Let Me Get This Straight

George Bush was in favor of the Vietnam War. Since ascending to the status of Generalissimo, he has started two wars of his own. But when he had the chance to fight for his country, he exploited his daddy’s connections to slither into the Texas National Guard. Bush loved the war but didn’t want to fight in it.

Meanwhile, as today’s New York Times reports, “In March 1969, John Kerry, a 25-year-old Navy lieutenant, reached down from the boat he was piloting in Vietnam’s treacherous Bay Hap River and in a spray of enemy fire pulled a soldier out of the water to safety. For his valor, Mr. Kerry won the Bronze Star with a combat “V” and his third Purple Heart.” Kerry went on to cofound Vietnam Vets Against the War.

If you’re against the war, you fight to prove you’re not afraid. If you favor it, you run away to prove you’re not stupid.

Ted Rall Subscription Service

You can receive my cartoons, columns and material created for freelance assignments directly to your e-mail box. Another advantage of the subscription service is that you will receive many cartoons up to a week before they appear online, sometimes before they appear in print newspapers. If you’re interested, please send a check, cash, or money order for $10 to cover the entire 2004 calendar year to:

Ted Rall

PO Box 1134

New York NY 10027

Important: Please include your email address!!!

Keeping Abreast

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl but I’ve seen its highlight–the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake breast-exposure video.

Call me crazy but I don’t understand the fuss. It’s a breast, people, not televised proof that the President was lying about causes for war. What about the kids–I know, I know.

Well, what about them? If Janet Jackson’s boob tube shenanigans are “obscene,” what does that make breastfeeding? Americans need to exorcise the ghosts of Puritanism, the original sin of a nation founded by people so uptight they couldn’t get along with the English.

Groggy But Alive

Jesus Christ. Food poisioning is a bitch. I’ve been officially recovered for more than a week but still can barely summon up the energy to get my work out every week. I’m afraid the old unpaid blog has been suffering as a result, and for that I apologize. I still can’t say I feel a hell of a lot better, though. Anyway, you may have seen the following post floating around in your e-mail in box:

If you really believe that President BUSH lied – – THAT THERE NEVER WERE ANY WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION IN IRAQ AND HE TOOK US TO WAR SOLELY FOR HIS OIL BUDDIES — then read this.

“One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line.” – President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998″

[many similar quotes from leading Democrats snipped]

“Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime … He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation … And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction… So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real…”

– Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003

SO, NOW THE DEMOCRATS SAY PRESIDENT BUSH LIED, THAT THERE NEVER WERE ANY WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION AND HE TOOK US TO WAR FOR HIS OIL BUDDIES??? AGAIN, THEIR MEMORY OF THINGS THEY HAVE SAID, SOME MOST RECENTLY, HAS FAILED THEM…NOW, WHO IS THE LYING???

It’s an interesting bit of sophistry, and here’s how it works:

First up, the time-honored rhetorical device of choosing to believe your enemy when it’s convenient. Do Republicans believe that Bill Clinton lied about having sex with Monica Lewinsky? Of course. Yet they choose to believe the former president, whom they repeatedly called a liar, when he claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. By their own standards, Clinton’s testimony is unreliable. He’s a proven liar, so nothing he says should be taken seriously, right?

Second, many of those quotes are old, going back to 1998 and 1999. Most intelligence experts still believed that Iraq had WMDs at that time. The relevant question about Iraqi WMDs, however, concerns whether or not it had them on March 20, 2003, the first day of the invasion. And the Newsweek headline–“We Were All Wrong”–is bullshit. “We” were not all wrong at all. I just finished compiling my essays about the Bush Administration for an upcoming book last night. I found dozens of comments by myself and more qualified experts dating back to 2001 citing the fact that the CIA did not believe there was enough proof to say that Iraq still had WMDs. “We” weren’t wrong. In fact, neither were the Bushies. They knew that they didn’t have jack for evidence–Colin Powell himself called the charges he listed at the United Nations “bullshit”–but decided to stampede the nation into war nonetheless. Using ancient intelligence to justify new attacks is illogical and immoral.

Finally, many leading Democrats in Congress and the media, either eager to appease GOP warmongers or genuinely misled by Bush Administration liars, joined the call for war that led to the illegal 2003 invasion. At best, they were idiots; at worst they were co-conspirators with the Bushies. John Kerry should be ashamed to have voted with the White House for war. Yes, Virginia, there are evil Democrats too.

The general argument being made, that the war was justified because “everybody”—including Dems—believed Iraq had proscribed weapons of mass destruction, is a another desperate distraction from the central point. Bush, Cheney et al. planned this war back in 1998. The fact that they got a bunch of Democratic simps and liberal fools like Chris Hitchens to go along with them doesn’t diminish their responsibility. (Though we should certainly hold the latter equally guilty as co-consipirators.)

Revised Cover

Check out who did the intro to my upcoming book!

To the People of New Hampshire

You have an important decision to make today. You have a choice between the one Democratic candidate, Howard Dean, with the guts and gumption to take on George W. Bush this coming fall, and an ordinary Democrat like John Kerry or John Edwards.

Howard Dean is far from perfect. I disagree with him on many issues, especially the war in Afghanistan. And it’s a little weird to know that your president sometimes growls like a Siberian snow leopard. But none of the other major contenders can beat Bush.

First and foremost, the nation has become so polarized that the “swing vote” has all but disappeared. I discovered this trend while researching my new book. What used to be a 40% Democratic-20% Independent-40% Republican nation is now closer to 45-10-45. The key to electoral success, as Gore and Bush discovered in 2000, is energizing your party’s base. All of those pumped-up twentysomethings–the successor to the Gen Xers who elected Clinton in 1992–are not going to vote for pro-Iraq war Kerry, or vote at all. Old-line liberals won’t turn out in sufficient numbers. In the final analysis, the difference between Kerry and Bush isn’t great enough to convince the American people to make a change.

Bush is a disaster. He has nearly bankrupted the federal government and many states with his profligate spending policies. He has planted the seed of fascism in the highest levels of government with his concentration camp, red-baiting and increased surveillance powers for Das Homeland. And it’s a fair bet that he’s planning more unwinnable wars for 2005. The Democratic Party needs its best chance at defeating him this fall, and that chance isn’t in the form of John Kerry.

I fear that too many Democrats, and too many Americans, don’t get it. If Bush wins this election, there may never be another one.

If you live in New Hampshire, vote Dean.

376 pp., all prose/no cartoons/all new content, nothing reprinted

TO PURCHASE this important book: you may either pre-order from Amazon or watch Soft Skull Press’ website.

BOOK REVIEWERS/EDITORS: Contact me to receive an advance review copy.

News for Completists

I wrote the introduction for the new MAD Magazine anthology of comic strip parodies. If that isn’t enough to prompt you to buy a copy (and I’m not sure it should be), they really are very, very funny parodies running the gamut from the 1950s to the present. A must for comics fans, methinks.

Heck, looks like I’ll have to buy one myself since MAD didn’t bother to send me a comp copy.

Bush-appointed WMD inspector has resigned. The first question on most people’s minds was “why?”–a question not asked or answered in most American media reports about what easily rates as the week’s most dramatic story.