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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Taking Time Takes Patience

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Ted Rall
Desperate and Afraid, People Trust Leader This is the first of two parts. WASHINGTON, NORTH AMERICAN PROTECTORATE, GREATER GERMAN REICH–From Honolulu to Portland, Maine, North American citizens of the Greater German Reich gathered on June 6th to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the victory of Axis forces at D-Day, the battle that decided World War II. Fallen heroes of the Wehrmacht and SS were commemorated at solemn ceremonies and Party rallies throughout the Reich, but the day held special meaning in Washington, which until 1945 was the capital of the former United States. Speaking at the Supreme Kommandatur, which was built at the site of the former American presidential palace, Chancellor Adolf Hitler III said the war against the Western Allies paved the way for the years of peace and prosperity that followed. “It was unknowable then, but so much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: How To Talk to a Pro-Lifer (and you must)

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Ted Rall
How Pro-Choicers Should Learn to Talk to Pro-Lifers All too often in American politics opposing sides talk past one another, firing off arguments loaded with language that stands no chance of persuading those who hold other views. The debate over what to do about 9/11 was such a moment, one that initiated the current era of polarization. When liberals recoiled at torture and GOP attacks on civil liberties, conservatives accused them of being anti-American traitors. When Republicans supported preemptive warfare against Iraq, liberals called them fascists and warmongers. If we had the chance for a do-over, it would probably happen just the same way. The attacks in New York and Washington exposed a fault line in Americans’ views of what makes our country great: liberals treasure the U.S. for the Bill of Rights whereas conservatives value living at the center of a wealthy and powerful empire. The kill-’em-all-let-God-sort-’em-out crowd doesn’t live in the same universe as those of us who…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Mr. Obama: Resign Now

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Ted Rall
With Democrats Like Him, Who Needs Dictators? We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through. From healthcare to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied. So timid and so owned is he that he trembles in fear of offending, of all things, the government of Turkey. Obama has officially reneged on his campaign promise to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. When a president doesn’t have the ‘nads to annoy the Turks, why does he bother to show up for work in the morning? Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Bail Out Your Own Damn Self

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Ted Rall
Time for a Tax and Mortgage Strike The calamari salad was world-class. Still, my friend the CPA’s face screwed up. “You know what still has me pissed off? The bailouts. All wasted on CEO bonuses. But nobody cares!” I told him I thought people cared, but they didn’t know what they could do about it. “I’ll tell you what we should do,” he fumed. “Stop paying our taxes. And our mortgages. They can’t throw us all in jail! They can’t evict us all!” What should we demand? “The bailout money. Make ’em give back every cent to us, the people who need it.” How would the money from The Mother of All Clawbacks be distributed? Equally? Should people in foreclosure get more? Or those who pay higher taxes? He didn’t know. So some details need to be worked out. But the point remains: it’s time for a revolt. The economic collapse began eight months ago, in September 2008. The Bush…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Excuses You Might Believe In

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Ted Rall
Democrats Are More Powerful Than Ever. How Will They Justify Doing Nothing? The defection of Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter and the imminent certification of Al Franken as the winner of Minnesota’s election recount has handed Democrats what they always said they lacked in order to pass a progressive agenda: a filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate. Now they face the awful problem of coming up with new excuses for not doing anything. How will Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other fake liberals weasel out of making good on their promises for real action on healthcare, the economy and the war? It won’t be easy. They control both houses of Congress and the White House. Obama is about to fill a new vacancy on the Supreme Court. The Times of London writes that “Mr. Obama, by some assessments, has more political leverage than any president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1937″—at the peak of the New Deal, just before he overreached by…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why We Fight

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Ted Rall
U.S. Troops Die For Rapists American soldiers serving in Vietnam wondered what they were fighting for. U.S. troops in Afghanistan don’t have that problem. They know exactly what they’re fighting for: rapists. After President Obama’s coming “Afghan surge” there will be 72,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. Their primary mission is to prevent Afghans from overthrowing the unpopular regime of Hamid Karzai, the former oil consultant installed by George W. Bush when the U.S. occupation began nearly eight years ago. America’s media repeatedly claimed that Afghan women would be better off under the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance puppet government headed by Karzai than under the Taliban. But when I went to Afghanistan and asked women what they thought, they had a different story. The defeat of the Taliban brought about the collapse of law and order, making life even more dangerous, especially for women. “Under the Taliban,” a woman told me, “I watched rapists being executed. Now I see them in the government.”…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: One Nation, Two Systems of Justice

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Ted Rall
Why Bush Must Go to Prison Do you believe in “intelligent design”? It’s the argument that the universe is so logical that it must have been planned out by a master creator. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, single-handedly disproves the existence of such a God. Friedman is the nation’s most prominent opinion writer. He wins journalistic prizes. Audiences shell out big bucks to hear him speak. Book collections of his columns become bestsellers for months on end. Yet the dude can’t write. I’m not talking about his opinions. Friedman doesn’t know how to arrange nouns and verbs in a way that is pleasing to readers of the English language. He is to writing what George W. Bush is to oratory. Stranger still is Friedman’s role as über barometer of conventional wisdom. When Congress, media tastemakers and thus most Americans bought into Bush’s Saddam-has-WMDs story, Friedman did too. When the Iraq War started to go wrong but officially acceptable…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Circle of Shame

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Ted Rall
It Takes a Nation of Torturers to Hold Us Back I suppose I should take a bow. For eight long years (years that passed like centuries for the misérables rotting in cages at Guantánamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib and Diego Garcia and Bulgaria and the U.S. Navy’s fleet of prison ships) no one cared about torture. Law professors, politicians, and journalists justified it. Even liberals didn’t care: there wasn’t one major protest march against beating or raping or drowning people to death. Strange but true: the only forces raging against the collective madness that warped the American psyche after 9/11 were human rights organizations and a couple of cartoonists. The syndicated political cartoonist Matt Bors and I took point, repeatedly ridiculing and ranting about the Bush Administration’s torture policies and Americans’ tacit tolerance of it in cartoons we knew would be reprinted in only a handful of publications. Editors and readers advised us to “stop obsessing” and “move on.”…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Every Dogi Has Its Day

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Ted Rall
Americans Lose Their Savings and their Minds When the revolution comes, the tribunal will turn to two sources to determine who should be arrested: a list of the 500 highest-paid CEOs and the Styles section of The New York Times. Real unemployment is over 20 percent. Millions of people are losing their homes to foreclosure. We’ve been at war for eight years, with nothing to show for it but a million-plus corpses and trillions in new debt. The United States, in the midst of full-on economic collapse, is teetering on the brink of political implosion. Which has driven some people to…doga. “Nationwide,” an article in the April 9th Times Styles section explains, “classes of doga–yoga with dogs, as it is called–are increasing in number and popularity.” Doga. The name alone inspires lovely fantasies of firing squads. Above the piece and above the fold are photos of dogs being levitated, stretched, and used as weights. Understandably, they generally look puzzled, if…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Barack Obama, Torture Enabler

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Ted Rall
Spain Enforces America’s Laws America is a nation of laws–laws enforced by Spain. John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes and Douglas Feith wrote, authorized and promulgated the Justice Department “torture memos” that the Bush Administration used for legal cover. After World War II, German lawyers for the Ministry of Justice went to prison for similar actions. We’ve known about Yoo et al.’s crimes for years. Yet–unlike their victims–they’re free as birds, fluttering around, writing op/ed columns…and teaching. At law school! Obama has failed to match changes of tone with changes in substance on the issue of Bush’s war crimes. “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” he answered when asked whether he would investigate America’s worst human rights abuses since World War II. Indeed, there’s no evidence that Obama’s Justice Department plans to lift a finger to hold Bush or his henchmen accountable. “They should arrest Obama for trying to impersonate a President,”…
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