America’s Best Conservative Cartoonist…

…is Chuck Asay.

I’ve long admired Asay, an older cartoonist whose multi-panel approach presages modern cartooning and eschews retro styles in other ways as well, because of his mad editorial cartooning chops. His right-wing politics are beside the point. A good cartoonist is a good cartoonist, period.

Check out an interview with him here:

He also says nice things about me:

I also like and respect Ted Rall. He is a very thoughtful person with incredible gifts. He writes well and is passionate about ideas. We may disagree about ideas from time to time but I can think of no other person who I’d like to be locked up with if we should wind up in jail somewhere.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Ted Rall in News Story About Editorial Cartooning

There’s an article containing my quotes about the editorial cartooning profession by Medill Reports:

Rall and many modern political cartoonists have also moved away from the use of symbolism in their work, something that marked nearly all historical editorial cartoons. Typical images included the use of the donkey and the elephant to represent political parties.

“No more labels, no metaphors, no cheesy Uncle Sam’s crying. It’s dumb!” said Rall. “That imagery isn’t popular with readers. They don’t get it, they don’t relate to it.”

Hillary Clinton 3am Response on Youtube
posted by Susan Stark

I found this response to Hillary’s “3am” ad on Youtube:

President Hillary Clinton answers the phone….

HILLARY: Hello?
BUSH: This is your Secretary of Defense, former President Bush. The terrorists may be bulding a doomsday weapon. If we drop our nukes now, millions of people will die, but billions of people could be saved. This is the most important decision in all of human history. What are you going to do?
HILLARY: Oh dear… where’s Bill?
BUSH: He’s out playing golf.(long pause)
HILLARY: Well, we’ll have to wait until he gets back.

What is wrong with this response, besides the obvious sexism in it? It seems that since the end of the Cold War, we have regressed into an appalling lack of knowledge of what happens after a nuclear war. The radiation fallout would kill not just the intended target, but any place the wind would spread it to. And then there is nuclear winter, which would finish off more than the targeted millions. I learned this in high school when I was a teenager in the ’80s. What are they teaching kids in class these days? Anything???

The first babies born after the end of the Cold War are now turning 18, and are old enough to vote and start holding political office. How many of them know what happens after a nuclear bomb is dropped? Maybe the teachers today should order from Netflix a coupla movies called The Day After and Threads and show them in class. They scared the pants off of me when I saw them, and they’ll scare the pants off of any kid watching it today. Scary, but necessary.

TED RALL COLUMN: HOPE YOU CAN’T VOTE FOR

Ralph Nader Appeals to Disenfranchised Liberals

“What,” editorializes U.S. News & World Report, “does Ralph Nader bring to the political dialogue this year? Answer: nothing except for his own inflated ego.” Dimestore psychoanalysis was the standard reaction to Nader’s third third-party presidential bid. “An ego-driven spoiler,” the Des Moines Register called him. “He seems to have a pretty high opinion of his own work,” jabbed Barack Obama.

You see, other politicians who seek the presidency are like the Dalai Lama, humble and self-effacing. Obama and Hillary? Two sweeties. Not an ounce of ego between them.

Even our former colonial masters put in their two pence. Nader’s “egotism and cult of left-wing purity has been an utter disaster for the values he affects to espouse,” railed the UK Independent. Nader’s values would fare better, apparently, were he to shut up and keep them to himself.

Is Ralph really a spoiler? To answer “yes,” you have to buy three assumptions:
First, that the two-party system is written in stone. But it’s not. There’s nothing in the Constitution about two parties, or about parties at all. (The Founding Fathers were dismayed when parties emerged around 1800.) Besides, the Democratic-Republican stranglehold ill serves a diverse population of 300 million. Because parliamentary democracies offer voters a wide selection of parties representing almost every conceivable ideology, voter turnout in Europe typically exceeds 80 percent. In the U.S., most registered voters stay home.

Assumption two: voters ought to vote strategically, i.e., for the lesser of two evils. Even for those who accept this curiously alienating concept, however, evil often comes in pairs. Most citizens think the U.S. has lost more than it has gained under NAFTA; neither Obama nor McCain want to repeal it. Most people want the U.S. out of Iraq; both men have repeatedly voted to prolong the war. How shall anti-NAFTA, antiwar voters divine which will prove least anathematic as president? Should they resort to a ouija board?

The third leg of the Nader=Spoiler tripod relies on a belief that opinions espoused by a small minority of a population are inherently worthless. But, as anyone who has successfully gambled on a business can attest, today’s fringe thinking becomes tomorrow’s conventional wisdom. After 9/11, nine percent of Americans thought George W. Bush was a lousy president. Seventy-two percent feel that way now. America’s greatest political achievements–emancipation, women’s suffrage, the 40-hour work week–were first espoused by tiny voting blocs led by figures on the political fringe.

But that’s not why Ralph says he’s running. His platform seeks to promote causes that are popular with an overwhelming majority of American voters, yet have been sidelined by the two major parties and their allies in the media.

Fifty-five percent of Americans believe that Bush deserves to be impeached, according to a November 2007 American Research Center poll. (Considering Iraq, Guantánamo, domestic surveillance and torture alone, it’s surprising the number isn’t higher.) But “impeachment is off the table,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced as the Democrats recaptured Congress in 2006, and they haven’t mentioned it since. America’s pro-impeachment majority obviously can’t expect Republicans to prosecute their own guy. Aside from most voters, only Ralph Nader wants impeachment proceedings against the “criminal recidivist regime of George Bush and Dick Cheney.”

So who are the fringe weirdoes: the out-of-touch media elite, or the guy who agrees with most of the people?

The two remaining major Democratic presidential contenders think that repeatedly name-checking John Edwards is sufficient to draw votes from his liberal Democratic supporters. But liberals “don’t like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama–for them, he sold out even before he was bought in,” the Independent mocks. Only Nader offers “left-wing purity.”

And what’s wrong with that?

While McCain, Obama and Clinton repeatedly vote for funding the Iraq War, at the same time calling for expanding the war against Afghanistan–a doomed effort that was lost years ago–Nader wants to slash defense spending, the number-one cause of our skyrocketing federal deficit.

Americans favor “socialized medicine” (43 to 38 percent, says the February 14th Harris poll); only Nader agrees with them. Nader would repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, which destroyed labor unions; the other candidates haven’t said squat about the single biggest reason real wages are shrinking.

What’s wrong with that, say Democratic Party officials, is that Nader’s first run attracted 2.7 percent of the vote in 2000. Nader drew support from liberals who didn’t think Al Gore had enough “left-wing purity.”

“This time I hope it doesn’t hurt anyone,” said Hillary. Nader “prevented Al Gore from being the ‘greenest’ president we could have had.”

Maybe the Dems and their pundit pals ought to get their story straight. If Nader’s “left-wing purity” is so fringe and wacky, how can he hurt them?

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Book Review: “The Age of American Unreason”

My review of Susan Jacoby’s new book is in the San Diego Union-Tribune today.

Generalissimo El Busho!

Please click here.

Flashback: May 3, 2007

I was looking over my cartoons from last year. This one still makes me laugh. As a cartoonist, I definitely want Obama to win.

“Quit Your Job, Work is a Sham,” Might Magazine, June 1995

Frédéric’s blog has taken the trouble to transcribe my famous 1995 essay for Might Magazine. He made quite a few typos, but it’s difficult if not impossible to find this online. (There’s a different version of it in “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.”)

Rereading it 12 years later reminds me what a great editor I had in the person of Dave Eggers, who has since become known as a memoirist and founder of a literary journal named McSweeney’s. He questioned everything, suggested important changes, and helped make my voice more articulate. Now that I do some editing, I know how difficult that can be.

Greg Palast on “Silk Road to Ruin”

Author and kick-ass investigative reporter Greg Palast writes about “Silk Road to Ruin”. Stay tuned for a coming comics journalism mash-up between Greg and yours truly.