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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Talking Smack

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Ted Rall
Obama Doubles Down on Bush’s Afghan Disaster -“If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer,” Yogi Berra once said. President Obama should do the same. The president’s recent interview with Canada’s CBC television network demonstrates that he doesn’t know much about Afghanistan. But that isn’t stopping him from talking about it–even while he escalates America’s war there. “Well, I think Afghanistan is still winnable, in the sense of our ability to ensure that it is not a launching pad for attacks against North America,” he told his interviewer. How is it possible for this well-educated man–like me, he went to Columbia, which had a superb history department–to be so ignorant? Afghanistan has never been a “launching pad” for a single attack, much less plural “attacks” against the U.S. (Or, as far as I know, Canadistan.) It’s true that, until 2000, there were a few camps in Afghanistan. But the vast majority of the training camps…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: It Couldn’t Happen Here

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Ted Rall
Could It? PARIS–Most Americans don’t care what happens in France. But the oldest country in “Old Europe” remains the Western world’s intellectual capital and one of its primary originators of political trends. (Google “May+1968+Sorbonne.”) The French are reacting to a situation almost identical to ours–economic collapse, government impotence, corporate corruption–by turning hard left. National strikes and massive demonstrations are occurring every few weeks. How far left? This far: the late president François Mitterand’s Socialist Party, the rough equivalent of America’s Greens, is considered too conservative to solve the economic crisis. A new poll by the Parisian daily Libération finds 53 percent of French voters (68 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds) favoring “radical social change.” Fifty-seven percent want France to insulate itself from the global economic system. Does this mean revolution? It’s certainly possible. Or maybe counter-revolution: Jean-Marie Le Pen’s nativist (some would say neofascist) National Front is also picking up points. One thing is certain: French politics are even more volatile than…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Vive la Crise

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Ted Rall
In France, the Left Returns PARIS–Two improbable new political parties have been born in France. One claims to already have the support of 15 percent of the population –not merely of the French republic but of the entire European Union. In a multi-party parliamentary democracy, that’s big. And mainstream pundits expect that number to double within a year. France’s resurgent left has been born of a movement borne of a level of mass rage and popular resentment the likes of which no one has seen here since the 1930s. Like Americans, French voters are terrified as securities markets falter and companies lay off tens of thousands of workers. They’re furious about bank bailouts that cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of euros, with little to no accountability as the beneficiaries spent the money on everything except helping the ordinary people and small businesses who need it most. But unlike the United States, the incendiary rhetoric of France’s left has seized the…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hopelessness You Can Believe In

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Ted Rall
Why Obama is Scarier Than George W. Bush Dave Eggers preceded his memoir “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” with a section titled “Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book.” It’s a brilliant attempt to disarm the reader and preempt criticism. Among its warnings, referring to chapter four: “The book thereafter is kind of uneven.” (Disclosure: Eggers edited my work at two magazines in the ’90s.) Barack Obama shares Eggers’ talent for managing expectations. “There will be false starts, there will be setbacks, there will be frustrations and disappointments,” Obama said upon his arrival in Washington. “I will make some mistakes.” In other words, don’t expect much. The soaring optimistic rhetoric of the campaign (“yes we can”) is no more, replaced by the sober, string-synced cello strains of Yo-Yo Ma. So is Obama’s million-dollar smile. The Dour One is demanding patience. And he’s getting it, for now: “Most respondents [to the New York Times/CBS News poll taken January 19th]…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: That’s It?

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Ted Rall
If Bushies Escape Justice, What’s Left of the U.S.? That’s it? Bush moves back to Texas to dote on his presidential library—while drawing a $197,000 pension? Cheney goes back to Wyoming to fish and work on his memoirs? After committing crimes so numerous and monstrous that bookshelves are already groaning under their weight, the cabal of illegitimate coup leaders who destroyed the U.S. get to tiptoe out of the rubble and go home to a comfortable retirement? Earlier this week a senior Pentagon prosecutor openly admitted what has long been known: torture, the lowest and most criminal act any society can sanction, is official U.S. policy. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture,” Judge Susan Crawford told The Washington Post about the alleged “20th hijacker” on 9/11, now being held at Gitmo. The man was so brutalized, Crawford decided, that he could not be charged in court. The same is true of many of those being held at the…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Oprah’s Book Snub

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Ted Rall
How Winfrey Elevates Lowbrow Tastes and Hurts Reading Oprah’s Book Club, The New York Times wrote when the talk show queen revived it in 2005, is “a boon to authors and publishers.” OBC has certainly been good for authors who lie and the greedy publishers who put out their books. Oprah’s first post-hiatus pick was James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” a memoir of substance abuse and rehab whose muscular Hemingway-lite style screamed inauthenticity. It also contained numerous fabrications. Oprah wasn’t alone; Frey’s lies fooled many stalwarts in America’s state-controlled media. “As Frey takes pains to make clear, he was a particularly hard case–an omnivorous drinker, crack smoker and occasional drug dealer who was wanted in three states on outstanding charges,” wrote a Times reviewer who recommended the book. Neither Oprah’s staff nor the Times bothered to check whether criminal records verified his “harrowing” account. (They didn’t.) Thanks to its placement on Oprah’s Book Club “Pieces” spent 15 weeks as…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Eat the Rich

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Ted Rall
Soak the Rich, Corporations A moratorium on housing foreclosures and evictions is a good idea. So is making the tax code more progressive. Obama’s plan to build new public works is smart. But those are half-measures. Even if they don’t come out of Congress watered down and wankified, they’ll come too little and too late to kill the rapidly metastasizing disease that threatens to kill the U.S. economy: income inequality. Employers are shedding jobs at a breathtaking rate: more than 560,000 per month. The rate of job losses could soon hit a million. People who still have jobs are being squeezed by pay cuts and freezes; even those who have yet to be affected are closing their wallets out of fear that they’ll be the next to get chopped. So consumer spending, which accounts for two-thirds of economic activity, is plunging. Moreover, millions of individuals and businesses have lost access to credit and thus the movement of capital that might…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: New Year’s Revolutions

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Ted Rall
There’s Plenty of Money Around. Let’s Take It. What’s the difference between you and a corpse? You both contain the same organs, the same fluids–all the same stuff. Inside you, stuff moves around. That’s the difference between life and death. What’s the difference between economic boom and bust? Again: movement. The United States of America is just as rich today as it was a year or, for that matter, ten years ago. It still possesses the same rich natural resources, the same enviable geography, and the same productive, innovative and energetic workforce. Our country still has enormous intrinsic value. But money, the lifeblood of any economy, has stopped moving around. Wealth is still here. But the economy has flat-lined. We know what caused the problem–the double bursting of the dot-com and housing bubbles, coupled with government regulators who took the last three decades off from work and financial analysts who said the old rules no longer applied. (The old rules…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: New Year’s Revolutions?

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Ted Rall
There’s Plenty of Money Around. Let’s Take It. What’s the difference between you and a corpse? You both contain the same organs, the same fluids–all the same stuff. Inside you, stuff moves around. That’s the difference between life and death. What’s the difference between economic boom and bust? Again: movement. The United States of America is just as rich today as it was a year or, for that matter, ten years ago. It still possesses the same rich natural resources, the same enviable geography, and the same productive, innovative and energetic workforce. Our country still has enormous intrinsic value. But money, the lifeblood of any economy, has stopped moving around. Wealth is still here. But the economy has flat-lined. We know what caused the problem–the double bursting of the dot-com and housing bubbles, coupled with government regulators who took the last three decades off from work and financial analysts who said the old rules no longer applied. (The old rules…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Obama’s Weasel Words

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Ted Rall
On Iraq, Antiwar Candidate Delivers More Carnage Obama won the Democratic nomination and the presidency by speaking out against the Iraq War. Now that he’s packing for Washington, however, the old Chicago lawyer is using Harvard Law weasel words to make sure the war goes on for years.Germans are organized. The French are snotty. Americans have a national character trait, too: inattention. It’s now obvious that Obama exploited our hard-wired inability to read between the lines to lay the groundwork for what many of his supporters will soon view as a terrible betrayal. Right there, in a July 14th op/ed, is Obama’s triumph of plausible deniability: “The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep,” he wrote in The New York Times. “Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president.” Seems clear. End means end. Finito. No more. But there’s an interesting phrase in Obama’s promises to pull out,…
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