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Violent Speech Might Not Cause Violent Acts. So What?

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Ted Rall
          With the exception of those who explain themselves, like John Wilkes Booth and Leon Czolgosz, political assassins tend to take their motives to the grave. Though the real reasons for their acts tend to be personal to the point of quirky—like John Hinckley hoping to impress Jodie Foster—Americans often point the finger at inflammatory rhetoric. Dehumanizing speech, we assume, is bound to prompt some weak-minded weirdo to act out.             Anti-JFK “wanted for treason” posters distributed in Dallas shortly before the November 1963 assassination were cited as evidence that right-wing extremism had created a toxic atmosphere, implying that the city itself had sort of killed the president. But Dallas didn’t shoot Kennedy; Lee Harvey Oswald did. Though his motives were nebulous, his politics leaned Left.             After Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot by her constituent in 2011, liberal media outlets took note of a map tweeted by a PAC associated with Sarah Palin released nine months earlier, which…
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Biden’s Senility Obscures Trump’s Senility

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Ted Rall
           Why, frustrated Democrats are asking, is the news media ignoring signs that former President Donald Trump is (also) suffering cognitive impairment? Why are they focusing on President Joe Biden’s debate performance and calling on him, but not Trump, following his conviction on 34 felony counts, to drop out of the campaign?             You have reasonable questions, I have answers:             Biden is the incumbent, not Trump. As much as Democrats would prefer otherwise, elections are a referendum on the incumbent.             Voters have long been worried about Biden’s age. The debate confirmed their concerns about the 81-year-old leader and added a new one: Democrats and their media allies have been gaslighting them about Biden’s physical and mental condition.             Trump’s felony convictions, though politically problematic are not inherently disqualifying. A felon can perform the duties of president. A senile person cannot.             Trump has been out in public, unscripted, a lot more than Biden. His performance was no worse…
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Biden Probably Has Parkinson’s Disease

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Ted Rall
          What, exactly, is wrong with Joe Biden? It’s probably not Alzheimer’s. I wrote a syndicated column bearing the headline “Biden obviously has dementia and should withdraw from the race” in March 2020. Democratic gaslighting aside, he has been sick for a long time. As I witnessed as caretaker for my mother, who died a month before I wrote the above, Alzheimer’s tends to progress faster than what we’re seeing, especially at Biden’s advanced age.             Biden’s affliction is some other form of dementia, defined by the CDC as “not a specific disease but is rather a general term for the impaired ability to remember, think, or make decisions that interferes with doing everyday activities.”             Many things can cause and present as dementia: hearing loss, traumatic brain injuries, liver disease.             One cause is the degenerative nerve disorder made famous by Michael J. Fox, Parkinson’s disease.             According to Johns Hopkins’ website: “Parkinson disease causes physical symptoms at first.…
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How Biden Could Salvage His Candidacy

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Ted Rall
            Biden’s unsteady performance in last week’s presidential debate has sparked a debate of its own between Democrats, between those who believe the president’s chances of reelection have dropped so dramatically that he should be replaced as their nominee and loyalists determined to stay the course lest the fragile coalition between corporatists and progressives unravel into internecine chaos.             As we await a second post-debate round of polling (the first ones show Trump gaining) that may or may not strengthen one of these positions, the pro-dump-Biden faction isn’t helping itself by floating a list of possible replacement nominees that comprises fairly obscure governors like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Andy Beshear of Kentucky. These figures would face the challenge of scaling their regional reputations as up-and-comers up to the national stage in a matter of weeks. Gavin Newsom is the exception. But Newsom underperformed at his recent just-for-fun debate against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis; he would…
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Our Weirdly Random Employment System

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Ted Rall
           Serendipity plays such a starring role in our lives that we never stop to ask ourselves whether we ought to accept it. A random event, especially one that turns out to be your “big break,” becomes a charming story—even though, really, such happenstance is an indictment of a system that is no system at all. Donald Sutherland, the New York Times noted in his recent obituary, “first came to the attention of many moviegoers as one of the Army misfits and sociopaths in ‘The Dirty Dozen’ (1967), set during World War II. His character had almost no lines until he was told to take over from another actor. ‘You with the big ears—you do it!’ he recalled the director, Robert Aldrich, yelling at him. ‘He didn’t even know my name.’” Wait—if the other guy hadn’t messed up, we’d never have gotten to know this brilliant actor?             James Kent, a chef and restauranteur who died June 16th at the…
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Men Are Not Disposable

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Ted Rall
The American packet ship Poland was traveling from New York to Normandy when, in May 1840, it was struck by lightning. A fire broke out. A Bostonian later recalled that his fellow passenger, a Frenchman, responded to the captain’s call to abandon ship with the suggestion that seats on the lifeboats go to “women and children first.” Everyone agreed to this then-novel idea. This order of priority became known as the Birkenhead drill, after a British naval ship that sank in 1852 and followed the same protocol. Originating in 19th century notions of chivalry and paternalism, “women and children first” became enshrined in popular culture with the Titanic disaster and (exaggerated) accounts of men disguising themselves as women in order to secure a coveted seat on an escape vessel. Interestingly, international maritime law still does not require men to disembark a sinking ship last—nor for the captain to go down with their ship.             Gender equality is generally taken for…
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How Hamas Defeated Israel

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Ted Rall
            When residents of the Middle East woke up on the morning of October 7, 2023, the Palestinian cause was in a sorry state. 700,000 radical Israeli settler-colonists and sealed-off “military zones” occupied 60% of the occupied West Bank, which was blockaded by a Berlin-style border wall, so much that the United Nations human rights chief no longer believed that Palestinian sovereignty was even theoretically possible. The occupied Gaza Strip was subject to an Israeli blockade that destroyed the economy and drove the unemployment rate to 80%. President Donald Trump had moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem—a strong signal to Palestinians that the world would never allow them their own State—and Joe Biden had let it stay there. Muslim nations that had previously supported the Palestinian struggle (Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco and Sudan) normalized diplomatic relations with the hard-right government of Israel; Oman, Indonesia, Somalia and Saudi Arabia were expected to follow.             The world, including numerous Arab governments, had…
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In Court, We’re All Abused Like Donald Trump

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Ted Rall
            At any given time, millions of Americans are involved in either a criminal case or civil lawsuit at some level of the local, state or federal court system. Very few people get to the end of their lives without coming into contact with judges and juries charged with determining the fate of their freedom and savings accounts.             For most people, the legal system feels like a meatgrinder. Cops and officials, paid by you the taxpayer, treat you like dirt. Court fees and lawyers bleed you dry. Your reputation is at risk. So is your sanity. Nothing makes sense. The courts impose a series of annoying and painful experiences that belie the fundamental constitutional guarantees they teach us in school and cast doubt on the assertion that we all enjoy equal justice under the law. Like a surgical procedure, time spent in an American courtroom is best gotten through as fast as possible and quickly forgotten. Never mind full-fledged…
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If Trump Leaned Left, Democrats Would Love Him Too

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Ted Rall
            If you don’t understand your enemy and their motivations, Sun Tzu counseled, victory will elude you. Part of the reason Biden’s polls are so awful is that Democrats and their supporters don’t have a clue about what is driving Trump and his MAGA movement.             The answer would shock many of them. Republican voters want the same thing as Democrats: a warrior. Republicans don’t much care whether their president or senator or congressman is a decent or law-abiding individual. They just want him to vote for the bills they agree with, and to push like hell to turn them into law.             Evangelical Christians, the bedrock of the GOP base, embodies this seeming paradox. “It is odd,” The New Statesman muses, “to see a man who embodies so many sins—including all seven deadly ones; is there anyone who better exemplifies a noxious combination of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth?—be so widely embraced by the religious Right.…
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My Stolen Rent Check Shows Why America Is Broken

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Ted Rall
           When my landlord’s management company informed me that they hadn’t received my rent check, I was surprised. As for most Americans, housing is by far my biggest expense. So of course I noticed when the money vanished from my account. The mystery deepened when I conjured up an image of the canceled check on my bank’s website. There was my check, canceled and endorsed. I sent a screenshot to my management company.             Look closer, they responded. We didn’t cash it. That’s the signature of some random person—not us.             So it was. How could my bank clear a check for thousands of dollars made out to a company like “XYZ Management Corp.” but endorsed by a completely unrelated individual—one who doesn’t work there, natch—like “John Smith”? What were my rights in this situation? The answers to those two questions provide insight into state of a country that has lost its way.             There is a prequel to the…
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