and the TPP. “I am all for free trade, but it’s got to be fair. When Ford moves their massive plants to Mexico, we get nothing. I want them to stay in Michigan,” he said. Poor and working-class voters, many of whom are backing Trump right now, have long opposed free trade agreements.

Bernie Sanders also opposes free trade. Interestingly, Sanders would beat Trump, whereas Hillary Clinton would not.

I would modify Krokorian’s thesis to say that Trumpism is the primal scream of an American public sick and tired of politicians who put don’t put the interests of American workers first.

For Skewed News, I’m Ted Rall.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Trump Goosesteps in the Fascist Footsteps of FDR, Bush and Obama

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Ted Rall

            George Stephanopoulos, ABC News: “You’re increasingly being compared to Hitler. Does that give you any pause at all?”

Donald Trump: “Because what I’m doing is no different than what FDR [did]. FDR’s solution for Germans, Italians, Japanese many years ago. This is a president who was highly respected by all. He did the same thing — if you look at what he was doing it was far worse.”

When it comes down to core values, you can never make an exception.

This week shows why.

After Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump called for a ban against Muslims to enter the United States — all Muslims, including businesspeople, college students, athletes, performers, even U.S. citizens currently living abroad — corporate media and the experts in their contact lists called the idea outlandish.

Primarily, they said it was crazy because it is unprecedented.

For example, NYU law professor Nancy Morawetz told The New York Times: “This is just so antithetical to the history of the United States. I cannot recall any historical precedent for denying immigration based on religion.”

True, there hasn’t been a religious test for admission to the U.S. But in a broader sense, Trump’s idea continues a long tradition of using immigration rules as expressions of American racism and intolerance.

There have been plenty of blanket bans motivated by bigotry. The Chinese Exclusion Act comes to mind. The Immigration Act of 1924 banned all immigration to the U.S. by Asians and Arabs. People with HIV-AIDS weren’t allowed to visit the U.S. from 1987 to 2009.

In each case, supporters of blanket exclusions argued that their extraordinary measures were “temporary” (that’s what Trump says) responses to unusual threats, such as the 19th century “yellow peril.” (Asians with “special powers,” Americans were told, were going to crush white culture.) Now we understand that the threats were trivial or nonexistent, that these responses were outlandishly reactionary. At the time, however, idiots and opportunists exploited the masses’ fear and ignorance to whip up paranoia — which set some terrible precedents we’re living with today.

Trump’s no-Muslims-need-apply plan is being criticized harshly. Rightly so, though no one asks the obvious question: If this is about border security, wouldn’t a real Islamic terrorist lie when asked about his religious affiliation, or claim to have renounced Islam, while applying for a visa? After all, some of the 9/11 hijackers were clean-shaven, drank alcohol and hung out in topless bars.

If anything, criticism of Trump has been too muted. Not one single Republican presidential candidate or major GOP official has said he or she would not support Trump should he win the Republican nomination. Believe you me, they’ll all fall in line if The Donald becomes The Man running against Hillary or Bernie.

Such weaselry is part of the way these things usually go. First there’s some sort of shock. Then a demagogue enters the scene who frames the shock as part of a crisis, followed by overreaction (we must give up some freedoms to stay safe) based on “exceptional times” because “everything has changed. Ultimately sanity returns, thanks to the passage of time, the cooling of passions and moving on to other concerns. This is a pattern we’ve seen before and we will surely see again — mainly because previous overreactions, many of them never renounced, serve as a perfect justification for new crimes against humanity.

“Look at what FDR did many years ago,” Trump said by way of justification, “and he’s one of the most respected presidents.”

So, sadly, true.

During World War II Franklin Roosevelt issued presidential proclamations that allowed officials to declare people of German, Italian and Japanese ancestry to be “enemy aliens” who could be detained without trial. Even though there is no evidence that any Japanese-American ever committed a disloyal act during the war, FDR ordered the internal deportation of tens of thousands from the Pacific Coast to concentration camps. Many lost their homes and their businesses. (Trump hasn’t decided whether he’d create Muslim concentration camps beyond the existing facilities at Guantánamo and overseas.)

There are two problems with FDR’s assault on the basic legal principle that we are innocent until proven guilty: his actions themselves, and the failure of our political and legal culture to repudiate him and what he did.

Had they been reversed and retroactively annulled, the FDR actions cited so approvingly by Trump would nevertheless stand as historical precedent. When something Really Bad happens — a sneak attack on your naval base, planes crashing into buildings, a couple going berserk and shooting up their workplace — all bets are off, including the Constitution.

But they were never annulled, much less reviled. So they also stand as legal precedent.

As Trump says, FDR is considered one of our finest presidents. The New Deal and winning World War II are what we remember. The internment camps, which affected only people with yellow skin, are a minor footnote in history classes. The message is clear: No one cares. If we thought the camps were really so wrong, Roosevelt would stand with Nixon and George W. Bush among our worst leaders, the same way Woodrow Wilson’s accomplishments in World War I and with the League of Nations are now being eclipsed by his racism.

And he should. Send just one kid to a camp, as FDR did to thousands, and yeah, that really does erase the Social Security Act.

The United States has never fully renounced those concentration camps for Japanese-Americans. Forty-three years after the end of World War II, Congress finally issued an apology but only paid token $20,000 payments to each surviving victim. (40,000 of the 120,000 prisoners had died.) No one was compensated for lost property. It’s still a fairly obscure chapter in history; I’d be surprised if 10% of Americans know it happened.

Disgustingly, the legal underpinnings of Roosevelt’s actions remain in full effect, namely the 1944 Supreme Court ruling in favor of the government in Korematsu v. United States. Fear of espionage and sabotage — though completely unsubstantiated — outweighed the right to due process of Japanese-Americans, said a 6-3 majority.

As a rule Americans prefer “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as Obama said in 2009 about Bush-era torture. The trouble is, the future winds up looking a lot like the past unless that past is truly dead and buried.

Use waterboarding, as U.S. troops occupying the Philippines did with impunity against Filipino independence fighters, and it comes back after 9/11. (No Marines were ever prosecuted for using this form of torture, but the U.S. did execute Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American POWs during World War II. Since Obama refused to prosecute CIA waterboarders, we can be sure it will happen again.)

Allow the president to fight a war without a formal declaration of war, “exceptionally” violating the Constitution as Congress did in 1950 with Korea, and a future president will do the same in Vietnam. And Panama. And Iraq. And Bosnia. And Afghanistan. And Iraq again.

And now Syria.

Because America never drives a stake through the darkest heart of its history, like the Korematsu decision, “exceptions” become precedents that keep coming back.

Several of George W. Bush’s memos calling for the suspension of the ancient right of habeas corpus cited Korematsu in order to justify holding Muslim POWs without charges or access to an attorney at Gitmo. In 2004, the Bush Administration used the precedent to fight a challenge by Gitmo detainees — prisoners who have been languishing under both Bush and Obama. (The Military Commissions Act of 2006 ended habeas corpus, the 800-year-old right to a court trial, for American citizens.)

As recently as 2014, Justice Antonin Scalia said the ruling remained in effect. It was, he said, “wrong, but it could happen again in wartime.”

Or, under a President Trump, in peacetime.

Just this once.

Because this time is different.

(Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net and SkewedNews.net, is the author of “Snowden,” about the NSA whistleblower. His new book “Bernie” about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, comes out January 12 and is available for pre-order. Want to support independent journalism? You can subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)

COPYRIGHT 2015 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

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