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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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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Afghan Death Trip

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Ted Rall
Broke and on a Losing Streak, Obama Doubles Down Contrary to myth, the Nazis weren’t crazy. But during the winter of 1944-45, with the Allied and Soviet armies closing in on Berlin, German leaders made an insane decision. Instead of doing whatever they could to hold out as long as possible, they sped up the Holocaust. The Nazis’ policy of accelerated genocide deprived the war effort of increasingly precious resources. Soldiers and paramilitaries were pulled back from the battlefront in order to arrest and guard ever-increasing numbers of Jews and other “enemies of the state.” As battle after battle was lost, trains assigned to transport reinforcement troops were reassigned to ship the regime’s victims to the death camps. Killing Jews was the Nazis’ top priority. It came ahead of everything else–even their own lives. Total madness. But who are we to judge? Here we are 64 years later, doing the same thing. The U.S. is locked in a last-ditch struggle…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: What Obama and Hitler Have in Common

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Ted Rall
Broke and on a Losing Streak, Obama Doubles Down Contrary to myth, the Nazis weren’t crazy. But during the winter of 1944-45, with the Allied and Soviet armies closing in on Berlin, German leaders made an insane decision. Instead of doing whatever they could to hold out as long as possible, they sped up the Holocaust. The Nazis’ policy of accelerated genocide deprived the war effort of increasingly precious resources. Soldiers and paramilitaries were pulled back from the battlefront in order to arrest and guard ever-increasing numbers of Jews and other “enemies of the state.” As battle after battle was lost, trains assigned to transport reinforcement troops were reassigned to ship the regime’s victims to the death camps. Killing Jews was the Nazis’ top priority. It came ahead of everything else–even their own lives. Total madness. But who are we to judge? Here we are 64 years later, doing the same thing. The U.S. is locked in a last-ditch struggle…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Why We Hate Them

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Ted Rall
Mistreated Customers Fuel Populist Rage “Populist anger in America is the anger of dispossession,” writes Newsweek‘s Rick Perlstein. “The delinking of effort and reward has become all too manifest. That always makes Americans angry. We do not like to reward those who do not produce.” That’s not it. This is about abused customers. After decades of insults, they can’t believe they’re being made to save companies that treat them like crap. I’m a calm person. Yet my most recent bank statement featured three items that brought my blood to a fast boil. One was a $10 “income wire transfer fee.” A newspaper that publishes this column paid for it by wiring the money to my account. The bank charged me ten bucks–for depositing money! Money that, by the way, they invest in what the banking industry calls “the overnight call float.” The same statement included a $3 fee for using an ATM that belongs to a different bank. Compared to…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Change You Can Parse

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Ted Rall
Obama Abandons Bush’s Talk, Keeps His Walk You can’t blame Dick Cheney for being annoyed at Barack Obama. Obama is closing Guantánamo. He’s ordering the CIA to interrogate prisoners according to the rules written in the Army Field Manual, which doesn’t allow torture. He’s even phasing out such classic Bushian phrases as “enemy combatant” and “war on terror.” But the dark prince of neoconservatism should relax. Obama’s inaugural address may have promised to “reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” but—in all the ways that matter—he’s keeping all of Bush’s outrageous policies in place. Sure, he talks a good game about “moving forward.” But nothing has really changed. From reading your e-mails to asserting the right to assassinate American citizens to bailing out companies whose executives pay themselves big bonuses, Obama’s changes are nothing but toothless rhetoric. Closing Gitmo, reported The New York Times, was merely “a move that seemed intended to symbolically separate the new…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Reasons To Be Cheerful, 1-9

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Ted Rall
Optimism in the Age of Suckitude It’s the end of the world as we know it and, while I can’t say I exactly feel fine, it’s all too easy to dwell on the downward spiral of our job prospects and 401(k)s. Even in the midst of economic collapse (possibly presaging political disintegration and ultimately social chaos), there’s cause for optimism. And so, in the same spirit of contrarianism that drove me to declare the boom economy of the late 1990s a sham we’d all live to regret, here are nine good reasons not to kill yourself over the economic meltdown: 1. Bushies Will Pay. President Obama is inclined to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards” when it comes to investigating Bush and his minions for torture, war crimes and spying on Americans. Fortunately, one of Obama’s first acts as president ensures the bastards will probably get what they deserve. Obama has ordered government agencies to revitalize the Freedom of…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Suicide via Conformity

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Ted Rall
How Top Newspapers Are Killing Editorial Cartooning An editorial cartoon is like nothing else in a newspaper. Editorial cartoonists don’t need any special degrees. Unlike reporters and editorial writers, they don’t even have to pretend to be “fair.” Moderation in what Jules Feiffer called “the art of ill will” is the ultimate vice: boring. A great political cartoon can do things no news article or editorial can. It can expose hypocrisies and ideological contradictions with the stroke of a pen and the flash of an eye. It can connect seemingly unrelated events to point out a theretofore unnoticed trend. At its best, an editorial cartoon can prompt readers to rethink society’s basic assumptions. But American political cartoonists are an endangered species. The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists estimates that there are fewer than 90 full-time staff cartoonists left in the U.S., down from approximately 280 in 1980. A dozen have lost their jobs in the last year alone. Syndicated cartoonists…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: CEO-Bashing For Fun and Profit

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Ted Rall
Obama, Media Grandstand on Executive Pay On July 14, 1789 an angry mob invaded Paris’ Bastille prison, igniting a chain of events that became the French Revolution. The insurgents may have been provoked by a prisoner, the notorious Marquis de Sade. “They are killing the prisoners here!” he shouted to the crowd two weeks earlier, on July 2nd. The authorities moved him to another prison before the 14th. The storming of the Bastille was pretty much a BS event. There were only seven prisoners for the revolutionaries to liberate, several of whom were living lives of considerable ease in fully furnished cells with servants. Yet the Bastille remains a symbol of monarchist oppression smashed by righteous people seeking freedom and equality. Sometimes empty symbolism means a lot. Not so much here or now. Revolution doesn’t seem imminent in Obamaland, where polls show people pro-Bama despite losing their jobs, and a government bailout for everyone and everything except the people and…
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