It’s an American Dictator, Stupid

What do you call a political leader who does whatever he pleases? A dictator. When there’s no meaningful internal opposition to his actions, he’s a durable one.

For those Americans who still doubt that the 2000 (and probably 2004) elections were a coup d’état carried out by a military-corporate junta of bandits, looters and mass murderers–OK, I get it, it’s hard to accept–the rabid cat is out of the bag. George W. Bush is a dictator.

What else can you call a leader who wages a wildly unpopular war and then escalates it after citizens have delivered a resounding and overwhelming no-confidence vote? Bush is a tyrant, and he’s every bit as deranged and dangerous as his father’s former employee, whom he sent to the gallows last week.

The Democrats? Useless, as usual. They’re planning to try to possibly pass a non-binding resolution, not even calling for a full-fledged pullout but merely asking pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top for Bush to not send another 20,000 to 40,000 troops. To a war, remember, that no one wants anymore. At all.

I don’t say this lightly: Bush is a dictator, albeit one mildly inconvenienced from time to time by remnants of the former opposition party. And we live in a dictatorship.

It’s the Iraqi Resistance, Stupid

I’ve been using the term for years, but isn’t it finally time, nearly four years into the occupation of Iraq, for the American media to join the rest of the world? That’s right. It’s time to stop calling the Iraqis who are resisting our oppressive presence “insurgents” and use a word that fits a lot better: “resistants.”

I know. They don’t wear berets or blow up Nazis. They don’t look like the French Resistance, which virtually defines the word in the American psyche. But the media has already quietly dropped the fiction that the Iraqi government is sovereign. Most press accounts refer to the “occupation.”

The Iraqi resistance fits the bill in all the important ways: they are using violence to resist the U.S. occupation and its puppet regime. More importantly, “insurgency” implies a nascent movement that may or may not last. You can have an insurgency for a year or two. What we have now looks more permanent. Can anyone imagine a scenario in which the Iraqis put away their guns and IEDs before we leave?

Ted Rall Subscription Service

It’s that time again! As you may recall, I charge for the Ted Rall Subscription Service–whereby you receive my cartoons and columns in your e-mail box well before the rest of the world gets them on the web (in some cases, days before) and you support my work–annually. With the New Year comes my request for you to consider signing up for the TRSS.

After discussion with some current subscribers I have decided to keep the rate the same as last year, $25. So if you’d like to get my stuff by email, please pay in one of the two easy ways:

BY MAIL: Send $25 to Ted Rall, PO Box 1134, New York NY 10027. Make sure to include your email address with your payment!

BY PAYPAL: Email me at chet@rall.com and I’ll tell you what to do.

Thanks again for your support and Happy 2007!

Obviously…

I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ll work on this.

Happy New Year, Readers!

Here’s to a happy and prosperous new year to you and yours, and everyone else.

I’m doing my own small part to add to the joy by granting a frequently received request: to enable comments on the . So, assuming I’ve done all the programming correctly, you should be able to comment on this and future posts henceforth. Right-wingers take note: my moderator will read and approve all comments before they get posted, so be civil if not downright polite.

Happy New Year, Ann Coulter

Yesterday I sent the following e-mail to those who promised to support a lawsuit against Ann Coulter.

Earlier this year I contemplated filing a lawsuit for slander and libel against columnist Ann Coulter in order to hold her accountable for her verbal and written statements to the effect that I had entered Iran’s contest for cartoons about (presumably denying/mocking) the Holocaust. These statements, though false, prompted people ignorant of Coulter’s long history of publishing lies to believe that I was anti-Semitic. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I wanted the chance to set the record straight in court.

One needs to have two things on one’s side to win a lawsuit: money and the law. Toward the first end I reached out to readers outraged by Coulter’s malicious smears against me and others whose only crime is criticizing the Bush Administration. They—you—didn’t let me down. I obtained serious pledge commitments (I asked readers not to send the actual money until and unless I filed a suit) sufficient to make fighting a suit against a moneyed defendant like Coulter feasible.

Because I am opposed to burdening the legal system with vanity litigation, I decided that I would only sue if I had an excellent chance to win. Therefore I asked my attorneys to exhaustively research case precedents relative to slander and libel in New York State and under federal law. Months of research have forced me to conclude that, though a lawsuit against Coulter would certainly withstand initial challenges and motions to dismiss and might ultimately prevail through verdicts and subsequent appeals, the road ahead is too uncertain to justify spending thousands of dollars of pledges, not to mention my own money.

Unlike Bush, I don’t enter into battles I’m not certain of winning.

More than ever, I believe that Coulter’s attempts to assassinate my character are illegal as well a reprehensible. Unfortunately, she may have sufficiently muddied the waters with her toxic brand of commentary that she might be able to avoid a judgment against her by claiming First Amendment protection as a satirist. If Ann Coulter tells a joke, does anyone laugh? If not, is it a joke?

The interesting legal conundrum for Coulter is that she would have had to testify either that (a) she intended her audience to believe I had entered the Iranian cartoon contest or (b) it was just a joke. She couldn’t cop to (a) without getting smacked with a libel and/or slander judgment. If she claimed (b), however, she’d be admitting that she is not, as she presents herself on Fox and other TV networks, a serious political analyst, but rather a comedienne—or attempted one, anyway. It would have brought her ill-begotten career as a talking head, if not to a crashing halt, to a stall. So which is it, Ann? Are you a pundit or a comic? I regret that I’m not going to get to watch her figure that one out at a deposition.

So there’s not going to be a Rall v. Coulter—at least not now. Look at the bright side, though—she could still go down for possible vote fraud!

Jonathan Chait in the LA Times

Jonathan Chait’s column in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times suggests putting Saddam Hussein back in charge of Iraq. Nice thought, or at least I thought so when I wrote it first. (I won’t even mention the cartoon I drew about it over a year ago.)

Turkmenbashi Dies: Central Asia on the Brink

The Central Asia-based conflagration that I predict in SILK ROAD TO RUIN began today with the death of the 66-year-old absolute dictator of Turkmenistan, Sapamurat “Turkmenbashi” Niyazov. Niyazov is the first of the generation of Soviet-era Communist Party bosses who ran all of the southern “Stan” republics of Central Asia to die in office since independence in 1991.

Unlike Fidel Castro’s Cuba and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, no successor was ever designated and a ferocious power struggle has broken out in Ashkhabat, the Turkmen capital, where the constitutional heir has been arrested by a heretofore unknown deputy prime minister who has seized power as acting president.

Turkmenistan, which borders Iran and Afghanistan and controls the world’s largest reserves of natural gas on earth–as well as key refineries and pipelines that process and carry Kazakh crude oil–is entering a dangerous period of political instability. Long-suppressed tribal rivalries and religious schisms will rise to the fore. Though hardly inevitable, a steady decline and eventual civil war are possible and indeed probable.

Energy futures traders are stunned by the news, and higher energy prices will almost certainly result.

Look for Russia and the United States to vie for control of post-Niyazov Turkmenistan through proxies within and outside of the country, and for possible military in intervention by one, or possibly both nations, during 2007.

Niyazov’s death marks the beginning of the end of the fragile post-Soviet order in
Central Asia, which has been held together by despotism. The future can only go in one of three directions now: Western military occupation, failed statehood, or–least likely–radical Islamism. The War on Terror is over. The New Great Game is afoot.

The most comprehensive essay ever written about Niyazov is a chapter titled “The Glory That Is Turkmenbashi” in my recent book SILK ROAD TO RUIN: IS CENTRAL ASIA THE NEW MIDDLE EAST?. The book also contains a detailed overview of Turkmenistan and its role vis-à-vis American foreign policy.

Here’s a sneak peak at “The Glory That Is Turkmenbashi”:

In a region where no one can imagine a president who isn’t an egotistical tyrant, posters of each country’s beloved benevolent despot festoon every police checkpoint and corruption is merely an economical word to describe business as usual, saying that Turkmenbashi’s Turkmenistan sets the standard for autocracy is selling him short. Not only has the Central Asian dictator created the most elaborate and grotesquely comical personality cult since Ptolemy put the pharaohs out of business two thousand years ago, his unique blending of naked greed and breathtakingly obvious stupidity has elevated autocracy to an art form. He has also reduced one of the world’s intrinsically wealthiest nations into a paragon of despair and near universal poverty.

Wherever you travel in this desolate desert nation nestled between southwest Russia and Iran, Turkmenbashi is there. Giant posters bearing his face and his ubiquitous Nazi-inspired motto “Halk, Watan, Turkmenbashi!” (“One Nation, One People, One Leader”) adorn every building, public and private in a country that would otherwise most notable for its meteorological inhospitability to the five million people doomed to have been born there. Signs bearing his quotes and images of the not-so-great dictator’s face are everywhere you turn. Turkmenbashi is on a painting behind the hotel receptionist. He’s on the businessman’s lapel pin, hanging from the taxi driver’s rearview mirror, even on a pendant hanging around the casino prostitute’s neck. He’s on T-shirts, CDs, DVDs, groceries, mosques, his own line of cologne. No one can get away from Turkmenbashi—not even in the desert.

Turkmenistan one of the few countries on earth to not have a river run through it. Its vast Karakum desert is home to animals—cobras, scorpions, giant monitor lizards and zemzen (“land crocodiles”)—that bite and sting and claw with alarming ferocity and regularity. Temperature readings of more than one hundred fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit in the shade are not uncommon; heat exceeding one hundred is standard. There is, however, no shade in this, the westernmost nation of Central Asia. Water is processed and piped in from the oil-fouled Caspian Sea and the Amu Darya river (Alexander the Great called it the Oxus) running along the eastern border with Uzbekistan. Most Turkmen are nomads similar in culture and tradition to the Bedouin. Outside the capital Ashkhabat and a few outlying provincial capitals, Turkmen set up their yurts wherever a few blades of grass poke out of the sand to feed their camels. City life, secularized by seven decades of Soviet rule, features grim mafia-run discos and thinly-patronized English-style pubs with CNN piped in on a time delay so that news about Turkmenistan and its Central Asian neighbors can be intercepted and blacked out. Even the U.S. embassy is isolated; Turkmenbashi cuts off international telephone and Internet service for weeks at a time. Out in the desert, old traditions live on. Women carry their clan’s savings in clunky silver jewelry hollowed out to hold bank notes; touching, much less robbing, a woman, is just cause for murder. Nomadic hospitality, on the other hand, occasionally prompts men to loan their wives to sate the desires of passing travelers. They would, after all, do the same for them. Sometimes they sell them; the going rate for a tribal wife is two to five thousand dollars depending on age, appearance and personality.
It feels like the end of the world. But in the windblown desert, along remote stretches of road that see less than one vehicle daily, immense billboards have been erected to proclaim the glory that is Turkmenbashi. Halk! Watan! Turkmenbashi!

Suicide Girls Interview with Ted Rall

There’s an interview with me about SILK ROAD TO RUIN at the Suicide Girls website and another one about my choice of Richard Stevens’ Diesel Sweeties at The Daily Cartoonist.

iPod Offer Gone

A benevolent reader has taken me up on my iPod offer.