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Cut Israel Loose

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Ted Rall
  It is useful when you feel stumped to step back and ask yourself: what if I were coming to this person/situation/decision fresh, without precedents or historical baggage? Inertia is a powerful and insidious force. How many times, working in an office, when you ask why a something is done a certain way, do you get the circular answer that it’s because it’s always been done that way? About that friend you’ve had since you were both kids: sure, you’ve known each other for decades. If you met the guy now, for the first time, though, would you still want to hang out? What about your job? It may have been a good fit when you first took it. Is your workplace still better than what’s available now? If your answer is no, perhaps you’re due for a rethink—and possibly a radical change. America is long overdue for a rethink of its toxic relationship with Israel. We’ve been in deep…
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Mr. President, Please Kill the Homeless Woman Who Lives Outside My Apartment

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Ted Rall
            Dear Mr. President,             Won’t you please kill the homeless woman who lives on a bench on the median strip of the street near my apartment building?             She doesn’t bother me. As far as I know, she doesn’t bother anyone else either. The woman who lives in the middle of the street is nice. I like her. Last week, as I was waiting for the traffic signal to change, she beckoned softly from under her pile of soiled blankets, asking for change, and I gave her a ten-dollar bill. I’m not usually that nice. She’s that sympathetic.             I pitied her. I’ve watched her decline since spring. As six months dragged by this probably-fiftysomething-year-old woman has deteriorated from “how did someone so normal become homeless?” to talking to herself to severely sunburned to “this person will die this winter.” It was in the high 30s last night and it will only get colder and it is not a…
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It’s Not Biden’s Age, Stupids

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Ted Rall
            Polls keep saying the same thing: voters think President Joe Biden is too old.             The latest comes from some outfit called “The New York Times.” According to these “Times” people: “An overwhelming 71% said [Biden] was ‘too old’ to be an effective president—an opinion shared across every demographic and geographic group in the poll, including a remarkable 54% of Mr. Biden’s own supporters.” Just because he’s 80.             Almost 81. If the election were held today, the poll monsters go on, “Trump would be poised to win more than 300 electoral college votes, far above the 270 needed to take the White House.”             On paper, where things get printed, it looks bad. “Even Kamala Harris—no political juggernaut so far—fares a bit better than Mr. Biden, trailing Mr. Trump by three points in a hypothetical matchup, compared with Mr. Biden’s five-point deficit,” the Times says.             Fortunately for Democrats, Biden doesn’t live on paper. Our commander-in-chief is a…
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Israel Is Not Acting in “Self-Defense”

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Ted Rall
            “Thou shalt not kill” is probably the oldest and most widespread moral and legal edict in human civilization, common to nearly every culture. However, there is one universal exception: even in countries that prohibit capital punishment and euthanasia, murder is permitted in self-defense.             At this writing, Israel has murdered more than 7,000 Gazan residents over the last three weeks. Israel and its supports say this bloodbath is justified as self-defense. “Israel has a right to defend itself and its people,” President Biden said on October 7th, hours after Hamas fighters killed more than 1,400 Israelis.             Is it really “self-defense”?             Israel is framing its war against Gaza as a nation’s legitimate right, under international law, to defend itself. “We are in a war for our sovereignty, for our existence, and we have set ourselves two fundamental objectives: to eradicate Hamas’s military and governmental capabilities and to do everything possible to bring the hostages held by the Palestinian…
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Ukraine and Israel Are Very Special Democracies

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Ted Rall
          Hi. Joe Biden here, asking for more money for Ukraine and Israel.             Many Americans are asking: why, while millions of Americans are unemployed and getting evicted and starving and homeless, should we ignore our own people and send billions of dollars to foreign countries instead? The answer is: democracy. We have to defend democracy.             Ukraine and Israel aren’t just democracies. They’re special democracies.             Very special democracies.             Ukraine, for example, is the kind of democracy that doesn’t hold elections for local offices. There were supposed to be parliamentary elections, this month, but…yeah. There weren’t and there won’t be. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly legal because after the war with Russia started in February 2022, martial law was declared and the Ukrainian Constitution doesn’t allow elections under martial law.             Ukraine is so democratic that it doesn’t even need to have presidential elections anymore. Martial law again. And who declared martial law? Why, it’s that sly rascal President…
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Israel Should Respond, Not React

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Ted Rall
            In the days and weeks and months and years after 9/11, when you questioned how the Bush Administration responded to the terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda, right-wing Republicans and liberal Democrats alike answered with a passive shrug. “Well,” they said, “we had to do something.”             Then you pressed about Bush’s specific responses—those somethings. Invading Afghanistan, which had nothing to do with 9/11. The USA-Patriot Act, which stripped away our rights and Congressmen didn’t bother to read. Guantánamo. Torture. Extraordinary rendition. Drones. Same reply: “We had to do something.” Invading Iraq? Not that. Bush crossed his own line in the sand there. Hamas’ violent incursion from the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip into Israel—re-read the preceding prepositional phrase, for it encapsulates the insanity of the situation—was instantly described as Israel’s 9/11. Like the United States 22 years ago, Israel is not responding. It is reacting.             They (feel that they) have to do something. That (feeling) is understandable.             However, logic…
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Clueless on Gaza

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Ted Rall
            Six weeks after 9/11, I thought I perceived a “new American thoughtfulness” in response to the attacks against New York and Washington.             “For the first time in memory, Americans are reconsidering the wisdom of supporting an Israel whose reactions to Palestinian terrorism is itself increasingly indistinguishable from terrorism,” my syndicated column for October 23, 2001 reads. “No one wants to cave in to those who massacred thousands of our fellow citizens. But the alternative is even less attractive,” I wrote. “If we refuse to even consider the possibility that our actions abroad are sometimes less than decent and honorable, we can look forward to more such attacks in the future.” What a fool I was! Poor hapless thoughtfulness never stood a chance against the bloodthirsty and jingoistic neoconservative foreign policy that has since held sway. Now it’s Israel’s turn to confront the blowback from years of suppression and repression of a population of Muslims who predictably determined that…
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Embrace Partisanship, Encourage Censorship

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Ted Rall
            We already know partisanship can be toxic. It also has some overlooked side effects. Team politics — the type of partisanship in which adherents of a party excuse every act of hypocrisy and wrongdoing by their own side while exaggerating and lying about the purported evils of the other — fuels censorship.             Consider climate change, by some measures the issue about which Democrats and Republicans most disagree. During its four years in power the Trump Administration deleted more than 1,400 references to global warming from U.S. government agency and department websites. Climate scientists reacted by censoring themselves, using terms like “global change,” “environmental change,” and “extreme weather” instead. After Biden took over, it was Democrats’ turn to suppress dissent. The new president’s top climate-change advisor pushed Silicon Valley to crack down on climate-change skeptics. Facebook, which like most social media companies is aligned with Democratic politics, now classifies posts that deviate from majority scientific opinion as “misinformation” and…
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Trump, the UAW and the Next Realignment

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Ted Rall
Bipartisanship is dead. But job-killing trade agreements like NAFTA were promoted by politicians of both major parties alike—until Donald Trump. “Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization, moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas. Globalization has made the financial elite, who donate to politicians, very, very wealthy. I used to be one of them,” he told an audience in Pennsylvania in 2016. “Many of these areas have never recovered and never will unless I become president. Then, they’re going to recover fast.” They didn’t. The Rust Belt continues to disintegrate. Trump didn’t deliver. But his message proved to be an effective vote generator. It turned Ohio, the ultimate bellwether swing state, red. Formerly Democratic Pennsylvania now swings. So it’s no surprise that Trump is repeating his message to workers: deindustrialization sucks, no one sees your pain but me, and I’ll make it go away. This year, Dr. Trump is going even further than…
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Deep Fake A.I. Ads Might Kill Us All

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Ted Rall
            Seeing is believing. In the age of AI, it shouldn’t be.             In June, for example, Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign issued a YouTube ad that used generative artificial-intelligence technology to produce a deep-fake image of former President Donald Trump hugging appearing to hug  Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former COVID-19 czar despised by anti-vax and anti-lockdown Republican voters. Video of Elizabeth Warren has been manipulated to make her look as though she was calling for Republicans to be banned from voting. She wasn’t. As early as 2019, a Malaysian cabinet minister was targeted by a AI-generated video clip that falsely but convincingly portrayed him as confessing to having appeared in a gay sex video. Ramping up in earnest with the 2024 presidential campaign, this kind of chicanery is going to start happening a lot. And away we go: “The Republican National Committee in April released an entirely AI-generated ad meant to show the future of the United States if President…
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