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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Violence Works, Incrementalism Doesn’t

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Ted Rall
“What worries me: time and time again,” writes Brendan Skwire in the Philadelphia Weekly about the circuses which are currently passing for Democrats’ town hall meetings on healthcare, “[is that] the needs of the stupid and disingenuous are not only treated as valid concerns, but as the greatest concerns.” Well, yes. This being the United States, one of the most gleefully anti-intellectual nations on earth, stupid people aren’t pathetic dolts to be pitied or perhaps sent to a reeducation camp. They’re the shining example we’re supposed to look up to. Obamacare, whatever it is or was going to be once the President saw fit to share it with the public, is dead. That it would die a dog’s death was predictable, so predictable that I predicted it a couple of months ago. “No one is going to call their Congressman, much less march in the streets, to demand action for a half-measure–or, in this case, a quarter-measure,” I wrote then.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: What If They Gave a War and Nobody Knew Why?

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Ted Rall
Obama Still Trying to Define Victory in Afghanistan What if they gave a war and nobody knew why? When the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan in October 2001, America’s war aims were clear: capture or kill Osama bin Laden, overthrow the Taliban government, deny Al Qaeda training camps and a safe haven. Of course, two out of three of these goals were based on lies; both bin Laden and most of Al Qaeda’s camps and personnel were in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. There was also a fourth unmentioned war aim, a lie of omission: lay an oil and gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan.  Still, the Bush Administration deserves credit for articulating clear goals—metrics, in bureaucratese—against which success or failure could be measured. President Obama has rebranded Bush’s Afghan War as his own. Afghanistan, Obama said during the campaign, was the war America should be fighting. And so we are. Obama has dispatched tens of thousands of additional troops to…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Lay Off Layoffs

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Ted Rall
“At Will” Employment Laws Unproductive, Barbaric You’ve seen how TV covers the immediate aftermath of a disaster. A tornado or earthquake or whatever has just ripped through a community. Rubble and bodies lie scattered. Asked to comment, stunned survivors weep and confirm the obvious—they’ve lost everything. Then the reporter’s wrap-up: “Now, the rebuilding begins. Back to you, Bob.” The impulse to clean up and move on after taking a hit is universal. But the underlying assumption—that everything will eventually be OK again—is uniquely American. Taking office four months into the economic collapse, President Obama played to our belief that gumption cures everything, saying in his inaugural address: “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.” They don’t roll that way in Yugoslavia, where Serbs still seethe over a battle fought in 1389. Nor in the Middle East, where displaced Palestinians hold on to deeds and house keys for homes they…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Everyone Hates the Cops

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Ted Rall
After Professor Gates, Why Pretend? The current national conversation about race and the police reminded me about an incident that occurred when I was in Uzbekistan. As I walked into an apartment complex for an appointment I noticed the decomposing body of a man lying on the side of the road. “How long as he been there?” I asked my host. “Three, maybe four days,” he said. “What happened to him?” “Shot, maybe,” he shrugged. “Or maybe hit by a car. Something.” I didn’t bother to ask why no one had called the police. I knew. Calling the Uzbek militsia amounts to a request to be beaten, robbed or worse. So desperate to avoid interaction with the police was another man I met that, when his mother died of old age at their home in Tashkent, he drove her body to the outskirts of town and deposited her in a field. With the exception of New Orleans after Katrina, it’s…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Heckuva Job, Barry

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Ted Rall
Obama, Losing Jobs, Soon to Be Shovel-Ready Pro-Obama political cartoonists have drawn variations of the same cartoon: the president, in the role of badgered parent on a family trip, is driving a car labeled “The Economy.” The American public, depicted as Uncle Sam or Joe Average, whines: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” With official unemployment approaching 10 percent and underemployment at 16.5 percent, Americans are running out of money—and patience. Obama’s approval ratings are down between 15 and 20 points, meaning that he has lost one in six Americans. His biggest weakness: the economy. “I think the public knows three things: We inherited a total mess; we’re working hard on it; and we’re not going to get out of it overnight,” says Chief White House propagandist Rahm Emanuel. That part is true. The trouble for Obama is that people don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. “The key to what…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Obama Covers Up a Dozen My Lais

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Ted Rall
Were 3,000 Afghans Murdered As U.S. Troops Stood By? “I’ve asked my national security team to…collect the facts,” President Obama told CNN. Then, he said, “we’ll probably make a decision in terms of how to approach it once we have all the facts together.” Probably. Such was Obama’s tepid reaction to a New York Times cover story about an alleged “mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.” Obama sounds so reasonable. Doesn’t he always? But his reaction to the massacre in the Dasht-i-Leili desert is nothing more than the latest case of his administration refusing to investigate a Bush-era war crime. There are two things Obama doesn’t want you to know about Dasht-i-Leili. First, the political class and U.S. state-controlled media have sat on this story for six to seven years. Second, U.S. troops are accused of participating in the atrocities, which involved…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Fog of Obama

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Ted Rall
Why Can’t Obama See His Wars Are Unwinnable? Robert McNamara, one of the “best and the brightest” technocrats behind the escalation of the Vietnam War, eventually came to regret his actions. But his public contrition, which included a book and a series of interviews for the documentary “The Fog of War,” were greeted with derision. “Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” editorialized The New York Times in 1995. “Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.” McNamara’s change of heart came 58,000 American and 2,000,000 Vietnamese lives too late. If the dead could speak, surely they would ask: why couldn’t you see then what you understand so clearly now? Why didn’t you listen to…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Sorry, Mr. Bush

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Ted Rall
The Poor Get Poorer, Presidents Get Worse I miss Bush. Stop the presses and shut off the RSS feeds: the bashiest of the Bush-bashers is starting to appreciate the Exile of Crawford. I haven’t forgiven George W. Bush for stealing two elections, starting two wars, bankrupting the treasury and doing his damnedest to turn the U.S. into a fascist state. He deserves one of hell’s hottest picnic spots for refusing to lift a finger to bring the 9/11 murderers to justice. Bush was stupid. He was vicious. He should be in prison. He was the worst president the U.S. had ever had. Until this one. On major issues and a lot of minor ones, Obama is the same as or worse than Bush. But Bush had an opposition to contend with. Obama has a compliant Democratic Congress. Lulled to somnolent apathy by Obama’s charming manners, mastery of English (and yes, the color of his skin), leftist activists and journalists have…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Half Healthcare, 100% Dead

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Ted Rall
Time for Obama to Get Serious Half measures are boring. That political reality derailed Bill Clinton’s 1993 healthcare reform plan. And it will likely unravel that of Barack Obama. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office finds that Obama’s plan, sponsored by Senators Chris Dodd and Ted Kennedy, “would reduce the number of uninsured only by a net 16 million people. Even if the bill became law, the budget office said, 36 million people would remain uninsured in 2017,” reported The New York Times. Yet it would cost at least $1 trillion over ten years. Americans like Obama’s basic idea: “Seventy-two percent of those questioned [in the latest Times/CBS News poll] supported a government-administered insurance plan–something like Medicare for those under 65–that would compete for customers with private insurers. Twenty percent said they were opposed.” The support is broad. But it isn’t deep. “Pay higher taxes for a healthcare plan that probably won’t help you personally, even if you’re uninsured” isn’t much…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Resistance is Purile

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Ted Rall
The Going Gets Tough. The Tough Start Blogging.This is the second of two parts. NEW YORK, NORTH AMERICAN PROTECTORATE, GREATER GERMAN REICH—At first glance, everything looks fine. Sixty-five years after the Nazi victory at D-Day brought this North American city into the fold of the Greater German Reich, the security situation is calm. Families stroll the sidewalks. Stores that haven’t been boarded up are filled with browsers. Travelers line up to take the express elevator to the top of Manhattan’s Adolf Hitler Tower to board express zeppelin service to Germania. But not everyone is happy. Decades after being conquered by Germany, North American subjects of the Greater Reich are growing restive. “We would greatly appreciate it if you would consider withdrawing,” reads the pointed graffiti on the side of a local SS recruiting station. Why the anger? Six months after a new chancellor came to power amid promises of dramatic change, the Reich remains at war. Between the officially unemployed…
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