Support Ted’s Work

SYNDICATED COLUMN: John Kasich’s Ohio Fantasy

•
Ted Rall
  There’s denial. There’s self-delusion. There’s hallucination. Then there’s John Kasich. It’s just another political horse-race story about another white guy running for president, but “Kasich Looks to Republican Primaries, ‘Ohio Story’ in Hand” in the March 19th New York Times would have made me fall out of my seat had I not been confined by a seatbelt and squished in by a pair of chubby fellow airplane passengers. John Kasich is the other Scott Walker, another Republican governor of a Midwestern state contemplating a run for president next year. Kasich runs Ohio. Ohio is my home state. Says the Times, Kasich is touting his “Ohio story” to make his case for moving into the Oval Office: “On his watch, Ohio’s $8 billion budget shortfall has turned into a $1.5 billion surplus. He has increased funding for mental health services and takes credit for 352,000 new private sector jobs.” (Note the qualifier “takes credit for.”) To be fair, the paper…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Goofus Hillary vs. Gallant Hillary

•
Ted Rall
I’m calling bullshit on Hillary. Not on Hillary herself. On the media’s portrayal of her. “The private Hillary is as warm and charming a woman as anyone could conjure up. The public Hillary sometimes seems brittle, with the judgment of a raging rhinoceros,” writes fellow syndicated columnist Ann McFeatters. I don’t mean to pick on McFeatters. Everyone (in the media) says the same thing: Hillary Clinton is so awesome one-on-one or maybe one-on-six, in private. For example, Mark Leibovich says she’s “quite human and funny” in private. She’s been a high-profile national politician for more than 20 years. Why hasn’t she figured out how to charm the American public on TV? These repeated accounts of Hillarity are less than reliable, issued as they are by the kind of people in a position to have met Hillary Clinton, which pretty much guarantees that they’re boring and bland and not very smart — the kind of people who think Obama means well…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Her Bad! Again, Hillary Reveals Her Terrible Judgement

•
Ted Rall
  Hillary Clinton’s political setbacks and scandals come in all shapes and sizes, but they all have one thing in common: they highlight a personality with questionable judgment. The question before the media, and American voters, is whether a person with such bad judgment should be trusted with nuclear launch codes at 3 AM. The former Secretary of State during Obama’s first term acquitted herself fairly well during yesterday’s news conference (though I wonder why none of her advisers told her to lose that pinched I-can’t-believe-I-have-to-put-up-with-this-crap look on her face), though she did commit two rookie errors (I’ll get to those below). To Hillary’s credit, she admitted she made a bad call in 2009, when she decided to exclusively use a private email account – whose server is kept at her private home in Chappaqua, New York – rather than an official .gov one issued by the State Department. “Looking back, it would have been better for me to use…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Joining ISIS is Stupid. But Why Should It Be Illegal?

•
Ted Rall
“American Taliban” John Walker Lindh stripped nude and tortured after his capture.   There have been several high-profile arrests of wannabe jihadis who allegedly intended to fight with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, including three New York City residents last week, charged with providing “material support and resources…to a foreign terrorist organization.” They each face up to 15 years in prison. Over the last year the United States has intercepted and arrested at least 15 young Muslims for wanting to join ISIS. If I went to Syria to join ISIS, I could be arrested and charged with felonies that carry long prison sentences. Why? As citizens of a supposedly free country, Americans ought to be able to travel anywhere on the planet, and fight for any army we please, as long as that force is not at war against the United States. This, by the way, has been American law for the last 120 years. Neither ISIS nor…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Obama Destroyed Libya

•
Ted Rall
Barack Obama destroyed Libya. What he did to Libya is as bad as what Bush did to Iraq and Afghanistan. He doesn’t deserve a historical pass. When Obama took office in 2009, Libya was under the clutches of longtime dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. But things were looking up. Bush and Gaddafi had cut a deal to lift Western trade sanctions in exchange for Libya acknowledging and paying restitution for its role in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In a rare triumph for Bush, Libya also agreed to give up its nuclear weapons research program. Libyan and Western analysts anticipated that Gaddafi’s dictatorship would be forced to accept liberal reforms, perhaps even free elections and rival political parties, in order to attract Western investment. Libya in 2009 was prosperous. As citizens of a major oil- and natural gas-exporting nation, Libyans enjoyed high salaries, low living expenses, generous social benefits, not to mention law and order. It…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Presidential Politics: All Personality, No Platform

•
Ted Rall
Distributed by Creators Syndicate (click the link to purchase for publication): Hillary Clinton has everything she needs to run for president: money, name recognition, staff, organization. Everything except ideas. The 2016 presidential campaign will begin in earnest in late summer. This hasn’t snuck up on her; she has known this was coming since at least 2008. Yet here she is, six months before the unofficial start of her run, starting to figure out what she’ll do if she wins. “People close to Mrs. Clinton say she has not yet settled on a specific platform” on the economy, the New York Times notes in a report about a recent series of meetings she held with 200 economists in order to collect their assessments of the economy. There’s nothing wrong with asking experts for suggestions about how to fix the problems you want to solve. But you should already have a vision for what America and its economy ought to look like.…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why Are We At War with ISIS?

•
Ted Rall
Is there any justification at all for bombing ISIS? There isn’t any Congressional authorization, much less a declaration of war. Is there even a good reason for the U.S. to be involved? There is no better time to ask this question than now, as much of the world (me included) is disgusted by the Islamic State’s beheadings of two kidnapped Japanese nationals, the second one an acclaimed journalist and humanist who lost his life trying to rescue the first. It is easy to forget, too easy, that for Americans going to war was until recently an act undertaken only after every other alternative had been thoroughly explored and completely exhausted, that the bar for casus belli was high, and that war wasn’t the standard response to outrage or international crisis, but quite unusual, a deviation from the normal order of business. Hard to imagine now, but the United States did not declare war against Germany after its U-boat torpedoed and…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Still Trust Them? Now the Government Is Tracking You So It Can Steal Your Car

•
Ted Rall
According to federal government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, federal and local law enforcement agencies are using incredibly sneaky technology to track you as you drive the nation’s streets and highways. Their goal? Stealing your car. This latest scandal — a mash-up of privacy violations on a wide NSA-like scale, corrupt asset forfeiture programs that make a mockery of the U.S. as a nation that respects private property rights, and brazen targeting of lawful gun owners — is a perfect political storm, an outrage that ought to bring liberals, libertarians and conservatives together in an alliance of freedom-loving people against an out-of-control government. Given the collective shrug elicited by the Edward Snowden revelations, however, expecting a big reaction may be unrealistic. In the shell of a nut: the ACLU has learned that the DEA and local police departments are scanning every motorist’s license plate as they drive down American streets. The NYPD and LAPD have each already…
Read More

SYNDICATED COLUMN: “Selma” and Hollywood’s Sleazy Perversion of History

•
Ted Rall
Movies are the historical record. Americans experience the Vietnam War by watching “Apocalypse Now,” slavery in “12 Years a Slave,” and D-Day through “Saving Private Ryan.” A lot more Americans watch historical movies than read history books. Which, when done well, is not a bad thing. I’ve read countless books about the collapse of Nazi Germany, but the brilliantly-acted and directed reenactment of Hitler’s last days in his Berlin bunker depicted in the masterful 2004 German film “Downfall” can’t be beat. When a film purports to depict a historical event, it becomes the only version of what most people believe really happened. So, as we move further into a post-literate society, misleading historical filmmaking isn’t just a waste of 2-1/2 hours. It’s a crime against the truth. The Ava DuVernay-directed film “Selma” is at the center of controversy, both due to its semi-snubbing by the Oscars – viewed as backtracking from last year’s relatively racially diverse choice of nominees –…
Read More
keyboard_arrow_up
css.php