Attention MSNBC Fans

If you watch MSNBC you’ve seen their new promo. They ask: “Will Bush win Florida again?” then say something along the lines about how you have questions, they have answers (sorry, Radio Shack). If you have a digital camera and can send me high-resolution photos of the ad’s 2 or 3 panels, I need your help! Please email me at chet@rall.com. There’s a free, personally-autographed copy of any book of mine you want in it for you.

Thanks,

Ted

Saddam’s Capture Changes Nothing

Remember this greatest hit from a few months back?

“Washington had hoped that the deaths of Uday and Qusay would weaken the insurgency…”

That’s from the Associated Press archives.

Since I’m directly addressing the capture of Saddam in my column this week, I think it’s important for Americans to stop deluding themselves that the war in Iraq cannot be won by such get-won-quick moments as the capture of Saddam. Who can understand the countless comments from Republicans that those of us opposed to the illegal invasion based on countless lies should eat crow simply because we done got Saddie?

Hear this: no one said we weren’t gonna catch him.

What we said, and what continues to be true, is that the war was unnecessary, and did more harm than good for many reasons: we trashed our credibility, made others fear and hate us, created a power vacuum, destablized the Middle East, etc. None of that changes just because one dictator has just fallen into the clutches of another dictator.

“Werewolf” Follow-up

Several German correspondents have written to confirm that, in fact, exactly zero American soldiers were killed in occupied Germany by so-called “Werewolves” after the May 7, 1945 surrender of Germany. And even if there had been casualties–which there were not–they certainly would have been expected in a nation which had declared war upon us. Iraq, on the other hand, was supposed to greet us with roses, remember?

Support Your Local Draft Board

An anonymous FOR (Friend of Rall) suggests:

“Some friends and I decided that the best defense in this case is to

stack the draft boards with fellow anti-war/anti-draft folks. We could

then grant exemptions freely.”

Indeed, why should the draft boards gearing up for possible spring 2005 conscription be loaded up with American-flag-lapel-wearing right-wing loons? It’s time for all patriotic lefties (a redundant term) to submit their application to join their local draft board!

Sign up with the Selective Service System today!

More Bush Lies, Now About World War II History

Yesterday I received the following email from one “Jason Wilson”:

Mr. Rall,

While I have rarely agreed with any of the sentiments coming from a single

one of your cartoons or columns, I’ve always believed that you are a person

who states facts as they are – you just have a rather bizarre way of looking

at them. So I was quite disappointed with Saturday’s cartoon (yes, like

anyone who truly despises a person’s work – I read everything that you

write) when your typically self-righteous left-wing character attempted to

condemn our war in Iraq by stating “No U.S. troops died in Japan or Germany

after World War II ended.”

My friend, this is just not true. I assume you’ve probably already received

e-mail from others informing you of this fact, but if you haven’t then

please allow me. Following the surrender of the Nazis, Allied troops were

continuously being sniped at and sabotaged by neo-nazi guerillas known as

“werewolves.” This guerila were went on for three years following the

official end of the war (much longer than our current war, would you not

agree?) Allow me to give you a direct excerpt from a book entitled “Minutemen of the

Third Reich”:

“The Werewolves specialised in ambushes and sniping, and took the lives of

many Allied and Soviet soldiers and officers — perhaps even that of the

first Soviet commandant of Berlin, General N.E. Berzarin, who was rumoured

to have been waylaid in Charlottenburg during an incident in June 1945.

Buildings housing Allied and Soviet staffs were favourite targets for

Werewolf bombings; an explosion in the Bremen police headquarters, also in

June 1945, killed five Americans and thirty-nine Germans. Techniques for

harassing the occupiers were given widespread publicity through Werewolf

leaflets and radio propaganda, and long after May 1945 the sabotage methods

promoted by the Werewolves were still being used against the occupying

powers.

Although the Werewolves originally limited themselves to guerrilla warfare

with the invading armies, they soon began to undertake scorched-earth

measures and vigilante actions against German `collaborators’ or

`defeatists’. They damaged Germany’s economic infrastructure, already

battered by Allied bombing and ground fighting, and tried to prevent

anything of value from falling into enemy hands. Attempts to blow up

factories, power plants or waterworks occasionally provoked melees between

Werewolves and desperate German workers trying to save the physical basis of

their employment, particularly in the Ruhr and Upper Silesia.

Several sprees of vandalism through stocks of art and antiques, stored by

the Berlin Museum in a flak tower at Friedrichshain, caused millions of

dollars worth of damage and cultural losses of inestimable value. In

addition, vigilante attacks caused the deaths of a number of small-town

mayors and, in late March 1945, a Werewolf paratroop squad assassinated the

Lord Mayor of Aachen, Dr Franz Oppenhoff, probably the most prominent German

statesman to have emerged in the occupied fringes over the winter of

1944-45.”

Wouldn’t you say that this sounds much more like the situation we are

currently facing, than does any cooked-up comparison to Vietnam?

It’s one thing to be a left-wing nutjob, Mr. Rall. It’s quite another thing

to be a liar. Try not to let it happen again – and it would also be good of

you to admit this error in an upcoming cartoon.

Thanks for reading,

Jason Wilson

I didn’t reply because (a) I was working on the second draft of my new book WAKE UP, YOU’RE LIBERAL and I was too busy, (b) Wilson violated my email rules about not responding to people who insult me and (c) I’ve studied enough World War II history–my wife would argue, way too much World War II history–to know that no reputable historian believes that the Nazi holdover “Werewolves” ever caused a single U.S. soldier to lose his life after the surrender of Germany on May 7, 1945. On this particular point, I checked the details with a highly respected expert on the subject before doing the final artwork on that cartoon. So I felt pretty confident that I hadn’t gotten this detail wrong (though anything’s possible, obviously).

Then, today, I received the following badgering missive from the same dude. I mean, really. Since when do I owe a total stranger a prompt response?

I notice that you have added to you , but it was not to admit that

you lied in your Saturday cartoon with the false assertion that no American

died in Germany after World War II. As I explained in my previous e-mail,

many Allied forces were killed for up to three years following the war by

the feared Nazi “werewolf” guerilla forces. You really need to come clean on

this if you hope to maintain your professionalism.

By the way, I wanted to comment on your latest entry into your little blog.

You wrote that “it’s good to see that U.S. forces didn’t see fit to execute

Hussein as they did his two sons and grandson a few months ago.” While this

statement isn’t quite a blatant lie such as your one about the Nazis, it is

very much a mistruth. Saddam’s sons weren’t “executed”. They were killed

after they engaged in a firefight with Allied forces. Saddam, on the other

hand, went without a fight. Are you really going to tell me that our forces

don’t have the right to kill people who are shooting at them?

Come on, Ted. You’re coming apart at the seams.

Please admit to your lie.

Sigh. The only thing that makes me feel like I’m coming apart at the seams is my desire, futile no doubt, to set the record straight. Still, being called a liar when I know that I was dead on kinda bugs me.

As Daniel Benjamin wrote in Slate, my Republican correspondent been suckered by yet another Bush Administration lie: this one that the situation in Iraq is comparable to that of Allied forces serving in Germany and Japan after the end of combat in World War II. Here are some highlights that, I hope, will put this matter to rest once and for all.

Yeah, like a blog can do that. Anyway:

Condi’s Phony History

Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq.

By Daniel Benjamin

Rice-a-phony history?As American post-conflict combat deaths in Iraq overtook the wartime number, the administration counseled patience. “The war on terror is a test of our strength. It is a test of our perseverance, our patience, and our will,” President Bush told an American Legion convention.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice embellished the message with what former White House speechwriters immediately recognize as a greatest-generation pander. “There is an understandable tendency to look back on America’s experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes,” she told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 25. “But as some of you here today surely remember, the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officers—called ‘werewolves’—engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them—much like today’s Baathist and Fedayeen remnants.”

Speaking to the same group on the same day, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted,

“One group of those dead-enders was known as “werewolves.” They and other Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated including the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be liberated. Children as young as 10 were used as snipers, radio broadcasts, and leaflets warned Germans not to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?”

Well, no, it doesn’t. The Rice-Rumsfeld depiction of the Allied occupation of Germany is a farrago of fiction and a few meager facts.

Werwolf tales have been a favorite of schlock novels, but the reality bore no resemblance to Iraq today. As Antony Beevor observes in The Fall of Berlin 1945, the Nazis began creating Werwolf as a resistance organization in September 1944. “In theory, the training programmes covered sabotage using tins of Heinz oxtail soup packed with plastic explosive and detonated with captured British time pencils,” Beevor writes. “… Werwolf recruits were taught to kill sentries with a slip-knotted garrotte about a metre long or a Walther pistol with silencer. …”

In practice, Werwolf amounted to next to nothing. The mayor of Aachen was assassinated on March 25, 1945, on Himmler’s orders. This was not a nice thing to do, but it happened before the May 7 Nazi surrender at Reims. It’s hardly surprising that Berlin sought to undermine the American occupation before the war was over. And as the U.S. Army’s official history, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944-1946, points out, the killing was “probably the Werwolf’s most sensational achievement.”

It’s hard to understand exactly what Rumsfeld was saying, but if he meant that the Nazi resisters killed Americans after the surrender, this would be news. According to America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, a new study by former Ambassador James Dobbins, who had a lead role in the Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo reconstruction efforts, and a team of RAND Corporation researchers, the total number of post-conflict American combat casualties in Germany—and Japan, Haiti, and the two Balkan cases—was zero.

And of course Qusay and Uday were executed. The house where they were staying was surrounded. All we had to do was wait for them to get hungry, thirsty and bored. They would have come out at some point. Surely some reservist who works as a cop stateside could have told his C.O. not to rush in there guns ablaze. As I wrote earlier today, I’m glad that they didn’t do this to Saddam.

He has so many interesting stories to tell, don’t you think?

Finally, a Dirty Deed Done Right

The news of Saddam Hussein’s capture does nothing to validate an illegal and murderous war fought on a pretext of lies, but it’s good to see that U.S. forces didn’t see fit to execute Hussein as they did his two sons and grandson a few months ago. It’ll also be interesting to see whether the Iraqi resistance fades away upon this development; if it does, that will validate the Bushies claim that a few “dead enders” were running the insurgency. If not, it will prove that the anti-U.S. forces are homegrown–something they haven’t quite admitted yet. Either way, it will end the sense of limbo that the invasion has given the Iraqi people, and that’s probably a good thing. I do have to wonder, though, why didn’t the moron flee overseas?

Pentagon stooge Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi governing council is currently planning to put the deposed dictator on trial, which would be a wonderfully interesting development. “Saddam will stand a public trial so that the Iraqi people will know his crimes,” he said.

The questioning ought to be fun. “When did you first meet Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Hussein?” “When did the first President Bush tell you it was OK to invade Kuwait, Mr. Hussein?” “How many metric tons of anthrax did President Reagan sell you, Mr. Hussein?”

Gavel to gavel on Court TV, I’ll be there.

They’re Getting Nervous

There’s been quite a bit of hate mail arriving at Rall Corporate World Headquarters. Republicans, it seems, are pretty upset about my suggestion that Democrats cancel the 2004 primaries to save money and build unity for the big push against the Generalissimo in November. “Undemocratic,” they call it. Just because Dean’s got the nomination locked up, they say, doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t have their chance to vote.

Gee, where were these democratic purists when the U.S. Supreme Court canceled the recount in Florida? Cheering that their guy got in.

Primaries aren’t electoral democracy, anyway. They’re merely a replacement of the old “smoke filled rooms” of yore, when party bosses directly selected the nominee. Truth is, several states have already abolished their primaries, replacing them with Iowa-style caucuses, to save money.

Besides, didn’t anybody notice? BUSH is running unopposed. Aren’t Republicans entitled to an alternative to their unelected incumbent ususper?

When Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981, wags said that he only backed unions in Poland. In 2003, Republicans only support free elections for Democratic primaries.

Next year will be a busy one on the book front. First up is the next installment in the ATTITUDE anthology series (I swear I had no idea there would be a repeat performance), ATTITUDE 2: THE NEW SUBVERSIVE SOCIAL COMMENTARY CARTOONISTS (NBM Publishing, February 2004, $13.95). I’m not in it per se, but I edited and compiled the work of 21 amazing cartoonists and asked the questions in the interviews. If you liked ATTITUDE, you’ll definitely want this one. If you missed it, not to worry–ATTITUDE 1: THE NEW SUBVERSIVE POLITICAL CARTOONISTS is in print and still available. Anyone who likes political cartooning and/or alternative weekly newspapers should pick it up.

Next up is WAKE UP, YOU’RE LIBERAL: HOW WE CAN TAKE AMERICA BACK FROM THE RIGHT (Soft Skull Press, April 2004), my book that diagnoses the troubles of the American left and offers solutions for them–including a new platform for a new majority Democratic Party. This is all prose, no cartoons, and contains nothing that has appeared elsewhere. This book could end up being a big deal.

Then, in June, look out for a collection of my writing and cartoons about Generalissimo El Busho’s first four years. More details on that as they become available.

The Wall Street Journal is one of the most impeccably written newspapers in America. Maybe that’s why they harbor a plump resident right-wing attack mutt by the name of James Taranto in the cyberslum edition of an otherwise dignified paper. A mystery, however, is why no one has called this McCarthyite neofascist on his slander of loyal Americans.

In a follow-up to a dressing down of the Howard Dean campaign, in which Taranto attempts to smear Dean by depicting me as some sort of wacko pro-Osama com-symp, this fat little Nazi has the gall–and poor legal judgement–to insult me as “America-hating columnist Ted Rall.”

I’m not a thin-skinned guy, Mr. Taranto, but anyone who dares question my patriotism or loyalty to the United States of America has crossed the line–no, he’s leapt way the hell over it. I adore my country, I would lay down my life to defend it, and I’m willing to take the heat from neo-McCarthyite scum like him. When I speak out against the gangsters who have taken over Washington, subverted the Constitution and undermined basic American values like truth and justice, I am merely doing what anyone who cares about our country would do. Bush and his policies are destroying my country–which is why I am working as hard as I can to stop them.

It’s one thing to counter an argument. It’s quite another to impugn the patriotism of the person making it. People who resort to shutting their opponents down, which is the antithesis of the First Amendment which allows our democracy to function, swim in the gutter because they don’t have a valid point of view. They are the true America haters.

It probably reads better in the original German, but Taranto’s original attack piece wallows in outright lies, elementary school smears and inane conjecture:

Ted Rall is like a chronic rash. You really want to scratch it, but doing so only aggravates the inflammation, so if you’re smart you’ll leave it alone. We’ve been pretty disciplined about this, not mentioning his name in almost a year. But there has been a Rall outbreak on Howard Dean’s blog, and, alas, it requires attention.

Look Taranto, just because you may have had some terrible experience with STDs doesn’t mean you should take it out on the rest of us. Follow the lead of the victim who responded to that ad in Germany, the one placed by the psycho looking for someone to kill and eat, and cut the damned thing off if it itches so badly.

Who is Ted Rall? The parts of the column Gross refrains from quoting give you some sense of Rall’s worldview. He likens the Bush administration to the Sept. 11 hijackers: “Who could have imagined back then that a dozen maniacs would hijack our democracy, bankrupt the treasury and subvert our basic values?” He describes Bush’s appealing the Florida election dispute to the U.S. Supreme court as an act of treason. He claims that after Sept. 11 “did Bush begin acting like a dictator.” And he makes this astonishing statement: America is under attack, and Bush is enemy number one. Where does Osama bin Laden rank in Rall’s enemies list? He doesn’t say.

Here, I’ll make it easy for you, Jimmy: Unlike you Republicans, I don’t HAVE an enemies list. While I wouldn’t say that Osama has America’s best interests at heart, I think it’s also safe to say, as any thinking person would, that a treasonous “president” who subverts a national election by hiring Hitler Youth-like goons to invade an elections office, runs up $10 trillion in debt, starts two unjustified wars and opens a concentration camp at Gitmo is more dangerous to the United States than a sick old man hiding out in the middle of Kashmir. Osama may have killed 4,000 Americans in all (and we’re still waiting for proof of what really happened on 9/11) and that’s obviously horrible. But he’s not American. He can’t be expected to give a damn about us. Bush has killed hundreds of U.S. troops and tens of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis for nothing but his own greed and self-agrandizement–and he’s one of us. Who do YOU think is the most dangerous?

Meanwhile, here are some other examples of Rall’s work:

* In an April 2001 column for the Mother Jones Web site (which erroneously labels it as having been published a year earlier), Rall endorsed the use of violence by opponents of free trade: “The disruption of the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City last weekend provides a classic example of doing good while throwing hard objects at big sheets of glass. . . . Lefties just don’t seem to get this fundamental truth of politics: Not only has there never been a revolution without violence, but there’s never been meaningful social change without violence or at least the threat thereof.”

* In an October 2001 syndicated column, Rall argued against liberating Afghanistan from the Taliban and claimed that the Sept. 11 attacks were merely a pretext, “the perfect excuse to do what the U.S. had wanted all along: invade and/or install an old-school puppet regime in Kabul.”

First, these are hardly “examples” of my work. I crank out three to five cartoons and at least a column every week. “Examples” of my work would randomly select from these rather than peruse thousands of pieces to find three for context-free dissection.

As for my Mother Jones magazine piece, I never endorsed violence. I merely stated an obvious fact: that the WTO protesters broke windows in Seattle because they found that working within the system, sending letters to the editor to papers like the Journal, didn’t move forward their claims. Reporting and analyzing the truth ain’t the same thing as endorsing an action, hombre, and you’d know that if you had a passing acquaintance with the former. And where did I ever argue against liberating Afghanistan from the Taliban? To the contrary, I argued against a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan because I didn’t think we had any interest in Afghanistan’s people–only its critical position along a possible oil pipeline route. I was one of the earliest commentators, both in cartoon form and on my former radio show on KFI Los Angeles, to try to get Americans to do something about the Taliban regime. As most Afghans can attest and as became rapidly evident after 9/11, U.S. occupation has not liberated them from anyone, least of all the Taliban.

* In March 2002, Rall published a cartoon…that mocked “terror widows,” apparently including the wife of Daniel Pearl, who had learned of her husband’s death just two weeks earlier. The strip’s third panel depicts a woman standing in front of a bank of microphones saying, “Of course it’s a bummer that they slashed my husband’s throat–but the worst was having to watch the Olympics alone!

Quoting one panel out of a six-panel cartoon, without the artwork, is pretty friggin’ lame. Could it be that the same cartoon, when seen in context, isn’t all that offensive? Selective spin, however, a standard rightist smear tactic.

* In a column published two weeks ago–on Veterans Day, no less–Rall described Iraq’s pro-Saddam guerrillas as nationalist freedom-fighters: “Dear Recruit: Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans. You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis.”

A classic example of Republirat spin. The column quoted above, which appears in its entirety in my column archives a few clicks away, in no way, shape or form endorses violence against Americans. It is an examination of the appeal of Iraqi resistance fighters, a response to morons like Taranto who claim not to understand why “liberated” Iraqis are shooting at us. He would probably have accused Jonathan Swift of advocating infanticide.

Now, obviously it isn’t Dean’s fault that this vile little creep endorses him–or, to be precise, flirts with the idea of endorsing him: “Maybe it’s premature to endorse Gov. Dean. But right now, given the information we have available, he’s the preferred candidate of us Anybody But Bushies.”

But Dean’s campaign is trumpeting Rall’s support on his Web site, and that ought to be enough to make anyone uneasy with the notion of Dean’s finger on the button.

Yeah, Dean would be SO scary. Unlike the current model of restraint and peaceful diplomacy currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvavnia Avenue. And my endorsement makes him even SCARIER!!! (Cue “Monster Mash” here.)

Fortunately, Dean supporters are a hell of a lot smarter than Taranto takes them for. They know that I’m no “anti-American” and neither is Dean. My upcoming book will lay to rest any doubts of my political stances on a variety of issues once and for all. You, on the other hand…

Have you at last, Mr. Taranto, no decency? Evidently not. A cursory Google search shows that Taranto (known as Tarantoad online) has done this sort of thing before, even stooping to post the home address and phone number of a progressive writer in the hope that rightists would harass him and his wife, who was sick with cancer at the time. No, decency isn’t something known to someone who calls anyone with whom he disagrees anti-American, but know this: calling me an “America hater” to my face would be a very unwise idea.

You may e-mail Tailgunner Jim Taranto at james.taranto@dowjones.com if you’d like to renew your Der Sturmer subscription or whatever.

Generalissimo El Busho Signs on as a Ted Rall Sponsor

Sharp-eyed readers of this website have noticed ads for a certain squinty-eyed dictator over the page for my columns. “For God’s sake, man!” one correspondent wrote. “Children read your column!”

First, an explanation: The banner ads on the Cartoon and Column pages are placed and solicited by uComics, a subsidiary of Universal Press Syndicate, my distribution agency. In exchange for maintaining an extensive archive of my work, they collect the revenue from those ads. I don’t have control over the ad content, nor do I get any money directly. Those banner ads are, however, the only way I can maintain archives that go back several years. Server space is expensive, and I have neither the technical nor the financial resources to do the job myself. The down side, such as it is, is the weird occasional contradiction of ads for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which I have advocated military attacks upon, and Bush, who merits prosecution and impeachment as a usurping warmonger, running on my website.

This arrangement will likely continue, unless someone steps forward with a sizable sum of money with which I could launch a full-scale redesign from the site’s current 1995-style format and purchase some server space somewhere. Since that’s probably not going to happen, these quirks will probably reoccur from time to time.