My latest cartoon for ANewDomain.net is about the revelation that the NSA is spying on Americans’ online sex habits and porn watching histories in order to exploit “vulnerabilities” so they can be blackmailed and/or discredited. Incredibly sleazy and highly reminiscent of the McCarthy era and the Nixon Dirty Tricks of the 1970s — and it’s all courtesy of the Obama Administration.
Check out the backstory of the current controversy here. Fascinating stuff about how other editorial cartoonists are routinely accused of racism merely because they criticize Obama — from the Left.
In a classic display of the dictum that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, conservative talker Glenn Beck has (sort of) defended me in the court of public opinion.
Beck took to the airwaves to say that I’d somehow been hoisted by my own race-baiting petard by not speaking up for right-wingers accused of racism for criticizing Obama:
The minute these guys who have power up at the top find you no longer useful, you are done. And you’ve set your own trap. You’ve set the standard: There is no standard.
Well, I don’t think I was ever useful to the Democratic Party. I’m not in this for the party, I’m in it for the politics — and the Democratic Party abandoned us a long time ago. Still, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and Beck had some sage words:
Look at the McCarthy hearings. When you can just say, ‘COMMUNIST!’ This is why we have said: Racism is the new McCarthyism. What they are doing is the new McCarthyism…Once they label you with that, you are done. That’s what happened in the 1950′s… You were labeled a communist, and your life was destroyed,” Glenn explained. “The same thing is happening with Ted Rall. Is Ted a racist? I don’t know. I don’t know him. Was that a racist cartoon? No.
Thanks, Glenn. We won’t mention that McCarthyism was by and large a conservative/Republican phenomenon.
I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week:
Angelenos try not to think about the shifting plates beneath their feet and their wheels, but everyone knows the Big One is coming — and a bad enough one is coming sooner than that.
Short of moving somewhere where tectonics aren’t quite as disconcerting (i.e., where it snows) there isn’t much we can do about earthquakes. But we can prepare for the worst by mitigating the damage.
Toward that end, Los Angeles city building officials are creating a list of “soft story” wood-frame buildings that were built before 1978. “Soft-story structures often are built over carports and held up with slender columns, leaving the upper floors to crash into ground-floor apartments during shaking,” Rosanna Xia and Rong-Gong Lin II report in the Times.
There are probably about 6,000 of these buildings. The city says it will take at least a year to complete a list. After that, a retrofitting program will be put in place.
But what if an earthquake happens between now and then? It’s not like Mother (or, not to be sexist, Father) Nature waits for bureaucracy to work its magic.
Yeah, I’m a negative cuss.
So anyway, I began thinking about what, if anything, could be done to stave off the inevitable for at least a year — because the idea that this can wait another year is both horrible and amusing at the same time. How do these people think? Walk softly? Pray?
I know. They’re just civil servants trying to do their jobs with shrinking budgets and limited resources. But if, God or fire demon forbid, something bad happens before that retrofit project is finished, everyone is going look back and wonder why we didn’t throw money at it to get it done faster.
When you’ve been drawing the same character for years, you go on autopilot. After Daily Kos censored my work (on the pretext that my Obama looked simian(!!!), which they didn’t notice for years), I say down to draw him from scratch, as though he were new and unfamiliar.
When I put him through my usual style — which applies the same to members of all ethnic groups — the results were, well, not good.
If anything, he’d turn out more objectionable.
The president is older. He’s lost weight. His hair is cut even shorter. Whatever ape-like demeanor a cartoon of him had in 2009 would look worse in 2013.
Of course, all humans are apes. We share 99.4% of our DNA with chimpanzees. Which is why I look like an ape and Brad Pitt looks like an ape and Dick Cheney looks like an ape. To not draw Obama the same way I draw everyone else, to make him look less ape-like than everyone else, seems fucked up.
So right now, looks like the smiley face. If the Militant Demobamabot Assholes want to censor me, let them end up with something no one can call “racist”: a depiction of the soulless inspidity of our drone murderer, bankster enabler, pro-torture, warmonger of a lying sack president.
Print Magazine interview with Ted Rall about censorship. http://www.printmag.com/uncategorized/ted-rall-censored/
The Progressive’s Ian Murphy has an interview with me about Daily Kos’ disgusting attempt to stifle criticism of the President here:
As Ruben Bolling, creator of “Tom the Dancing Bug,” notes: anyone familiar with Rall’s work knows that crude, “ape-like” depictions of all races is basically his shtick. We’re primates, after all. And while a lot of the irrational anger directed at Obama is undoubtedly rooted in the irrational fear of melanin, it’s a bit tragic when the left cannibalizes one of its own.
