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SYNDICATED COLUMN: We Don’t Have the Right to Care

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Ted Rall
U.S. Drone Strikes Equivalent of Dozens of Newtown Massacres We don’t have the right to be sad. We don’t have the right to be angry. We don’t have the right to care about the 20 dead kids, much less the six dead adults or the one deranged shooter. Our newspapers don’t have the right to pretend that we are a nation stricken by grief. Our television networks don’t have the right to put the Newtown shootings at the top of the news. We don’t have the right to gather around the water cooler and talk about how terrible it all is. Our president doesn’t have the right to express grief or remorse or pretend to be a human being or reference the fact that he is a parent or wipe his eye (assuming he was crying). Our pundits don’t have the right to use this massacre as a reason to call for gun control. Our Congress doesn’t have the right…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Self-Censoring of America

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Ted Rall
How Sellouts Are Killing Growth Are you a sellout? If you came of age during the 1960s, whether or not to sell out was the existential question of your generation. Which to choose? Reckless youthful abandon or corporate “adult” obeisance? Films that dealt with that quandary, from “The Graduate” to Bertolucci’s “The Conformist” launched a million rap sessions, yet Baby Boomers are sure to leave this ethical dilemma unresolved. My fellow travelers, we of unlucky, witty Generation X, have lived constrained careers with fewer options. Coupled with shrinking financial aid for college, the dismal job market made the choice between Wall Street and the Peace Corps depressingly simple. So we Gen Xers projected the debate onto practitioners of pop culture. Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli and The Knack, judged all commerce no art, were shunned. Artists who cashed in could be deemed genuine, but only if they took chances and/or made decisions that were bad for business: The Clash, Elvis Costello,…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Malicious Mallard and Me

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Ted Rall
How Online Popularity Contests Are Killing Politics Luddite? Not me. I like tech. Played Pong, loved Space Invaders. Was obsessed with the TRS-80, Commodore 64 and Apple II. One of my first jobs, as a traffic engineer for an Ohio suburb, had me programming a Honeywell 77 computer the size of a small car; I loved those crazy punchcards (“do not fold, spindle or mutilate”), FORTRAN and the green glow of the LED terminal. I was among the first cartoonists to put my email address on my work; I loved the instant audience feedback. Still do.  So I blog and I’ve embraced social networking. I tweet. I post to Facebook. And Google Plus, though I’m not sure why. LinkedIn has the dumbest business model ever–in the middle of a Depression, it’s where jobseekers meet nonexistent would-be employers—but I use it anyway (to connect to other underemployed losers). So. Note to people who are reading this online: I’m one of you.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Shoot First, Justify Later

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Ted Rall
Our Police State Does What It Wants, Then Writes a Memo Imagine that you were the president of United States. Now think what you would do if you or one of your advisers proposed an idea—a great idea, one that solved a big problem—that was radical to the point of possibly crossing the legal line into unconstitutionality. You’d want to lawyer that sucker, right? After all, the last thing you would want to do is break the law. You wouldn’t want to be accused of running off half-cocked in violation of your inaugural oath to preserve and protect the Constitution. You wouldn’t want to risk a scandal, an investigation, or even impeachment. Now imagine that you were a chief of police. Again, imagine that you or one of your officers came up with a great new approach for tracking down bad guys, but that the idea was so novel that you couldn’t be sure that arrests made using your new…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Awaiting a Slut Moment

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Ted Rall
Everybody Cheats. When Will We Admit It? We need a Slut Moment. As CIA director, David Petraeus led an organization that carries out extrajudicial assassinations, overthrows foreign heads of state and fires drone missiles at innocent civilians. For his performance as a leading state terrorist, General Petraeus received four stars, 28 motorcycle policemen to escort him to a girlfriend’s house, and nearly universal acclaim. For cheating on his wife, he was forced to resign in disgrace. (Since his lover, a West Point graduate, was not a spy, national security was not at issue.) What is wrong with our values? I wouldn’t lay it on quite as thickly as John Prados, senior research fellow at the National Security Archive did in The Washington Post: “Because of an affair that had already ended, the nation this month lost the services of a highly skilled public servant. The hysterical reaction to the news of then-CIA Director David Petraeus’s liaison with his biographer, Paula…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Leftist Republican Party of the Future

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Ted Rall
To Survive, GOP Should Out-Democrat the Democrats Republicans, engaging in the traditional losing party’s post-election wound-licking, blame-flinging and anger-at-the-dumb-voters ritual, are facing the awful truth: The American people just aren’t into their gay-bashing, race-baiting, woman-hating, Eisenhower-era positions on social issues. “It’s not that our message–we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong–didn’t get out. It did get out,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville told The New York Times. “It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed. An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.” Exasperated radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh asks: “Condoleeza Rice…is a pinnacle of achievement, and intelligent, and well-spoken…You can’t find a more accomplished person. Marco Rubio. And really, speaking in street lingo, we’re not getting credit for it…Are these people perceived as tokens?” Yes. Uncle Toms are easy to spot. “In order to get the Hispanic or Latino vote, does that mean open the…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Our Contempt is Bipartisan

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Ted Rall
Both Zombie Parties Too Stubborn To Admit They’re Dead Neither party gets it. They both think they won. And they sort of did. But we still hate them. Democrats are patting themselves on the back, congratulating themselves for a mandate that neither exists–50.4% to 48.1% does not a mandate make–nor, if were real, would be actionable (Republicans still control the House). “Republicans need to have a serious talk with themselves, and they need to change,” Democratic columnist E.J. Dionne sniped in the Washington Post. Not likely. If Republicans could change anything, it would be the weather. “If you hadn’t had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy,” Karl Rove told the Post. (Which leaves out the fact that the places hit hardest by Hurricane Sandy, New York and New Jersey, are not GOP states.) “We [Congressional Republicans] will have as much of a mandate…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: It’s 15% About Roe v. Wade

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Ted Rall
Why Romney Won’t Ban Abortion and Obama Won’t Legalize It. As a poster to my blog commented sarcastically about Obama apologists: “Please vote for Obama. True, he sucks, but…” Which summarizes the feelings of many Democratic voters. Others, whether smarter or more long-winded, try to justify their cognitive dissonance with one simple plea: If Obama loses, abortion will be banned. You’ve heard their argument: “It’s all about the Supreme Court.” “It’s all about Roe v. Wade.” Indeed, because four members of the Supreme Court are in their 70s, a Romney victory could lead to the end of federally-guaranteed abortion rights. Obama played on women’s fears in a recent interview with Rolling Stone: “I don’t think there’s any doubt [that Roe v. Wade could be overturned],” Obama said. “Typically, a president is going to have one or two Supreme Court nominees during the course of his presidency, and we know that the current Supreme Court has at least four members who…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Factchecking the Factcheckers

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Ted Rall
In a Media Without Real Journalists, Lies Become True When fact-checking organizations like Politifact and Factcheck.org appeared a few years ago, they seemed like perfect antidotes to a lazy, corrupt and broke corporate media unable and/or unwilling to hold politicians to account for their lies. Cue Murphy’s Law: Rather than set a higher standard, independent fact-checkers gave mainstream journalists more excuses not to work. “Perhaps the most jarring aspect of media factchecking is that many reporters see it as someone else’s job,” Peter Hart and Julie Hollar wrote in FAIR’s Extra! magazine. This year’s presidential debates have been showcases of absentee journalism. With the exception of a single interjection by Candy Crowley (on a trivial point), all three moderators sat silently and passively as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney told one lie after another to an audience mostly composed of citizens who were paying attention to the campaign for the first time. “My moderator mission was to stay out of…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: If You Vote, You Can’t Complain

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Ted Rall
Why It’s OK for Disgusted Liberals Not to Vote for Obama Here we go again. Like Charlie Brown considering Lucy’s offer to hold the football so he can kick it–and Lucy’s promises not to pull it away at the last second, as she’s done every time in the past–lefties are being urged to set aside their disgust over the last four years and vote Democratic. At least Lucy respected Charlie Brown enough to lie to him. President Obama isn’t even bothering to tell disappointed progressive voters that things will be different this time. At last night’s second presidential debate, for example, he promised to create jobs years in the future–not now, when we need them. Despite my well-documented doubts, I voted for Obama in 2008. Not this time. “If you don’t vote for Obama, you’re letting Romney win.” (So many friends, colleagues, family members, correspondents, bloggers and random whoevers have told me that that it hardly seems fair to single…
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