Episode 141 | March 14, 2024: TikTok AtToked, Third Parties on the Rise, Crises in Gaza, Haiti and Ukraine

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the political Left) and Scott Stantis (from the political Right) discuss the week’s biggest stories without the boring yell fests but with force and passion.

First off, the United States House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed legislation that would force the Chinese company that owns TikTok to divest itself of the social media company within six months. President Biden says he will pass the measure if it hits his desk but its future is uncertain in the US Senate. Scott and Ted discuss the cultural, economic, legal and political implications of targeting a company purely based on conjecture and speculation with no proof that it has any plans to act nefariously.

Secondly, third and independent party presidential runs are in the news. Robert F Kennedy Junior is about to announce his choice for his voice presidential running mate. No Labels is about to appoint a committee to determine its options for president and vice president this year. Dr. Jill Stein will almost certainly be the nominee for the Green Party. And Dr. Cornel West is running his so-called jazz campaign.

Finally, five months into Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, it is very clear that Israel has overreached and is dangerously close to becoming an international pariah. Meanwhile, United States considers the possibility of military intervention in Haiti, something that has never gone well in the past. Ukraine, of course, will soon have to accept the difficult truth that it has lost its war against Russia.

 

Watch the Video Version: here.

Official Lies Aren’t What They Used To Be

            The government’s services keep getting worse.

Even their lies.

            The Bushies told us we had to invade Afghanistan to catch Osama bin Laden and then to go into Iraq because Saddam had WMDs. As the Pentagon knew, bin Laden was already in Pakistan; as Hans Blix and Scott Ritter told us, there was no evidence Saddam had proscribed weapons.

            Sure, they were lies. But they were plausible lies. Theoretically, UBL might have snuck into Afghanistan. Saddam might have acquired WMDs. Those things could have been true.

            Now they’re giving us implausible lies. Not only are their lies, well, lies—they say things that are untrue and can’t possibly be true and that no one, no matter how stupid or uninformed, could believe.

            Democrats go on and on about how nothing is more important than defeating Trump. Democracy itself hangs in the balance! After Trump redux, the re-deluge. Like Hitler, but worse.

            But they don’t really believe that. If liberals really actually thought Adolf Trump was going to suspend the constitution and send his enemies—them—to camps, their sense of survival would have prompted them to select the most charismatic, brilliant, popular, vigorous, 2024 Democratic presidential nominee possible. Instead, they gave us Biden.

            You can’t think Trump is dangerous and go with Biden-Harris. For Democrats, protecting their party’s corporatist status quo matters more Trump’s purported threat to democracy. That’s the truth. We all know.

            Republicans won’t shut up about out-of-control deficit spending and the $34 trillion national debt which, according to them, will tank the economy because, like a family that has to live within its means except for credit cards and student loans and car loans and home mortgages, the government can’t keep spending cash it doesn’t have even though it owns the U.S. Mint and has gotten away with it for, like, a century.

            We know that the fake deficit hawks don’t actually believe what they are saying in real time, as they’re saying it, because while they’re threatening to shut down the government every few months, they keep throwing even more billions of dollars at the Defense Department than the DOD even asks for, so much that the military sucks up more than everything else the government does combined, and that’s not including the wars they put “off the books” and the proxy wars and the wars they charge to the State Department, not to mention debt service on old wars.

            These diametrically opposed lines of rhetoric represent a dramatic shift away from old-fashioned political hypocrisy. If the military is your biggest expense by far and you keep raising it, and you claim to worry about spending, you are lying. No amount of cognitive dissonance can convince us otherwise. You know we know it’s crap yet you keep right on going.

            “Normal” communication by political elites has become prima facie impossible to take seriously.

            We used to be able to accept the announcement by a defeated primary candidate that they would endorse their rival and tour for him because primary campaigns involved incremental ideological variations and hadn’t yet devolved to bloodsport.

            No more. Even after Trump implied that Ted Cruz’s father assassinated JFK and had his surrogates impugn Ron DeSantis as a eunuch and a fey cuck, he collected both men’s endorsements. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden red-baited Bernie Sanders as an existential threat to the Democratic Party yet were rewarded with his fealty. This, we are supposed to think, is adults being adults and maybe this is so, but more than that it’s proof positive that nothing any primary candidate claims to stand for or against should ever be trusted.

            Everywhere we look, politicians are deploying lies whose obviousness is evident out of the gate. Elites will never be believed, they know it,  and they don’t care.

            Israel’s war cabinet tells its traumatized citizens that October 7th came as a surprise at the same time countless specific warnings and the IDF’s eight-hour response time (!) prove that cannot possibly have been the case. As people shout “bring them home,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he’s trying to do just that. But that’s a lie and it has to be a lie because you don’t bomb a place where hostages you care about are being held lest you kill them and anger their captors.

            Families of the doomed hostages cannot believe him and do not believe him yet they do not demand that the bombs stop falling or that those who drop them be removed from power.

            Ukraine, they say, is a fellow democracy even though it has canceled all elections forever and its press is censored and opposition parties are banned, and as a democracy it must be defended by us, who are not really much of a democracy either as Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson and others who have been denied access to ballots can attest. The idea that this famously corrupt post-Soviet republic could have posed as a democracy was cute on its face, of course…shut up and fly your blue and yellow flag.

            Taiwan, Biden says, is a country that must be defended from a Chinese invasion. At the same time, Biden also says, Taiwan is not a country at all nor should it become one, China is the One China and Taiwan is part of it so China can no more invade Taiwan than the U.S. can invade Ohio, but still, we’ll defend Taiwan but really we won’t. “Realists” call this “strategic ambiguity“ but really, it’s just one of those lies-you-see-coming.

            Gender identity, woke elites insist, is not merely psychological but physically real as well: a transwoman is a woman, period. This cannot be true; a transwoman swimmer is not generically the same as her cis female competitors but they tell us that we should tell cis female athletes to chill, it’s not an issue when clearly it’s an issue but the authorities don’t want us to take their ridiculous word for it, just as it is with DEI and its clumsy flip-replacement of one form of systemic discrimination with another, they just want us to shut up.

            The era of the lie-you-know-from-the-start may be over soon.

            Next up: insane truths without the thinnest varnish of deception.

            Though not a renowned rhetorician, our president surely deserves historical credit as the first American leader to say, at the start of a war, that we will lose. Days after the U.S. military began what it plans to be a prolonged bombing campaign against Yemen, an effort to stop the Houthis from attacking ships in the Red Sea, Biden announced that future strikes would not succeed. “Are they [US airstrikes] stopping the Houthis? No,” Biden told reporters. “Will they continue? Yes.”

            They’re not even trying anymore.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

The Final Countdown – 1/12/24 – Trump Lashes Out at Opposing Counsel in Defiant Speech at Civil Fraud Trial

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall discuss current events from around the globe, including Trump’s civil fraud trial. 

Jeremy Kuzmarov – Managing Editor of Covert Action Magazine 
Armen Kurdian – Retired Navy Captain
Steve Hayes– Tax Attorney   
 
The show begins with Jeremy Kuzmarov, Managing Editor of Covert Action Magazine, joining the show to break down the missile strikes on Yemen’s Houthis by the U.S. and U.K. 
 
Then, Retired Navy Captain Armen Kurdian weighs in on the Fani Willis scandal and Hunter Biden’s guilty plea on federal tax charges.  
 
The second hour starts with tax attorney Steve Hayes who shares his expertise on Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial. 
 
Ted and Angie close the show, breaking down the upcoming Taiwanese elections. 
 
 

One Domino Theory After Another

Over and over, the military tells Americans that grave consequences would follow unless we fight and win in some overseas conflict. Yet we keep losing, and nothing terrible happens. When, if ever, will we see through the military’s fear-mongering?

The Final Countdown – 11/15/23 – Biden-Xi Talks Take Center Stage at APEC

On this episode of the Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie Wong discussed a wide range of topics, including the meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. 

Dan Lazare – Independent Journalist 
Carl Zha – Host of Silk and Steel Podcast
Elijah Magnier – Veteran War Correspondent 
Paul Wright – Managing Editor at Prison Legal News 
 
The show kicks off with Independent journalist Dan Lazare talking about the House voting to curb a government shutdown and the Senate rejecting an individual bill that would fund Israel’s military.  
 
Then, Host of the Silk and Steel Podcast, Carl Zha, shares his perspective on the upcoming talk between Xi and Biden at San Francisco’s APEC Summit. 
 
The second hour begins with Elijah Magnier sharing his insights on the Israeli military offensive in Gaza, and its attempts to capture Al-Shifa Hospital.
 
The show closes with Paul Wright, Managing Editor at Prison Legal News, discussing the tragic murder of an Alabama prison inmate. 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 10/18/23 – House’s Fate Hangs in the Balance as Government Nears Shutdown

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall discuss hot topics, including the House Speakership Crisis. 
 
The show kicks off with Robert Fantina, an author and activist, sharing his perspective on the hospital blast in Gaza and Biden’s visit to Tel Aviv. 
 
Then, International Relations & Security Analyst Mark Sleboda provides his expertise on the U.S.’s clandestine move to provide long-range ATACMS missiles to Ukraine, and what this means for escalation in the region. 
 
The second hour begins with Army Infantry Veteran Tyler Nixon weighing in on the House speakership crisis. 
 
The show closes with Host and Reporter at CGTN Radio, Anna Ge, to discuss the meeting between Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi amid the Belt and Road Summit. 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 9/12/23 – Putin Reveals Why Global South is Supporting Russia

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Angie Wong and Ted Rall discuss top news, including Russia’s alliance with Global South countries. 
 
Tyler Nixon – Army Infantry Veteran
Mark Frost – Economist
Fiorella Isabel – Journalist 
Ted Harvey – Former State Senator in Colorado, Founder of StopJoe.com
 
The show begins with Army Infantry Veteran Tyler Nixon who joins The Final Countdown to break down the latest of Trump’s legal troubles in New York, Florida, and Georgia.
 
Then, Economist Mark Frost shares his perspective on the imminent United Auto Workers strike and the Google antitrust trial. 
 
The second hour kicks off with journalist Fiorella Isabel joining to discuss Russian President Vladimir Putin’s appearance at the Eastern Economic Forum, and Russia’s Grain Deal with China. 
 
The show closes with Former State Senator in Colorado Ted Harvey sharing his perspective on Kevin McCarthy’s impeachment inquiry into the Biden family. 
 
 
 

Foiled in Their Farmland Schemes

33 American states are sucking up to the nativists in their electorates by considering legislation that would prevent Chinese nationals and entities from buying land in their states. As if China can’t spy on the U.S. from satellites!

The Final Countdown – 8/3/23 – Trump Blasts Federal Charges, Presses Forward With 2024 Campaign

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Manila Chan and Ted Rall discuss breaking news, including the latest out of Trump’s indictment. 
Bob Patillo: Attorney and Executive Director of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition 
Tyler Nixon: Army Infantry Veteran 
Mark Sleboda: International Relations & Security Analyst 
KJ Noh: Journalist and Political Analyst
 
The show kicks off with Attorney and Executive Director of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition Bob Patillo to discuss the latest out of the Trump indictment. 
 
In the second half of the first hour, Army Infantry Veteran Tyler Nixon joins to discuss American confidence in the military. 
 
The second hour begins with International Relations & Security Analyst Mark Sleboda discussing the phone call with Putin and Erdogan, and the latest out of Russia and Ukraine. 
 
The show closes off with journalist and political analyst KJ Noh, to discuss the U.S. potentially arming Taiwan. 

The Final Countdown – 7/26/23 – Judge Strikes Down Biden’s Controversial Asylum Policy

Hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan discuss breaking news in this episode of The Final Countdown, including Biden’s asylum policy. 
 
Susan Pai: Immigration Attorney
Brad Blankenship: Prague-based American journalist
Dr. Reese Halter: Conservation biologist  
Dan Kovalik: Human rights lawyer 
 
The show kicks off with Susan Pai, an immigration attorney, to discuss a judge blocking Biden’s asylum policy. 
 
In the second half of the first hour, journalist Brad Blakenship joins from South China to discuss Qin Gang getting fired. 
 
The second hour begins with conservation biologist Dr. Reese Halter discussing the Gulf Stream’s current collapse. 
 
The show closes with human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik to talk about his time in Donbass. 
 
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