The Russians Are Coming? Not Really.

            Trump’s interest in rapprochement with Russia and his annoyance with Ukraine, embodied by last week’s Oval Office shouting match, has corporate pundits and politicians freaking out. Trump’s former national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, said Trump’s dressing down of Volodymyr Zelensky made him “ashamed for my nation”—something he’s never said about Guantánamo or torture or invading Iraq or even racism. Whenever U.S. support for Ukraine gets questioned, count on militaristic whores to drag out cut-and-paste fearmongering from the Cold War era.             Putin aims to “absorb Ukraine, all of it, and likely the other former states of the Soviet Union, too,” the editorial board of Canada’s Globe and Mail claimed in 2022.             “Putin’s Ukraine invasion is the first time in 80 years that a great power has moved to conquer a sovereign nation,” Mitt Romney wrote in 2022. Um—Afghanistan? Iraq? Panama? “It echoes Hitler’s absorption of Czechoslovakia and his lust for Poland. But even more, it reflects Putin’s drive…
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The Incredible Vanishing Liberals

            For this essay, let’s not debate the pros and cons of our new old president. Detailing specific reasons that many Americans are upset with/scared of/annoyed by Donald Trump and the Republican Party would be a distraction from a point that desperately needs to be made. Suffice it to say, millions of people are angry, disappointed and would prefer entirely different political policies and priorities out of Washington. The fact that we should linger upon is this: Many, many liberals feel very, very impotent. And this should be a major cause of concern. When Republicans celebrate their win by mocking their opponents, they’re whistling past the small-d democratic graveyard of history. Winning an election is good. Crushing your opponents’ political will to live is dangerous. For liberals, there is a lot not to like about politics since January 20th. Trump has signed a blizzard of sweeping executive orders on a myriad of controversial issues. His administration is attempting a radical…
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A Movement Beats a Party Every Time

           As Democrats continue to deconstruct the root causes of their recent defeat and attempt to regroup for next year’s midterm elections, they might want to consider a new factor in American politics: the seductive power of a movement compared to a boring old party.             On the surface, the 60th American presidential election was the usual two-way contest between the Democratic and Republican parties. But, as Democrats tried their best to run as normal and competent a campaign as they could despite Biden’s ill-timed withdrawal, Trump had re-branded and re-organized the Republican Party as a vessel of his MAGA movement.             A movement is dynamic. Its number-one goal is building excitement and a sense of belonging.             A party strives for constancy. It represents a set of principles through thick and thin. All things being equal, a movement beats a party.             “The difference between parties and movements is simple,” the progressive pundit David Sirota wrote back in 2009.…
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Resistance to Memory

            When I was young, I knew a lot about old people. Especially about old people I knew personally: members of my family, my mother’s contemporaneous older friends, teachers, clients on my paper route.             It wasn’t a choice. When I was young, no one asked whether I was interested about events that significantly preceded my birth. They just talked. My mom told me countless detailed stories about her childhood growing up during the Nazi occupation of France; many if not most of these tales of woe were repeated despite my reminders that I was already familiar with them. I was expected to listen as the schoolteacher got shot, the cat was abandoned and the Allied tanks rolled in.             Children, teenagers and young adults were expected less to be seen and not heard than to listen politely nodding their heads as their elders described watching the Beatles arrive at Idlewild (on black-and-white TV with rabbit ears, natch), where they…
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I Have Been Un-personed by ChatGPT

           I’ve been unpersoned. Here, in the United States of America.             The censor? OpenAI, the huge tech company run by Sam Altman, famous for creating ChatGPT.             Open ChatGPT and ask it: “Who is Ted Rall?” ChatGPT will answer: “I’m unable to produce a response.” Unable? Unwilling is more like it. ChatGPT had all sorts of things to say about me a few years ago. Asked to describe my supposed trip to Uganda, ChatGPT falsely offered: “Ted Rall, an American political cartoonist and writer, visited Uganda in 2006 as a journalist. He went to the country to report on the conflict between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group accused of widespread human rights abuses, including the use of child soldiers.” I’ve never been to Uganda. I also asked ChatGPT: “What is Scott Stantis’ relationship to Ted Rall?” Scott, the conservative editorial cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune, is my best friend. ChatGPT, however, had…
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Democrats Want a Divorce

          When a marriage is in crisis, a point often occurs when constant bickering, arguing and fighting yields to detachment and hopelessness. The yelling stops. It’s quiet. But it’s not peace. Exhausted, dispirited and contemptuous, one or both partners give up trying to convince the other that they’re wrong or ought to change. They accept that improvement is highly unlikely and check out emotionally. Some psychologists call this uneasy calm a “silent divorce.” Dr. Ridha Rouabhia describes a silent divorce as “a state of being legally married but emotionally disconnected from one another, thus carrying within it a relational breakdown that is very often imperceptible but deeply damaging.” By the time you and your spouse are fighting your own personal cold war, odds of divorce are high. Couples who fall in love and dedicate themselves to long-term committed relationships tend to fit into one of two categories. There are the soulmates who share important values and personality traits. Then there…
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Trump Grabs at a Presidency of Intentionality

          There are two kinds of leaders: managers and revolutionists. Most American presidents are managers. Managers have small ambitions, often so small as to be immeasurable. They may or not think that the organization that they’re taking over requires a few nips or tucks, but they believe that the fundamentals are sound. The main ambition of these incrementalists is to attain their position. The moment their buttocks sink into the big chair behind the big desk, they have fulfilled their biggest goal. It is easy to identify a managerial president during a time of crisis. No matter how bad things get and how angry voters become, managers are loathe to change much. They govern as though continuity were a given. Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, both consummate technocrats, assumed the nation’s highest office during periods of economic upheaval. Yet they did not follow the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a revolutionist, by introducing major plans or anti-poverty bills to try…
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Sympathy for Our Devils

One of my editorial cartoonist colleagues got arrested for child pornography (or CSAM, for “child sexual abuse material” as it is also called) this week. As I write this, he is in jail, apparently unable to make bail, awaiting arraignment. I won’t get into the details of his case, or at least the details we have so far, here. It is, as these things go, a novel set of allegations. I may write about those aspects of the situation in the future. He has had an exceptionally rewarding life and career. First Black cartoonist to win the Pulitzer in cartooning. Creator of a widely-syndicated and highly-respected comic strip. Author of a bestselling graphic novel. Husband and father of four. All of that is starting to fall apart. His employers have issued statements distancing themselves from him even as they note that, legally at least, Americans are presumed innocent until proven guilty. It isn’t difficult to predict what will happen next.…
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Joe Biden: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

            For journalists, this is the first of two occasions to discuss and evaluate the presidency of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. The second will arrive sooner rather than later, when the president dies. Long after we follow him to the grave, historians with the benefit of declassified archives and looser-lipped eyewitnesses will take their own measures of the man and his political career. So away we go with a look at… The Good… At the end of Trump’s first term, the country’s infrastructure was in woeful condition. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ annual report on the roads, water, waste treatment and schools we rely on gave it a grade “D.” 43% of roads were in miserable condition. We ranked at the bottom of the G20 most-developed economies in terms of infrastructure spending. The 2021 ASCE report said the U.S. needed to spend $5.9 trillion on infrastructure, $3.4 trillion of which was funded. The remaining funding gap was $2.5 trillion.…
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Theory of the Non-Voter

           Non-voters are the biggest (potential) voting bloc in American politics. In midterm, state and local elections, more eligible voters choose not to exercise their franchise than to do so.             Pundits and political sociologists ignore non-voters. Nobody polls them. Nobody asks them why they don’t vote. Nobody asks them what issues they care about. Nobody asks them what it would take to get them to vote, or who they would vote for if they did. Whether this lack of interest in non-voters is due to a lack of imagination or contempt based on the belief that they are lazy and apathetic, the result is that we don’t know much about the political leanings and motivations (or lack thereof) of the majority of our fellow citizens. There are tens of millions of them. They are an untapped resource and, until recently, there has been little attempt to reach out to them.             Democratic Party strategists largely assume that there is…
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