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AL JAZEERA COLUMN: Too Soon To Tell

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Ted Rall
I am pleased to announce that I am now writing a weekly long-form column for Al Jazeera English. Here is my second piece for Al Jazeera: One Year Early, Obama’s Reelection Far From Certain The American punditocracy (and, perhaps more importantly, Las Vegas oddsmakers) currently cite Barack Obama as their odds-on favorite to win next year’s presidential election. Some even predict a landslide. Mainstream media politicos acknowledge the atrocious economy, with its real unemployment rate nearly matching the worst years of the Great Depression of the 1930s, as an obstacle to reelection. But most of them believe that other factors will prove decisive: disarray in the field of candidates for the nomination of the opposition Republican Party, the GOP’s reliance on discredited Reagan-style austerity measures for the masses coupled with tax cuts for the wealthy, and Obama’s assassination of Osama bin Laden. Maybe they’re right. But if I were the President, I wouldn’t be offering the White House chef a…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Sexual Freedom: The Next Frontier

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Ted Rall
No One Should Be Judged Because of How They Have Sex If slavery was America’s original sin, Puritanism was its original curse. In recent years the United States has made significant strides towards greater equality and freedom. Racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry have been significantly curtailed by new laws and cultural education. But we still have work to do. Four centuries after people so uptight they couldn’t get along with the British invaded the New World, however, the United States remains one of the most sexually repressed Western countries. It is not good for us. “If expression of sexuality is thwarted, Christopher Ryan wrote in Psychology Today last year, “the human psyche tends to grow twisted into grotesque, enraged perversions of desire. Unfortunately, the distorted rage resulting from sexual repression rarely takes the form of rebellion against the people and institutions behind the repression.” In other words, mean parents, churches and right-wing politicians. “Instead,” Ryan observed, “the rage…
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AL JAZEERA ENGLISH COLUMN: Obama’s Third War

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Ted Rall
Yesterday I published my first column for Al Jazeera English. I get more space than my syndicated column (2000 words compared to the usual 800) and it’s an exciting opportunity to run alongside a lot of other writers whose work I respect. Here it is: Stalemate in Libya, Made in USA Republicans in the United States Senate held a hearing to discuss the progress of what has since become the war in Libya. It was one month into the operation. Senator John McCain, the Arizona conservative who lost the 2008 presidential race to Barack Obama, grilled top U.S. generals. “So right now we are facing the prospect of a stalemate?” McCain asked General Carter Ham, chief of America’s Africa Command. “I would agree with that at present on the ground,” Ham replied. How would the effort to depose Colonel Gaddafi conclude? “I think it does not end militarily,” Ham predicted. That was over two months ago. It’s a familiar ritual.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Revolution Will Not Be Deactualized

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Ted Rall
Oct. 6th: Will Tahrir Square Come to Washington? I used to work for Democratic candidates. I was a campus activist. I marched in protests. But, in the 1980s, I quit politics. I was fed up. The Left was impotent and inept. They didn’t want to change things. They were content with theater. Bad theater at that: dorks on stilts, boring speakers, stupid slogans, the same old chants. “The people, united, will never be defeated!” Except—we were defeated. We didn’t even fight. Our protests were poorly attended. The media ignored us. And we always lost. Even the Democrats didn’t care about us or our opinions. By the time Bill Clinton won in 1992, the progressive wing of the party was good for one thing: voting Democratic. Along with millions of others, I drifted away. Now, finally, for the first time in decades, I am excited. We can change everything. Here. In America. Now. People are rising up in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Being, Nothingness and Anthony Weiner

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Ted Rall
Should Anthony Weiner Resign? Should Anthony Weiner resign? Aside from the obvious pleasure that we derive from wallowing in salacious revelations about the rich and powerful, this week’s Weiner sexting controversy provides a window into American morals. Namely: what is wrong, what is right, and what if anything should be done about it? Let’s look at the sin first. Weiner sent smutty photos, some with smutty captions, to some of his followers on Twitter. As far as we know he never met any of these women in person, much less had sex with them. After the Congressman and once-possible-future mayor of the City of New York realized that he had mistakenly sent one of his crotch shots to the wrong addressee, he got too clever by half. Trying to get ahead of the story before it broke organically, he called a press conference and claimed that Evil Right Wingers had hacked his Twitter account. This lame story quickly fell apart,…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Teddy Roosevelt Saw This Coming

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Ted Rall
The Decline and Fall of an American Icon Why did our political system become so corrupt and unresponsive? How did we end up with such a rigid, Old European-style class system—in which you can’t get ahead unless you were born that way? America: What Went Wrong?, a 1992 paperback by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, went a long way toward answering those questions. It may be, however, that America was doomed long before then. The historian Edmund Morris recently published the final entry of a magisterial trilogy about the life of Theodore Roosevelt. Though frequently listed among the greatest American politicians today, TR was an “accidental president” who ascended to power thanks to the murder of William McKinley. His blustery and impolitic style—his supporters called it speaking truth to power—would never have allowed him to win a presidential election. Roosevelt sussed out the perils of unregulated capitalism early on. “The great corporations which we have grown to speak…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Evil of Two Lessers

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Ted Rall
Two-Party System Is Not Democracy We get the government we deserve. Don’t get mad at the politicians! It’s your/our fault. You/we elected them. Most Americans accept these aphorisms. Yet they are lies—lies that distract us from the fact that our political system is a farce. Really, we should get rid of this phony two-party “democracy.” And we will. In the meantime, we ought to ignore it. The two-party system made simple: Two worthless scoundrels are on the ballot. If you vote for one of them, a worthless scoundrel will win. If you don’t vote, a worthless scoundrel will win. It’s a pretty unappealing sales pitch. How did it last 200 years? The two-party system, a political mutation unanticipated by the Constitution and dreaded by the Founding Fathers, mainly relies on the “lesser of two evils” argument. Next year, for example, many liberals will hold their noses and vote for Obama even though he has not delivered for them. They will…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Rise of the Obamabots

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Ted Rall
Stifling Liberal Dissent Under Obama After they called the presidency for Obama, emails poured in. “You must be relieved now that the Democrats are taking over,” an old college buddy told me. “There will be less pressure on you.” That would have been nice. In the late 1990s my cartoons ran in Time, Fortune and Bloomberg Personal magazines and over 100 daily and alternative weekly newspapers. I was a staff writer for two major magazines. Then Bush came in. And 9/11 happened. The media gorged on an orgy of psychotic right-wing rhetoric. Flags everywhere. Torture suddenly OK. In a nation where mainstream political discourse was redefined between Dick Cheney on the right and libertarian Bill Maher on the not-as-right, there wasn’t any room in the paper for a left-of-center cartoonist. My business was savaged. Income plunged. My editor at Time called me on September 13, 2001. “We’re discontinuing all cartoons,” she told me. I was one of four cartoonists at…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: What If Might Made Right?

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Ted Rall
Reimagining the Assassination of Bin Laden President Obama murdered Osama bin Laden. I am surprised that the left has been so supportive—not of the end result, but of the way it was carried out. Imagine if the killing had gone down the same exact way, but under Bush. Armed commandos invade a foreign country, storm into a suburban neighborhood, blow a hole in a house and blow away an unarmed man in front of his 12-year-old daughter. The guy is a murder suspect. Mass murder. But there’s no attempt to arrest him or bring him to justice. They spirit his bloody corpse out of the country and dump it into the ocean. Osama bin Laden was suspected ordering of one of the most horrific crimes of the decade. He might have been taken alive. Yet Obama’s commandos killed him. A big part of the puzzle—the key to the truth, who might have led us to other people responsible for 9/11—is…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Osama bin Laden’s Ultimate Victory

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Ted Rall
Culturally Clueless and Politically Tonedeaf, U.S. Gave Bin Laden the Martyrdom He Craved The assassination of Osama bin Laden was masterfully orchestrated to appeal to American media consumers. But it will play poorly overseas. President Obama’s Sunday evening announcement, timed to fill Monday’s papers with a sickening orgy of gleeful triumph but little information, prompted bipartisan high-fives and hoots all around. “U-S-A! U-S-A!” chanted a mob of drunken oafs in front of the White House. Blending the low satire of two Bush-era classic send-ups of a nation allergic to self-reflection, “Team America: World Police” and “Idiocracy,” they set the tone for a week or a month or whatever of troop-praising, God-blessing-America, frat-boy self-backslapping. “So that’s what success looks like,” wrote New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley in the paper’s special ten-page “The Death of Bin Laden” pull-out section. Success for Obama, certainly. He’ll see a much-needed bump in the polls. But it won’t last. Eventually the unemployed will wonder…
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