In today’s Wall Street Journal I examine the somewhat mysterious appeal of Beto O’Rourke.
“Mr. O’Rourke probably won’t be the nominee. There’s lots of competition to be the Democratic “fresh face,” including candidates such as Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, who can credibly claim to have accomplished something. But Betomania is real and weird. Cory Booker didn’t get this much media love when he rescued a neighbor in Newark, N.J., from a burning building.“
Read more here.
A passel of First Amendment organizations calls bullshit on the LA Times. I’ve posted our final brief to the California Supreme Court asking for my right to a jury trial. Check out this succinct overview of the case:
Ted Rall Reply to LA Times’ Answer to Petition for Review by California Supreme Court
Two weeks ago I discussed some of the projects and jobs that, for whatever reason, I never got to do during my career as a cartoonist and writer. The stuff we don’t do, I wrote, defines as much as what we do. This week: my weird stuff that never came together.
Hugh Hefner died in 2017. I was un-sad.
Un-sad is not happiness. It’s feeling neutral when you’re supposed to be unhappy. Hef, who as a young man wanted to be a cartoonist, had bad taste in cartoons and architecture but superb taste in art directors. In the 1990s his charismatic cartoon editor Michelle Urry recruited me to help modernize Playboy’s graphics, whose content and aesthetics were stuck in the 1960s the way The New Yorker looks like it’s still the 1920s. Under Urry’s tutelage I drew scores of sex-themed cartoons with a left-wing social and political bent. I think they were some of the funniest stuff I’ve ever done.
“I love them but Hef hates them,” Michelle told me. “He wants to leave everything the same.” So no commie sex comix. Sadly for real, Urry died prematurely.
One of my oddest aborted projects was a comic strip in which I partnered with another cartoonist to whom I will grant anonymity. Conceived over planter’s punches at a defunct Village bar called the Dew Drop Inn and marketed to alternative and underground newspapers under a pseudonym, “Lil’ Adolf and His Friend Eva” featured the antics of two kids in an American high school facing situations à la Archie and Jughead (drawn a bit like that) with a twist: neither knows they’re clones of a certain German Chancellor and his girlfriend Eva Braun. Faced with a dilemma—homework, bullying, getting picked last in gym class—the pair inevitably resorts to violence. I often decry newspaper editors as a band of boring middlebrow risk-averse Babbitts but in this case I applaud their discretion. Not one paper expressed interest in “Lil’ Adolf.” I am grateful.
My UPN fiasco left a few scars. In 1998 or 1999 Dean Valentine, head of the now-forgotten TV network that aired the “Dilbert” TV show, asked me to develop an animated series to follow “Dilbert” at 8:30 pm. Valentine had seen my cartoons in the Los Angeles Times. While the lawyers hashed out the deal I toiled over plots and character designs. The result would be a show called “Boomerang.”
Whereas “The Simpsons” is about a nuclear family in the suburbs, “Boomerang” would concern a postmodern extended tangled yarnball of relationships between half/stepsiblings and their LGBTQA partners and adopted children and pets living in a sprawling dilapidated Victorian hulk in Newark reflective of America’s splintering socioeconomic infrastructure. Very Gen X.
Six months or so into it, the deal was finalized. I signed a stack of contracts. My lawyer shoved them into a FedEx. And we never heard from UPN again. We called and called…no reply.
Ghosted by a corporation! Now it’s standard business practice. Twenty years ago, though, neither me nor my attorney had ever heard of such a thing. We could have sued for breach of (half-signed?) contract and perhaps won. But I wanted to do another show someday and didn’t want to get blackballed by Hollywood companies.
Two of my TV show pitches attracted high-level interest in Tinseltown, though not as close to those execution copies of contacts at UPN. Aside from the glory, I would have wanted to watch them. That’s my test for cartoons, books, podcasts, whatever I make. If I were a fan, would I want to consume it myself?
“Green”’s premise was simple: if the planet is in danger, if ecocidal maniacs are causing climate change, mass extinctions and possibly the end of the human race, isn’t the right thing to do to murder the bastards? “Green” the series would have been about a “deep green” terrorist organization—think Earth First! meets the Weather Underground if WU had had more members—and a FBI counterterrorist taskforce assigned to find and stop them. I saw it as a political, existential HBO-type show starring brilliant, troubled lead characters.
I scored repeat pitch meetings with Hollywood production companies and a few networks. But interest waned. Calls were no longer returned.
Shortly after the 2000 election I shopped a treatment for “The Bushies,” an animated series about the then-First Family in which all the characters were secretly different than their public personas. In “The Bushies” George W. Bush was a brilliant, soulful intellectual. Cheney was a mushy crybaby. The Bush twins were nefarious serial killers. Like many other L.A. dreams, “The Bushies” died in a major network’s “business affairs” department because some idiot lawyer worried about libel suits.
The Bushies were public figures, as public as could be. This was classic political satire, immune from litigation assuming a Bush was dumb enough to sue. Most countries (France, Germany, England, Russia) had similar comedies mocking their leaders. As usual, the in-house attorney won. Trey Parker and Matt Stone moved quickly with their “That’s My Bush!” for Comedy Central. It was not one of their finer resume entries.
Later in the decade I tried to jumpstart a political animation career with five-minute shorts. I drew and wrote; David Essman animated. We did 35 of them in all. Some still hold up, all are worth watching (the Tea Party one is great), but despite my aggressive marketing campaign I couldn’t sell them to anyone. It’s sad: static political cartooning is dead, Internet companies are obsessed with video but no one wants animated cartoons. My political cartoonist colleagues have had similar lousy results.
One of my most ambitious projects got killed by 9/11.
Less than an hour before the first plane hit the World Trade Center, my train left New York’s Penn Station for Philadelphia. By the time me and my business partner, now a magazine editor, arrived in Philly the Parks Police were shutting down the Liberty Bell. (My first post-9/11 joke: “don’t worry, it’s already broken.”)
We were in Philly to close a $1.5 million deal with a Pennsylvania media investor in Brooklyn Weekly, the alt weekly newspaper we wanted to launch in the borough. At the time Brooklyn still being hipsterized. The 19 hijackers messed it up. As we watched the events on TV the moneyman leaned back into his seat. “Deal’s off,” he announced as he wrote off the nation’s biggest city. “No one will ever do business in New York again.”
“With all due respect,” I replied with nothing-to-lose bravado, “that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. They still do business in Hiroshima.”
Osama bin Laden may have done me a favor. Craigslist destroyed the classified ads business that were the basis of the alt-weekly profit model. The dot-com crash pushed the economy into a slump that lasted the rest of the decade. Brooklyn Weekly might have been doomed.
Or maybe not. Brooklyn is different. I could easily see a weekly with a strong political and cultural point of view succeeding now.
(Ted Rall, the cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
As of yesterday my fate and the fate of California journalists was in the hands of the state Supreme Court in San Francisco. We filed our Answer to the LA Times’ Reply to our Petition for Review with the court along with 7 amicus curiae letters in my favor issued by First Amendment organizations including the National Coalition Against Censorship, the National Writers Union, Index on Censorship, Project Censored, the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and Cartoonists Rights Network International.
The Times argued in its Reply that truth is irrelevant because the First Amendment gives the Times the right to publish anything it wants regardless of veracity, and that its decision to fire a journalist is not actionable because it’s not firing but rather a simple “decision not to publish.”
If the court fails to rule in my favor or to hear my case, defamation law will be dead in California. And journalists will lose the right to contest wrongful termination.
Major media outlets are still refusing to cover my story. I suspect it’s because it’s awkward. The Times is wrong and they know it. But they don’t want to lose protections in case they screw up too.
Now we wait to hear whether the Court will agree to hear my case.
There they go again.
In 2002 and 2003 corporate media idiots speculated that secular socialist Saddam Hussein might give nukes that he didn’t and couldn’t have to radical Islamists who wanted to kill him. That story wasn’t true. Worse than that, it couldn’t have been true. I said it over and over and over. So did others.
But we skeptics were outsiders. Corporate media’s strict idiots-only hiring policy keeps journalists-as-stenographers, propagandists and broken-brain logic-haters employed by censoring those of us who are always right. The idiots’ idiotic lies about WMDs justified a war that left more than a million Iraqis dead.
Corporate media didn’t fire their idiots after the WMD fiasco. Why would they? They were in the war business and the suck-up-to-government business. Had they been in the truth business, losing their credibility might have mattered.
Idiots gonna idiot. So it’s no surprise that in 2016 the same corporate media morons fabricated another conspiracy theory so outlandish that not only was it obviously untrue, it could not possibly have been true—and that it would again have devastating real-world consequences.
Russiagate was a propaganda campaign waged by the Democratic Party and its media allies with a daily blizzard of overheated speculation that Russia installed Donald Trump as its stooge by hacking the 2016 presidential election. Several years and millions of dollars later, special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded that it didn’t happen.
Of course it didn’t happen. It couldn’t have happened.
As I wrote last year: “You’re asking us to believe that Trump’s people met with Putin’s people, not to discuss Trump’s sleazy real estate developments in the former Soviet Union, but to encourage Russian hackers to break into the DNC, steal Hillary’s emails and funnel them to WikiLeaks with a view toward angering enough voters to change the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor. Trump doesn’t even read one-page memos. Yet we’re being asked to believe that he supervised a ridiculously complex Machiavellian conspiracy?
“WikiLeaks didn’t get the DNC documents from Russia or any other state actor. They got them from a disgruntled pro-Bernie Sanders staffer at the DNC. Anyway, the intelligence community — you know, the friendly folks at the CIA, FBI and NSA whom Democrats worship the way Republicans revered firefighters after 9/11 — says whatever Russian hacking occurred did not affect the outcome of the election.
“Then there’s this: Trump didn’t actually want to win. Why would he go to such lengths to steal something he didn’t want?”
As Chris Christie pointed out January 28th, how the hell could a shoestring operation like the Trump campaign, which was “just trying to figure out how to get field people hired in places like Pennsylvania” be so internationally sophisticated as to “run some sort of Tom Clancy operation”?
My colleague Matt Taibbi writes, and he’s right: “Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.” Whatever credibility U.S. media still had after pimping those imaginary Iraqi WMDs, The Los Angeles Times allowing its stock to be sold to the LAPD and then taking orders from the police, and “experts” repeatedly reporting that Donald Trump had no chance of winning, lies in tatters.
The media idiots’ WMD BS cost a million-plus Iraqis their lives. Their Russiagate crap has vastly increased the chances that Trump will win reelection. Russiagate will make it all but impossible to impeach the bastard as he deserves and as the country desperately needs.
As I said on the radio after the Mueller news broke: “Business corruption would have been, should have been the focus of Democrats looking for legal means to remove this president. That’s the low-hanging fruit; that’s where something actually happened. Instead, they went after the president for something he didn’t actually do, and so they look really foolish, and Trump is going to beat the Mueller report over the heads of the Democrats all through next year, and it’s going to be hard for the Democrats to put this behind them.”
Trump is a corrupt real estate magnate with ties to the mafia and sleazy autocrats around the world. Anyone out to get him should have started by following his misbegotten money. Instead Democrats tried to do three things at once: get Trump, destroy U.S.-Russia relations to provoke a new Cold War that would profit the military-industrial complex and explain away the bankruptcy of Hillary Clinton’s brand of centrist corporatism.
Democrats are now turning their attention to the New York-based investigations of Trump and his business affairs by U.S. Attorneys. The president faces significant legal jeopardy on several fronts, including abusing a charitable organization to evade taxes and the likelihood that his hush-money payoffs to Stormy Daniels violated federal campaign finance laws. When he leaves office, Trump might even face jail time.
But none of that matters. Trump is so old and fat he’ll probably die before facing prosecution. The real threat to Trump from New York is current and political. Thanks to Mueller’s exoneration on Russiagate, Trump is largely politically inoculated from the New York stuff even if the Department of Justice files major charges. “Just another witch hunt,” he’ll say—and voters—not just his base—will nod their heads. The media will go on and on about wrongdoing that under normal circumstances would amount to one hell of a scandal—but who will listen other than partisan Democrats?
The second Trump Administration that just became likelier will hasten the destruction of the planet by pollution and climate change, widen income and wealth disparity and gut the Affordable Care Act. The U.S. system may never recover. All because the corporate media idiots went after a serial criminal for the one crime he didn’t commit.
Wanna know the richest irony? Trump knew how this would turn out. He knew what the Mueller Report would say. For two years he’s been watching DNC mouthpieces like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow rant about Russiagate. He knew he’d use those clips for one attack ad after another.
Actual collusion! Democrats and their media outlets conspired to install Donald Trump as president in 2020.
(Ted Rall, the cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
She was a terrible boss. But she was wise about work. “We are defined more by the business we refuse to take than the ones we do,” she told me. That turned out to be true. My cartoons are notable for what they don’t include: symbols like donkeys and elephants, labeled graphic metaphors, a reliance on caricature.
Film fanatics muse about the Greatest Movies Never Made. There was talk about remaking John Carpenter’s campy, low-budget, politically brilliant 1988 movie “They Live.” Unlike Harrison Ford’s oafish 1995 do-over of “Sabrina”—first rule of Hollywood should be don’t remake a film by Billy Wilder—“They Live” with money for special effects and real actors might have been something to see.
Projects that get dropped before completion reveal the outer limits of a creator’s interests. Ideas intriguing enough to pursue initially and fall apart in the face of financial or marketplace distribution issues or other, easier-to-finish plans present a tantalizing portrait of a career that might have been under different circumstances.
I’ve been slogging through a midlife crisis. Court battles, career pains and my mother’s flagging health have me focused on mortality. For a poor kid from the Rust Belt I’ve lived an amazing life; if I die today I’ll feel that I scored a better deal than many others. Still, to whine is human. Closer to death than birth, I’m considering how to spend the time I have left and regretting cool things I never got to do and probably never will: work on staff inside the offices of a newspaper or magazine, study toward a master’s degree, teach, live or study overseas.
As a project-oriented creator I think even more about specific projects that, for whatever reason, never worked out. Call them: Ted Rall’s Greatest Projects Never Made.
I got close to newspaper staff jobs several times. The editor at the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch admired my cartoons but said she didn’t think her readers wanted to swallow the graphic equivalent of “ground glass with their breakfast every morning.” The Newark Star-Ledger passed me over for a recent college grad on the grounds that “it’ll be easier to tell a kid what to do.”
The Sacramento Bee flew me out for a decidedly unimpressive interview, putting me up at a motel whose view was an endless parade of homeless men pushing shopping carts. I knew the fix was in when I saw Rex Babin’s latest cartoon on the editor’s desk, not mine. They hired Rex. Anyway, the editor informed me that my caustic cartoons “might be too upsetting to the good burghers of Sacramento.” At the Harrisburg Patriot-News the fault was mine. They asked how much I wanted and I told them ($80,000 if memory serves). They hired another sportswriter instead. Two decades later, the cartooning job is still vacant.
Then there was the Asbury Park Press. I’d been schlepping down the Jersey shore from NYC for more than a year to draw about local and state politics. Finally the day I had been waiting for arrived: the big interview. Ray Ollwerther and I talked for an hour. Everything went smoothly until the executive editor’s last question. Gesturing to a window that overlooked the parking lot, he asked: “Will I ever look out there and see someone protesting something that you drew?” Honest to a career-suicide fault, I said, “I don’t know. Maybe.” As at the Ledger, they hired a young guy instead.
In the 1980s, in my twenties, I was desperately poor and viciously ambitious, a combination that opens one to a certain moral flexibility. I hated my life as a low-level banker. Why not sell out? Which is how I found myself being treated to lunch at the Four Seasons by Priscilla Buckley, editor of the archconservative National Review.
You may wonder why I include NR on this list. I obviously didn’t belong there. Because the money would have been great. And I would have loved to have worked with Buckley. Republican she was, and also an excellent human: witty, incredibly intelligent, kind. I left with instructions to draw 12 cartoons from a right-wing point of view.
I agonized. The poor: it’s their own fault. Reagan, we’re lucky to have him. We ought to have more wars. I couldn’t do it. Not because it made me feel evil—it was simply that none of it was true and there is no satire without underlying truth. I ducked Priscilla’s calls and she soon gave up.
Morals entered the equation in late 1990 when the New York Daily News went on strike. It was a brutal labor battle. Newsstands that sold the scab paper got torched; a strikebreaking delivery truck driver was shot at or shot, I don’t remember which. Along with every other newspaper, the News had been on my mailing list so that’s how they came to call me about a cartooning position at what was then America’s largest circulation newspaper. The editor offered me $120,000 at a time when I had zero prospects. I was a 28-year-old college senior, with no income and the same amount of financial aid, about to graduate into a tough recession. Editorials, not just at the News, portrayed the strikers as spoiled overpaid brats, but the offer bothered me. So I called my mom.
Uncharacteristically, she listened carefully without interrupting. “I didn’t raise a son,” she said simply, “to cross a picket line.” She was a teachers’ union shop steward. That was that.
We’re defined by what we refuse to do. But whenever I’ve worried about money, I wished I hadn’t called mom.
Next week: the really weird stuff I never did.
(Ted Rall, the cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Index on Censorship, the prestigious UK-based free-speech organization, has joined six US-based pro-press freedom organizations to oppose the LA Times’ four-year campaign of harassment and libel against me, trying to ruin me because I offended their then-business partner and part-owner, the Los Angeles Police Department, with my cartoons. Here is the complete text of the IoC letter.
All presidents suck so I hate them. But it takes a special something to trigger me into full-on Presidential Derangement Syndrome.
When you go from contempt to boiling rage at the mere thought of a president’s existence and less to his deeds, that’s PDS. When Reagan and one of the Bushes appeared it took Herculean effort to resist my urge to throw something heavy and lethal at the screen. The thought that two of these worthies are dead gives me nothing but pleasure; I hope to live long enough to witness the trifecta.
I hated their policies. But policies don’t trigger PDS. As a leftie I despise Democrats more than Republicans in the same way that the French loathed the Nazis but hated French collaborators more; Republicans are warmongering racist corporatist monsters but so are Democrats and they ought to know better.
I despised the transparent insincerity of Reagan’s “well, golly” phony folksiness juxtaposed against the viciousness of such actions as gutting the social welfare safety net to cut taxes for the wealthy. As with Reagan my visceral disdain for George HW Bush stemmed from his behavioral hypocrisy; how dare he play the civilized Connecticut preppy while he gleefully ordered a war crime, the massacre of thousands of Iraqis fleeing Kuwait during the Gulf War on the “Highway of Death”?
Bush Derangement Syndrome (about Dubya) pushed me over the edge.
Typically, the man’s politics were despicable. But it was his style, his stage manner, that really drove me nuts: his adopted Texas swagger and equally phony accent, the smirk, his manic cadence—above all, the look in his eyes that said: “I’m a dumbass and I like it.” I didn’t want to have a beer with him, I wanted him to move to the surface of the sun. The incurious idiot drove me to distraction and it shows in my cartoons from the Bush 43 era: angry, pedantic, ineffectual.
In Anglican-founded America, political satire is best served cold.
Living in New York most of my friends are Democrats. I empathize with yet do not share the Trump Derangement Syndrome that is rife throughout liberal-leaning media and among voters.
Trump, TDSers scream, is the worst president ever. They claim that his politics are uniquely ruinous, totally unprecedented, and represent an existential threat to everything good and decent about America. We are doomed! Pendant Trump, le déluge. Trump’s novel awfulness, they explain, is why they hate him so much they wouldn’t even consider having sex with someone hot if they owned a MAGA hat.
Liberals are mistaken. Like all Presidential Derangements, the Trumpian version is provoked by the man’s tone, not the substance of his policies.
No doubt, style matters. This president is the most uncivil, crassest, crudest, ugliest (in several meanings of the word) U.S. leader in memory. Maybe ever.
But style is only style. Style is not substance. Conflating Trump’s weird crazy demeanor with his generically Republican politics exacerbates a problem afflicting our national discourse, our pundits’ tendency to obsess over the distraction of personality rather than the politics that govern our lives.
Though repugnant, neither Trump’s politics nor his policies are significantly worse than those of his precedessors.
Trump separates and jails children at the Mexican border; the policy began smaller under Obama—who jailed and tortured children at Guantànamo (as did Bush). White government officials stole babies from Native Americans until the early 20th century.
The Muslim travel ban is racist and vile; so was the Asian Exclusion Act.
Trump ignored Puerto Rico after it was destroyed by hurricanes; have we already forgotten Bush’s malign neglect after Katrina devastated New Orleans?
Trump’s White House staff reeks of nepotism and self-dealing. JFK appointed his brother, who never really practiced private law, as Attorney General. It didn’t take but Clinton tried to make his wife a healthcare czar.
Trump filled his cabinet with unqualified fools and officials who oppose the missions of the departments they lead. Nothing new there either: Reagan appointed a dentist as Secretary of Energy, a military general as the nation’s chief diplomat, a guy who wanted to eliminate the Education Department to run it and James Watt, who hated the environment, to lead the Interior Department.
Though it’s more style than substantial policy, Trump rightly earned contempt for legitimating the “alt right” in Charlottesville. Sadly, this is hardly new ground for a president. Reagan staged his 1980 campaign announcement rally in the tiny Mississippi town where the KKK murdered four Freedom Riders during the civil rights struggle in order to signal to racists that he was one of them. Nixon had his Southern strategy. Wilson (famously a racist) Taft, Truman and Ike tacitly approved of American fascists like Herbert Hoover and Joseph McCarthy as they hunted down “communists” who in many cases were not—and so what if they were?
Trump’s trade wars and government shutdowns feel new. Actually government shutdowns, all 20 of them, date back to Gerald Ford. We’ve launched trade wars since independence from Britain.
Trump coddles dictators and tyrants like the Saudi prince who had a journalist murdered and sliced into pieces in a consulate but it would be difficult to identify any US president who didn’t maintain close diplomatic, financial and military ties with brutal dictatorships.
No. Trump is not a departure. He is a continuation of America’s insanely violent, classist, racist and militarist policies as pursued by every one of his predecessors.
The real reason liberals can’t stand Trump is that he’s vulgar. Everything from his ’80s-shiny too-tight suits and too-long cherry-red ties to his combover of death to the brass trimmings he favors in his hotels and his spray-on tan screams “used car salesman.” Obama, now he was a president: slim, trim, calm, professorial, multisyllabic. Anyone who liked Obama and hates Trump is kidding themselves if they don’t admit it: they’re can’t stand President Trump because he’s a terrible casting decision.
Politics has very little to do with it.
I hate Trump, but no more than previous presidents. Actually, there’s something I really like about him.
There’s little disjoint, no disconnect, between his disgusting policies and his equally gross persona. Trump is the president America, specifically American politics, deserve. You can’t help but look at that mean greedy pompous bloated orange flag-hugging idiot and think: here, at last, is the perfect embodiment of who we are and what we do to ourselves and the world.
We’ll probably get another “normal” president after Trump. The awful politics will stay the same, the rich will keep stealing from the poor, the bombs will keep raining down on the brown people and Democrats will go back to sleep.
I will miss him.
(Ted Rall, the cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
The NWU has joined six other free-speech organizations in supporting my lawsuit against the LA Times with an Amicus Letter to the California Supreme Court. It is so great to see people stepping forward and standing up against billionaire Dr. Pat Soon-Shiong, whose LA Times is bullying me on behalf of the Los Angeles Police Department.
Here is the text of their letter:
Here is the complete Amicus Letter filed with the California Supreme Court, opposing the LA Times’ attempt to destroy my career because I criticized the LAPD, which owned the stock of their parent company.
