Some liberals see politics like football, in which moving the ball closer to the goal means you are winning. Thus they are encouraging progressives to vote for Joe Biden, arguing that Biden’s centrism would be an improvement over Trump. Biden, they say, can be pressured more easily from the left than Trump. But that’ds not at all what happened when Biden’s boss was president.
First Elect Obama, Then Move Left!
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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It was precisely the VP choice of “Biden’s boss” that made it perfectly clear Obumma was incapable of being “moved to the left.”
Now that very VP choice IS the presidential candidate …. and he is going to “move left”?!? The political “logic” of liberals appears to be a similar psychological pathology as that of the “face masks are a commie plot” crowd.
I begin to think that it won’t matter shortly whether a candidate moves to the left or not. Mother Nature bats last, and she always swings for the fences. Um, Biden, can do his Clintonian compromise shuffle all he wants: the hurricanes, the heat waves, the forest fires, the extinctions, will demonstrate that he’s wrong. I know he won’t live long enough to suffer any humiliation for being so terrible a leader that he put his corporate owners first, second, and last at the expense of all the people trapped on the planet with him, but maybe, if we’re lucky, the entire Biden clan will commit seppuku in atonement of their inferior Grampa Joe and his irretrievable stupidity.
Now if that button worked, I’d buy that McGovern-intro’d book. …
«Mother Nature bats last, and she always swings for the fences.» She doesn’t have to, Alex – it is she who determines where the fences stand. They are getting closer and closer ; there doesn’t seem to be any outfield left….
Henri
And obviously, electing Trump is not a solution either. And does anyone seriously believe that a third party can win this year? And change is URGENTLY needed, as the climate apocalypse is speeding up. Evidently, the only option remaining to us is revolution. I doubt we’ll be ready to do that before November, but we can start working on it now. The first step is to get more people talking about it, in many different ways. And Ted’s cartoons are an excellent contribution to that conversation.
“You can change the shepherd, but the sheep will remain sheep.”
– William Jefferson Blythe III
There certainly isn’t enough room in your cartoon to detail all the ways Obama is at odds with his liberal image, but one of my favorites is Guantanamo. It is rare for a candidate to actually promise anything. He promised to close Guantanamo prison. Worldwide, Guantanamo prison is a lasting concrete symbol of how grossly immoral and unjust the US is. And I think that is the actual message its continued operation means to send. A continuous message that the US can do anything and no one will stop us. It’s just like torture, which is never about getting information, it is only about ensuring that the people on the outside who haven’t been tortured yet are fully terrorized. And when the most powerful person in the world was faced with doing the right thing, he chose something fundamentally immoral and terrorizing.
I remember mentioning that way back when. “He said he’d close Gitmo and he didn’t.” And the response I got, over and over, was a variant on “We didn’t elect a king.” No sense of betrayal, no sense of outrage because it was a democrat doing it.
[…] Bonus No. 4: First Elect Obama, Then Move Left! […]
Great cartoon, Ted.
Citizens of the United States of Amnesia need history lessons such as this to overcome their cultural senility.
Your Writer’s Voice interview was as good as you said it was.
It reminded me of an old SDSer associate of mine who was so lost to history that I had to ask him, at last, if he was still in his first childhood or if this was his second.