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DMZ America Podcast #66: Special guest Charles Lipson joins Scott Stantis and Ted Rall to discuss the war in Ukraine and what happens if the President-elect dies before the electoral college meets?

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Ted Rall

Charles Lipson, University of Chicago Professor Emeritus of political science, and a regular contributor to Real Clear Politics, Newsweek, Spectator/World and The Wall Street Journal, joins cartoonists Scott Stantis and Ted Rall in a freewheeling discussion on the continuing war in Ukraine. They also take a deep dive into presidential succession. With Joe Biden insisting he’s really running for reelection and Donald Trump doing the same, we have to wonder—because at the time of the next election, one will be 82 and the other 78. What happens if the winner dies before the electoral college convenes? Interesting people having interesting conversation. You should listen.

 

Democrats Should Stop Crying Trump

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Ted Rall

           As a businessman, Donald Trump did a lot of terrible things. He stiffed vendors. He hired illegal immigrants as construction workers and abused them. People went into debt paying for his fake university education.

            As a president, Donald Trump was awful. He kept children in cages. During the pandemic he promoted quackery and denied science. He stacked the Supreme Court with right-wing cretins. He claimed Biden stole the election, then encouraged his supporters to keep him in office by means of a coup.

            The truth about Trump is bad enough. So when Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans describe Trump as an existential threat to democracy, God, apple pie, cat videos and everything good and decent in the world, they’re abandoning high political and moral ground that ought to be easy to hold.

            No matter what you think of the former president, one fact belies the overheated handwringing that defines Trump Derangement Syndrome: he served four years, yet here we still are. No World War III. The Constitution remains in effect. Cities are not burning, though they’ve become seriously sketchy. Trump’s coup attempt was, like many of his projects, hardly planned and half-assed executed, and fizzled in a matter of hours.

            In some respects, Trump did well. He negotiated and ordered the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. He held high-level talks with North Korea. He oversaw Operation Warp Speed, which suspended regulations in the interest of developing the COVID vaccine in record time. It is unlikely that Hillary Clinton would have done that stuff.

            When President Biden argues, as he did recently in Philadelphia, that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” even the most fervent Democrat has to ask themself: if that’s true, why is the republic still standing after four years of this dangerous despot? If Trump wanted to replace our system of government with “semi-fascist” authoritarianism, why would he have waited four long years to do so before ultimately missing his chance—unless, and this is really insane, he’s plotting to finally pull the trigger during his upcoming possible second term?

            Trump is what he is and what he is is reprehensible: rhetorically divisive and bigoted, rabidly anti-intellectual, callous and disrespectful of the high office he held, the nation whose government he headed and the deep need of the people for leadership that takes everyone who lives here, citizens and non-citizens, into careful consideration. It is not, or at least ought not to be, necessary to exaggerate Trump’s toxic politics or personality.

            Yet that is exactly what Democrats keep doing.

Los Angeles Detective Mark Fuhrman claimed he found one bloody glove at the scene of Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder and its match at O.J.’s house, thus justifying a search. That story seemed too good to be true. I believed that Fuhrman found both gloves at Nicole’s place and took one to O.J.’s so he could link him to the killing—O.J. was guilty, he thought. Why not give justice a little assist? The answer, of course, is that the jury didn’t buy the prosecution’s too-neat story. So O.J. walked. Legally correct; cosmically heinous. And it’s prosecutor Marcia Clark’s fault.

Like Fuhrman, the anti-Trump coalition—DNC-aligned media outlets, Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans and their allies in “deep state” strongholds like the FBI—is so determined to nail their quarry that going after him for his actual crimes isn’t enough. They want to be really, really sure he goes down. So they exaggerate Trump’s sins and, in notable cases, make them up out of whole cloth.

January 6th, tax fraud, sleazy business deals, hobnobbing with right-wing extremists—all these offer more than enough grist for a competent political team to kneecap Trump with a disciplined campaign of attack ads and drum up support for civil and perhaps criminal prosecution on the most serious charges. The problem for Democrats is, they keep focusing on lines of attack that were neither true nor could ever have been true—so their credibility is in tatters.

They are the boys who cried Trump.

There was the now-debunked Steele dossier and its sensational—and ridiculous—claim that Trump, a famous germaphobe, hired Russian prostitutes so he could watch them pee on his hotel bed in Moscow…because the Obamas had once slept in said bed. Uh-huh.

            During the 2016 campaign Trump said: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” Watch the video. It was clearly a joke. Yet corporate media insisted for years that Trump meant it seriously—because, obviously, that’s exactly the way you’d make such a covert, fraught, illegal, international request—and, even more absurdly, that Russian government hackers (who, if they existed, were not actually government employees) got straight to work on Trump’s assignment the very same day.

            The mother of all disinformation campaigns, still ongoing on a cable-television channel near you, was Russiagate—the conspiracy theory that Trump cheated his way into the White House with the help of those self-same Russian hackers. For a man who was allegedly a stooge of Vladimir Putin, however, Trump’s presidency was marked by deteriorating relations with the Kremlin from start to finish. In the end, of course, what never made sense became perfectly clear; the real conspiracy in 2016 was Hillary’s; it turned out that Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman ginned up the Trump Russiagate hoax and fed it to the FBI with the hope that the ensuing investigation would smear Trump and the Republicans as foreign operatives.

            It is entirely possible to look at Trump and his opponents and conclude: they’re both worthless liars, albeit about different matters.

            The alternative having failed them repeatedly, it is perhaps time for Democrats to try a new line of attack against Trump: playing it straight.

Why not go after the guy for what he’s actually done?

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

DMZ America Podcast 65: Abortion and the Midterms, Hunter Biden’s Secret Laptop and Gannett Fires Its Last Political Cartoonist

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Ted Rall

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall and Scott Stantis are in a glum mood following the Gannett newspaper chain’s decision to fire/lay off/buy out their colleague Andy Marlette, marking another milestone in the media’s war against political cartooning. First, however, Rall and Stantis discuss the evolving prospects for the midterm elections in light of the increasing impact of the Dodds decision overturning abortion rights, Hunter Biden’s laptop and what’s on it and why corporate media still refuses to talk about it.

 

DMZ America Podcast #64: Gorby Dies, Biden speaks and how’d we handle Covid?

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Ted Rall

This week’s episode sees two of America’s top editorial cartoonists, Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right), debate the legacy of the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. Next, the boys critique President Joe Biden’s recent speech calling MAGA Republicans fascist. In the third segment Scott and Ted review the reports coming out analyzing America’s Covid response. (Spoiler alert: we didn’t do too good). Plus, as always, flamethrower drones.

 

The U.S. Played Gorbachev for a Fool

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Ted Rall

            Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union who died this week, was a member of that tribe of politicians who can diagnose a problem but doesn’t know how to treat it. As he grew up, he couldn’t understand why a nation blessed with extraordinary natural resources and an enviable geographically strategic position had so much trouble delivering economic prosperity to its people. “Mr. Gorbachev has said he finally realized, as regional party boss, that something much more serious was wrong with the Soviet system than just inefficiency, theft and poor planning. The deeper flaw was that no one could break out with new ideas,” The Washington Post wrote in his obituary.

            It is, however, possible to be too open to new ideas. Arms reduction negotiations with the United States led to increasingly close ties between the Soviet leadership under Gorbachev and the Reagan and first Bush administrations. He took meetings with advisers and officials of the World Bank and IMF, capitalist institutions for which the socialist utopian vision represented by the existence of the USSR presented an existential threat, and listened to their countless entreaties to reform the socialist economy, privatize state enterprises and replace the social safety net with brutal austerity. Do these things, he was told, and we will help you.

Of the many mistakes he made, Gorbachev’s biggest was to trust his biggest enemy, the United States.

            Socialism didn’t kill the Soviet Union; capitalism did. Privatization of small businesses and other of Gorby’s perestroika reforms tanked the Soviet economy toward the end of the 1980s. By late 1990 suppressed inflation, global recession and supply problems had sent the country into a tailspin. A desperate Gorbachev reached out to the Bush administration for assistance.

            At first, Bush almost behaved like a human being, promising the USSR up to $1 billion in loan guarantees to buy American agricultural products. “Instability in the Soviet Union is very definitely not, in my view, in the interests of the United States,” said Secretary of State James A. Baker III. “I want perestroika to succeed,” Bush said. “The Soviet Union is facing tough times, difficult times, but I believe that this is a good reason to act now in order to help the Soviet Union stay the course of democratization and to undertake market reforms.”

            Six months later, however, the tiny credits had expired and Bush refused to renew them. Bush also cooled to the suggestion that the U.S. should help bring the USSR in for a soft capitalist landing. “My only reservations are, will it help? Will it encourage reform?” Bush commented to Soviet requests for direct cash grants. “I think President Gorbachev knows we have understandable concerns about his creditworthiness and I hope he understands that I, and the other allied leaders, want to move forward.” Gorbachev was offered pennies on the dollar of the Marshall Plan-scale aid he needed to keep his country afloat.

            As the Soviet Union dissolved, the United States dithered. “A shortage of foreign capital is not what plunged your economy into crisis, nor can your economic ills be cured by a simple infusion of cash,” Bush lectured Gorbachev in August 1991. Neither statement, of course, was true. Gorbachev glumly noted the “increasingly obvious discrepancy” between America’s supportive rhetoric and “and the nature of our economic relations.”

            “Until Gorbachev’s resignation in December 1991, no American grants or loans would help the Soviet leaders in their struggle to turn 70 years of communist totalitarian rule into a Western-styled socialist democracy,” Diana Villiers Negroponte wrote in Wilson Quarterly.

            Disintegration of the former Soviet Union and the decision of the Western policymakers to sit on the sidelines chewing popcorn rather than offering a helping hand led to dire economic and social consequences in the 15 former Soviet republics, including Russia. Life expectancy plunged, with up to five million excess adult deaths in Russia during the 1990s. Birth rates collapsed. There was out-of-control crime and human trafficking. Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s U.S.-backed replacement as president of Russia, was a fall-down-drunk alcoholic who once wandered out of the White House in his underwear to Pennsylvania Avenue where he tried to hail a taxi to get some pizza.

            Russia, a superpower that defeated Nazi Germany and terrified the United States with nightmare scenarios of communist dominoes falling all around the world, was looted, impoverished and humiliated. At bare minimum, the U.S. let it happen. At worst, they held the knife that plunged into Russia’s back—a scenario that seems more likely considering the zillions of times Republicans have given Reagan and Bush credit for defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

            It is not hard to see why the Russian people wanted something different and better, or why they blamed Gorbachev for trusting the Americans. In 1996, when Gorbachev ran for president of Russia, he received less than 1% of the vote.

            He’d been played for a fool by his American friends.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

DMZ America Podcast #63: Student Loan Forgiveness, Quiet Quitting and Zelensky’s Big Lie

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Ted Rall

Joe Biden wants to forgive up to $20,000 per student loan borrower. Ted and Scott do a deep dive into who qualifies and why and why it’s weird, and Scott takes a stand against executive action rather than congressional debate in the situation. America’s favorite left-wing and right-wing political cartoonists discuss the phenomenon previously known as slacking, now known as “quiet quitting.” Finally, Ukrainian President Zelensky has been outed as a major liar to the Ukrainian people, some of whom are not pleased about it. In a democracy, or what passes for one, what if anything are the people entitled to know?

 

 

Trump’s Critics Are Even More Dangerous Than He Is

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Ted Rall

             Edward Luce of the Financial Times recently tweeted one of the most overheated sentences ever uttered in the world of politics: “I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.” General Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and NSA, added: “I agree.” These opinions, and the fact that they are quoted approvingly by Margaret Sullivan in her final column as a media writer for The Washington Post, indicate that Trump Derangement Syndrome is raging at a 106° fever pitch among Democratic elites.

            Luce’s remark is pure madness. No one will out-disdain me when it comes to the GOP but only a lunatic would argue they’re more “nihilistic, dangerous and contemptible” than the Khmer Rouge, the Rwandan Hutu-led government of Théoneste Bagosora, Al Qaeda, ISIS or Saudi Arabia. It’s depressingly revealing to watch that someone who so clearly ought to and probably does know better like Sullivan, who earned praise for her courageous run as ombudsman at The New York Times, regurgitate such ahistorical nonsense and turn to a man like Hayden—who for years presided over the exquisitely illegal effort to collect and store every communication between every individual and organization on Earth—for his opinions on  democracy.

            (Disclosure: After some initially-promising email exchanges about the possibility that she and the Post might look into the Los Angeles Times’ decision to fire and smear me as a favor to the LAPD, Sullivan ghosted me.)

             There is nothing wrong with sounding the alarm about Donald Trump. But democratic institutions face a far bigger threat than the former and possibly future president: the argument, repeated incessantly across multiple platforms by boldfaced media and political personalities, that Trump is especially dangerous, that he lied/lies more than other politicians, that his politics are exceptionally extreme…that he is somehow unique.

            The standard argument that, as Post columnist Jennifer Rubin put it in her 2017 screed, that “[Trump] is Not a Normal President,” invites the American public to buy into three assumptions:

  • Other presidents and politicians tell fewer lies—a lot fewer—than Trump.
  • Nothing was fundamentally wrong with the United States or its political system before Trump came along.
  • Get rid of Trump and everything will be fine.

Certainly, Trump and his presidency were unusual in some respects. He’s the only man to have won the White House without having held political office or served in the military. He eschewed prepared speeches. His campaign ran on a shoestring budget without a national organization. He expressed the willingness to talk to enemies and adversaries without preconditions. He continued to hold campaign rallies during his presidency. But the media hype is a lie. In the ways that matter most in a presidency—policy and tone—Donald Trump was/is anything but anomalous.

      Yes, Trump refused to concede the 2020 election. George W. Bush refused to concede the 2000 election.

Trump’s goons resorted to violence to try to overturn an election. So did Bush’s.

Trump tried to steal an election. Bush succeeded.

Trump wallowed in racist dog whistles. So did Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Trump’s cabinet was full of underqualified nuts. So was Reagan’s and Bush’s.

      The first step is admitting that you have a problem. American democracy has big problems. But neither the media nor the political class nor the voters are willing to acknowledge them—so there’s no chance we’ll fix them.

      Not only are we in denial about the systematic flaws baked into our political system—two parties that conspire to keep smaller parties off the ballot, the inherently corrupting influence of capitalism on democracy, the electoral college and the revolving door between business, media and politics—we’re deluding ourselves into believing that Donald Trump is the problem.

      Trump isn’t the problem. He’s a symptom.

      The duopoly gave us Trump when the DNC kneecapped his strongest Democratic primary challenger, Bernie Sanders, in favor of Hillary Clinton. The cult of money convinced voters that his wealth qualified him for office. The electoral college gave him the White House even though he got fewer votes.

      Those who obsess over Trump are far more dangerous than he is. Trump is old and fat and, before long, will no longer be with us. The issues we’re ignoring while we’re distracted by Trump will afflict us for years to come.

      As will the idiots who won’t shut up about Trump.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.

DMZ America Podcast #62: Liz Cheney, Sarah Palin and the Midterms, Salman Rushdie and Personal Political Violence, Superhero Movies and the Cancellation of Bat Girl

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Ted Rall

Two of America’s top editorial cartoonists sit down to discuss the future of Republican firebrands Liz Cheney and Sarah Palin. Then they talk about the horrible knife attack on author Salman Rushdie and their own experiences with political violence aimed at them and other US political cartoonists. Finally the two get into how much they love/hate superhero movies, (can you guess which one holds which opinion?).

 

4 Lessons from Afghanistan

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Ted Rall

            One year ago, America lost yet another war. Afghanistan is right back where it was two decades ago, under control of the Taliban. The question is: what, if anything, have we learned?

            Make any mistake you like, but don’t make the same mistake twice—or four times. The U.S. committed the same errors of omission and commission in Vietnam, and then Iraq; our failure to draw intelligent conclusions from those conflicts and apply them going forward led us to squander thousands of more lives and billions of more dollars in Afghanistan. Here we go again: unless we learn from our decision to go to war against Afghanistan and then occupy it, we are doomed to our next debacle.

            Afghanistan Lesson #1: When politicians tell you that war is necessary and justified, always be skeptical.

            President George W. Bush told us that we had to invade Afghanistan in order to bring Osama bin Laden to justice for 9/11. Almost certainly false; the guy was probably in Pakistan. And if bin Laden was in Afghanistan, Bush could have instead accepted the Taliban’s repeated offers to extradite the accused terrorist. Bush argued the war was necessary to take out four training camps allegedly used by Al Qaeda. But Bill Clinton bombed six such camps using cruise missiles in 1998, no war required.

            Bush’s casus belli for Afghanistan made no more sense than his evidence-free weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the fictional Tonkin Gulf incident LBJ used to get us into Vietnam. It’s long overdue for American voters to download and install a sturdy BS detector about wars, particularly those on the other side of the planet.

            Lesson #2: Never install a puppet government.

            Of the countless mistakes the U.S. made in Vietnam, no single screwup led to more contempt for the United States than its sustained support for the deeply unpopular, brutal, autocratic president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem. Saddam Hussein looked positively brilliant in comparison to the exiled con man, Ahmed Chalabi, whom Bush tried to replace him with. Rather than allow Afghans at the post-invasion loya jirga council meeting to choose their own ruler, like the long-exiled king, the U.S. pulled strings behind the scenes by buying the votes of corrupt warlords in support of the dapper Hamid Karzai, who had little popular support. Three years later, even the establishment New Yorker conceded that “if American troops weren’t there, Karzai almost certainly wouldn’t be, either.”

            The U.S. propped up Karzai and his successor and close ally Ashraf Ghani for 17 more years.

            Lesson #3: Never try to exclude an entire political party or group from a nation’s political life.

            The Taliban’s base of power was the ethnic Pashtuns who comprised 40% of Afghanistan’s population. Yet the Taliban were not permitted to attend the loya jirga. They could not run in parliamentary elections under the U.S.-backed puppet government. Marginalized and “alienated from the central government, which they believe[d was] unfairly influenced by non-Pashtun leaders and interests,” in the words of a prescient 2009 Carnegie Endowment white paper, they had two options: stand down and shut up, or resort to guerilla warfare.

            The U.S. messed up the same way in Vietnam and Iraq. In U.S.-backed South Vietnam, communists and their nationalist allies were excluded from electoral politics. Iraq’s Sunnis, 32% of the nation, lost their leader when Saddam was overthrown by U.S. forces, got fired from the military and other jobs by Bush’s idiotic deBaathification policy and humiliated by America’s new darlings, Shia politicians and their factions—sparking a bloody civil war and leading to U.S. defeat.

            Lesson #4: Never be a sore loser.

            European powers that offered financial assistance and training to their former colonies after independence in places like Africa continued to enjoy influence within those countries. Examples include the UK’s relationship with India and France’s role in Mali, Senegal, the Central African Republic and even Algeria, which cast off the French yoke after an eight-year-long struggle famously characterized by torture and terrorism.

            The United States should try something similar when it loses its wars of aggression: lick its wounds, acknowledge its mistakes and offer to help clean up the messes it makes when it withdraws from a country strewn with mines and cluster bombs.

            It took 20 years before the U.S. reengaged with Vietnam after the fall of Saigon—two decades of squandered rapprochement and lost international trade. This occurred despite the precedent of World War II, in which U.S. occupation authorities worked to insinuate themselves with their defeated enemies Germany and Japan almost on day one, two relationships that paid off for all concerned.
            Its nose bloodied by its debacle in Iraq, the U.S. has allowed Iran to become the dominant outside power inside the country.

            And now the U.S. is doing the same thing in Afghanistan as in Iraq—nothing. Afghans are gaunt and hungry because of drought and the U.S. decision to cut off aid and frozen Afghan government funds. The economy is collapsing. The enormous U.S. embassy in Kabul is closed, making it impossible for Afghans to contact the U.S. government.

            All that investment of money and time, and who will get the more than $1 trillion in untapped natural resources, including copper, lithium, and rare-earth elements? China, most likely. If the U.S. could get over itself, it might salvage some influence over the new Taliban government in Kabul and open new markets. Let girls go to school and women work, President Biden could tell them, and we’ll release some funds. Arrest and hand over figures like the recently droned Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was living in Kabul, and we’ll restore aid. Carry out more reforms and we’ll establish diplomatic ties.

Picking up your toys and going back to your house after losing a fight might feel good. But it’s immature and counterproductive in a world in which success depends on having friends and collaborators.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

DMZ America Podcast #61: Trump Under Fire. More Truth From Inside Russia. Does Democrats’ Good Week Matter?

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Ted Rall

Former President Donald Trump’s Florida home raided by the FBI as he prepares to be deposed by the New York attorney general’s office. Will Trump be able to survive, or even thrive, as a result of overreach that feeds into his supporters’ sense of eternal grievance? Cartoonists Ted Rall and Scott Stantis discuss the political ramifications. Ted downloads about his second week in Russia and how it bore zero resemblance to the picture of doom and gloom depicted by Western news media. Democrats got stuff done, finally. Does it matter? If so, how much?

 

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