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SYNDICATED COLUMN: If This Is The End of the U.S….

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Ted Rall
…Will Anyone Come To Our Funeral? Before I left for Afghanistan, the producer for my talk radio show asked me to return with a souvenir. “Bring me back an MRE [“Meal Ready to Eat”],” he requested. It was the fall of 2001, a few months into the U.S. invasion, and news accounts said Afghan skies were dark with millions of MREs dropped by U.S. warplanes to the starving masses. I never saw an MRE. Neither did any of the Afghans I talked to. As far as we could tell, the only stuff that American planes dropped on Afghanistan were bombs. Scattered in the rubble one could find the shards of said explosives, the well-known names of the defense contractors visible in black-stenciled English. Bombs: America’s biggest export. Food: not so much. I’m torn over what The Washington Post has so cavalierly dubbed “the economic apocalypse.” When I was 21, I prayed for this. The United States of America was the…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Mad Money

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Ted Rall
A Broke America Can’t Afford Wars, Tax Cuts Credit has dried up. The stock market is disintegrating. Unless someone pours money into capital markets, everyone agrees, we could wind up like people in Baghdad, fondly remembering the day five years ago when they pushed the handle and their toilets still flushed. Only one “someone” has enough cash to fix the problem: the U.S. government. The Bush Administration and Congressional Democrats want taxpayers to pay $700 billion to bail out failing banks. Progressives would prefer to bail out homeowners facing the imminent foreclosure of their homes, as well as those in danger of being foreclosed upon during 2009, at a cost of $1.3 trillion. Never mind which approach is better. Where will the government find the money? There are two elephants in the room: war and Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. We can’t afford either. Yet, to abuse the animal metaphor, everyone acts like they’re sacred cows. When you think…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Bush, Congress Party Like It’s 1929

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Ted Rall
Save People, Not Bankers Seat belt laws embolden drivers to drive faster, causing a net loss of life. It’s the law of unintended consequences, also known as the Peltzman effect: the safer you feel, the more risk you take. Sam Peltzman, the economist after whom said effect is named, says that government bailouts like the Bush Administration’s $700 billion attempt to stave off economic collapse are no more effective than “pouring money down a rat hole.” Moral hazard–rewarding reckless people and companies while allowing responsible ones to fail (hello, Lehman Brothers) may avert one economic crisis while planting the seeds of a worse one down the road. “In the long run,” says Peltzman, “you’re just laying the groundwork for more because you’re giving people an incentive to take too much risk, where a big part of the risk gets laid off on the taxpayer.” I don’t think much of the laissez faire, magic-of-the-marketplace, let-’em-eat-flat-screens school of Darwinian economics flogged by…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Good, the Bad and the Editor

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Ted Rall
Why Political Cartoons Matter More Than Ever I could not help but notice the editorial cartoon,” complains a Canadian newspaper reader, “which in my opinion was not funny or satirical at all–in the past, the purpose of an editorial cartoon.” An editor at the Houston Chronicle disagrees. “The point of satire is not to be funny,” he argues. “The point is to be critical.” Who’s right? Both. Neither. Who knows? And that’s the problem. For some reason my colleagues have made me President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC), the organization for professional political cartoonists. (I suspect cartoonists’ predilection for hard drinking had something to do with it.) Kidding aside, I’m honored. And scared. As I’ve written before, daily newspapers–the biggest source of income for cartoonists–are in crisis. Bottom lines dependent on ad revenue, decimated by the migration of advertising money to the impecunious Web, are now getting killed by the recession. Layoffs and buyouts of reporters and…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Bristol Did The Wrong Thing

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Ted Rall
Abortion Should Be Mandatory for Pregnant Teens You don’t need a rich imagination to picture the scene. In the Alaska governor’s mansion, a pair of parents and their visibly pregnant teenage daughter sit on a dead bear sprawled across a couch they had to have shipped because there isn’t an Ethan Allen in Anchorage. On a second sofa, on the opposite side of a glass coffee table festooned by the exoskeleton of a giant crab, fidget a second set of parents and their son, a.k.a. The Extremely Nervous Boyfriend. Heads of dead animals line the walls. “Levi, Levi, Levi.” The governor pauses, reveling in the others’ discomfort. Moments like this are how she earned the sobriquet Barracuda. She leans in. “You little s—. You knocked up my daughter. Do you know how close your little sexcapade came to screwing up my plan for global domination? Now you’re going to do the right thing.” A few days later, Extremely Nervous Boyfriend…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Sarah Palin, Queen of the Nobodies

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Ted Rall
Experience is Overrated. What About IQ? Until four years ago, no one had heard of our current Democratic nominee. “Who is Barack Obama?” asked CBS News after he was picked to deliver the keynote address at the Dems’ 2004 confab. “Not exactly a household name.” Four years later, that speech remains his biggest achievement. No landmark legislation bears his name. His claim to fame is his gift of gab. But Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s newly-minted fame makes Obama, saddled with a resume so thin he pads it with the entry “community organizer,” look like an elder statesman. Governor of one of the nation’s least populous states for a mere two years and the ex-mayor of a municipality that’s home to 7000 souls, Palin is now positioned to be a proverbial heartbeat away from the ability to order ICBMs fired at Russia. (On January 20th McCain, a cancer survivor and hardly the picture of health, will be two years…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Muddle is the Message

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Ted Rall
Obama on the Ropes Democrats are fired up about Obama. Belying Will Rogers’ adage that as a Democrat he didn’t belong to any organized political party, this year finds the DNC uncharacteristically well funded and startlingly organized. Running against an incumbent likely to go down as this country’s worst leader in history, Democrats couldn’t ask for a more favorable political climate. “Watergate is the last time things were so overwhelmingly tilted against the Republicans,” Duke University political scientist David Rohde tells the Bloomberg wire service. McCain ought to be a pushover. At a time when Americans are tired of Iraq as well as the “good war” against Afghanistan, the GOP standard bearer’s narrative is military: career Navy, POW, wants to send more young men and women to Iraq. Yet the latest Gallup poll (conducted August 22-24) has Obama neck and neck with McCain, with 45 percent each, with a two percent margin of error. CNN (August 21-23) yields identical results,…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: 13 Days in August

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Ted Rall
The Polish Missile Crisis: Bush’s Last War? The Cold War is over,” Condi Rice said last week. This may be true. She and her lame duck boss seem to be starting up a hot one instead. Imagine Russian or Chinese military bases in Tijuana or Ciudad Juárez, across the Mexican border from El Paso. Add some more in Toronto and Vancouver. Now imagine that Russia managed to persuade Canada and Mexico to join it in some weird new Eastern bloc military alliance whose purpose was to “contain” the U.S., and then placed a battery of long-range missiles in one or both countries. How long would it take before we went to war? Of course, you don’t need an imagination. The U.S. didn’t tolerate Soviet missiles in Cuba, and is still trying to overthrow its government. Given America’s refusal to accept an unfriendly regime in its neighborhood–remember Grenada?–you’d think it would know enough to stay out of Russia’s hair. You’d be…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hope For Audacity

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Ted Rall
Why Obama Is in Trouble Unless something happens, John McCain will win. Of course, “unless something happens” is the biggest qualifier in the world, more than adequate to CYA me should Obama prevail. It’s politics. There are almost three months. Odds are something will happen. Still, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Obama’s electoral handicaps–his racial identification and short resume–should have easily been eclipsed by Bush’s–er, McCain’s well-stocked aviary of albatrosses. McCain was and remains short of money. His campaign organization is a mess. Republican bosses are unenthusiastic, both about his prospects and about the direction he would take his party should he win. He has aligned himself with the most unpopular aspect of the wildly unpopular outgoing administration, the Iraq War. At a time when economically insecure voters are staring down the barrel of a recession-cum-depression, McCain promises more of the same–no help is on the way. And he’s old. Sooo painfully I-don’t-use-the-Internet old. What is it that…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: It’s the Torture, Stupid

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Ted Rall
Restoring Human Rights Must Be Next Prez’s Top Priority Both major presidential candidates have promised to roll back the Bush Administration’s torture archipelago. Both say they’ll close Guantánamo, abolish legalized torture, and respect the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. Obama also pledges to eliminate “extraordinary rendition,” in which the CIA kidnaps people and flies them to other countries to be tortured, and says he will investigate Bush Administration officials for possible prosecution for war crimes. If followed by other meaningful changes in behavior–withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq and foreswearing preemptive warfare–restoring the rule of law and respecting the rights of “enemy combatants” can start America’s long, slow climb back to moral parity in the community of nations. But there are worrisome signs that Barack Obama and John McCain’s commitment to moral renewal is less than rock-solid. McCain, who claimed to have been tortured as a POW in North Vietnam, says a lot of the right things.…
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