Democrats say they’re defending democracy–but only by opposing Trump. They’re happy to resort to anti-democratic tactics whenever they feel threatened.
If Trump Leaned Left, Democrats Would Love Him Too
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If you don’t understand your enemy and their motivations, Sun Tzu counseled, victory will elude you. Part of the reason Biden’s polls are so awful is that Democrats and their supporters don’t have a clue about what is driving Trump and his MAGA movement.
The answer would shock many of them. Republican voters want the same thing as Democrats: a warrior. Republicans don’t much care whether their president or senator or congressman is a decent or law-abiding individual. They just want him to vote for the bills they agree with, and to push like hell to turn them into law.
Evangelical Christians, the bedrock of the GOP base, embodies this seeming paradox. “It is odd,” The New Statesman muses, “to see a man who embodies so many sins—including all seven deadly ones; is there anyone who better exemplifies a noxious combination of pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth?—be so widely embraced by the religious Right. This is a politician who has no home church and can’t name his favorite Bible verse.” White evangelicals went 84% for Trump in 2020, up from 77% in 2016 according to the Pew poll.
And from their perspective, it paid off. Trump’s Supreme Court appointees, a trio of hard-core right-wingers, are why Roe v. Wade and the federal right to an abortion are no more.
If they thought about it, Democrats would realize it’s not odd at all.
Recently I noticed a photo I have of myself with the late Ted Kennedy, liberal lion of the U.S. Senate and perennial candidate for president. Kennedy’s personal life, particularly vis-à-vis women, was deplorable. I knew, everyone knew, about that when I went to work for his primary campaign against Jimmy Carter in 1980 and then when he tried again in 1984, and yet again when I met him at the ceremony where I received the RFK Journalism Award.
I didn’t care.
I wouldn’t let my daughter catch a ride in Kennedy’s black Oldsmobile. So what? What mattered to me was not what he did as a private individual but how he voted and championed liberal values.
Many women felt like that. “If you are sympathetic to Kennedy and his politics, Newsweek observed when Kennedy died in 2009, you were “willing to measure the benefits that Kennedy brought to countless people through his politics, and give them proper weight on the scales of the man’s record.”
In 2004, when antiwar leftists and progressives disgusted by the then-popular Cult of George W. Bush and his lie-based invasion of Iraq were at their most desperate for a champion to walk tall, consequences be damned, Kennedy stood head and shoulders above his fellow Democrats. We thrilled as he dared to unleash his outrage against a GOP that hadn’t faced serious criticism since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
“Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam,” Kennedy said in one of his many famous speeches. “Truth is the first casualty of policy” when it came to Bush, he thundered. “This is the pattern and the record of the Bush administration [on] Iraq, jobs, Medicare, schools, issue after issue—mislead, deceive, make up the needed facts, smear the character of any critics. Again and again, we see this cynical, despicable strategy playing out.”
Mitch McConnell (R-KY), then the Senate Majority Whip, blasted Kennedy as “vicious” and “outrageous.”
It is, however, no coincidence that Kennedy’s favorability polls peaked in 2004.
Liberals could sure use a warrior like Kennedy now.
If you can, try to imagine a Joe Biden with many of the same qualities and flaws of men like Ted Kennedy and Donald Trump. Let’s say that we knew for a fact that he repeatedly crept out on Jill with, among other people, a porn star. That he cheated people who worked for him. That he issued truly disgusting utterances, some of it racist. But that he was also indefatigably determined to push forward a far-left agenda whether or not the establishment was ready for it—socialized healthcare, free college, much higher minimum wage, legalized abortion at the federal level.
If you are tired of a Democratic Party that constantly seems to sell itself cheap to the Republicans, you might vote for that kind of Joe Biden.
Alternatively, what if Trump were the same exact person, but a warrior for the Left? Admit it—progressives would love him.
Of course, the real Joe Biden is not that different than the theoretical Joe “Mr. Hyde” Biden I just described—the bad part, anyway. A former Capitol Hill staffer accused Biden of sexual assault. So did other women. Like Trump, Biden credibly stands accused of corrupt business dealings. He launched his political career by defending segregated schools, engineered a racist crime bill that sent two generations of young Black men to prison for minor crimes and made numerous racist remarks.
Sadly, Biden isn’t enough of a warrior to justify turning a blind eye to his negatives. If he were, the extreme-right government of Israel would have to look somewhere else for the tens of billions of taxdollars Biden is sending them to help slaughter the Palestinians.
Even so, tens of millions of Democratic voters will do just that this November. Like the Trumpies, the Bidenites are overlooking their candidate’s flaws, not least of which is his alarming mental decline. Surely liberals should be able to see that, in this respect, they are exactly the same as the Republicans. But of course there is a difference. Unlike the Republicans who ignore Trump’s failings, Democrats who put their consciences on silent mode in order to vote for Biden are doing so without any indication that they will ever get anything back in return.
(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. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
No Place for Violence
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Even as he funnels tens of billions of dollars in weapons to Israel to help it bomb the Gaza Strip, President Biden lectures college students about being too violent as they try to protect themselves from riot police.
To Stop Trump, Anything Goes
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Democrats say that Donald Trump is evil because he is a liar, cheater and a thief. Because he’s so bad, they say, almost any tactic is justified in getting rid of him. Does that include lying, cheating and stealing?
Ukraine is a Very Special Kind of Democracy
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You can’t call yourself a democracy unless you hold elections. Americans have been supporting Ukraine in large part because it’s a democracy. But they’ve canceled all their elections and opposition parties and media are no longer allowed.
Ukraine and Israel Are Very Special Democracies
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Hi. Joe Biden here, asking for more money for Ukraine and Israel.
Many Americans are asking: why, while millions of Americans are unemployed and getting evicted and starving and homeless, should we ignore our own people and send billions of dollars to foreign countries instead? The answer is: democracy. We have to defend democracy.
Ukraine and Israel aren’t just democracies. They’re special democracies.
Very special democracies.
Ukraine, for example, is the kind of democracy that doesn’t hold elections for local offices. There were supposed to be parliamentary elections, this month, but…yeah. There weren’t and there won’t be. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly legal because after the war with Russia started in February 2022, martial law was declared and the Ukrainian Constitution doesn’t allow elections under martial law.
Ukraine is so democratic that it doesn’t even need to have presidential elections anymore. Martial law again. And who declared martial law? Why, it’s that sly rascal President Volodymyr Zelensky—make that President-for-Life Volodymyr Zelensky. We’re so dysfunctional here in the U.S. that House Republicans can’t agree with themselves who should be Speaker. But Ukraine is streamlined! The guy who would be running for reelection this spring won’t have to, because he personally said so! That’s a very special democracy.
Under “martial law,” a term that no one has ever managed to define, Ukraine is a kind of democracy in which “conducting referendums, organizing strikes, and holding public demonstrations and other mass gatherings are prohibited.” Special!
President-for-Life Zelensky points out: “according to the [martial law] legislation, it is forbidden to hold elections.” Legislation that he signed unilaterally, of course. He is so committed to the rule of law that he refuses to unilaterally cancel a law that he unilaterally created in order to cancel the rule of law.
As everyone knows, you don’t need to hold elections to call yourself a democracy. Aside from martial law, there would be some big logistical challenges to holding an election right now. Like, Zelensky could lose! In the last poll of Ukrainians before the war, 53% of voters disapproved of his job performance and 38% approved.
Also, an election without other candidates and parties isn’t much fun. Ukraine has banned all left-wing parties, and also banned 11 other parties, including the biggest one, whose leader is under house arrest. Better not to bother.
Even if there were other parties and candidates to run against Zelensky, which there are not, they wouldn’t be able to campaign because “conducting referendums, organizing strikes, and holding public demonstrations and other mass gatherings are prohibited” under martial law. Who needs campaign rallies, because who would report about them anyway? His Excellency the President-for-Life has imposed state censorship on newspapers, shuttered opposition websites and shut down all opposition TV outlets and consolidated them into his own state TV platform. He calls it a “unified information policy.” No more channel changing! Save on monthly subscriptions to media apps!
The U.S. spent over $14 billion on the 2020 election. Ukraine is a very efficient democracy. They’re spending nothing at all! We must defend this penny-pinching beacon of freedom.
Israel, I like to say, is “a safe, secure, Jewish, and democratic state.” OK, not that safe. But, like Ukraine, it’s a democracy. Israel is a very very special kind of democracy.
In a democracy, the right to vote is one of the most fundamental privileges accorded to a citizen. The trouble is, sometimes people vote incorrectly. And in a democracy, all you need to do to be considered a citizen is to be born and live in the country.
To fix this problem, Israel has decided that only its very best people—the 9.6 million residents of Israel “proper”—can be citizens. The 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza or the 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank are, as the vernacular goes, S.O.L. (The 500,000 Israeli settler-colonists squatting in the West Bank are, however, fully vested voters.)
Of the 9.6 million Israelis in Israel proper, 2.0 million are Israeli Arabs and 500,000 are neither Jewish nor Arab. If they and the West Bank settlers voted alongside their fellow 5.1 million Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank in a unified Israeli-Palestinian state, there would be 7.6 million Jews almost tied with 7.1 million Arabs.
Too much democracy.
On the other hand, 5.1 million Palestinian citizens of their own viable nation-state in a two-state scenario would present a different problem. The Republic of Palestine would have a seat at the United Nations, embassies and consulates all over the world, foreign news bureaus. Journalists and tourists could freely come and go. Palestinian citizens would talk. They’d complain, even about Israel. I mean, they do that now—but people might pay attention and—God forbid—care!
So Israel has an à la carte democracy. They lock the Palestinians away in Gaza and the West Bank, out of sight and out of mind, stateless and hopeless and voiceless, under Israeli occupation but without the right to vote. The Jewish “majority” of Israel enjoys the Middle East’s only thriving democracy.
Imagine how cool it would be if we could do that here! Turn the flyover “red” states into an occupied stateless concentration camp without voting rights. The remainder, the coastal “blue” states, would become a liberal paradise. No more Trumpies. Abortion rights—back. E-vehicle charging stations everywhere.
Israel has biggified democracy!
So, my fellow Americans, please join me in supporting Ukraine and Israel, these two very special, very expensive democracies.
While you’re still allowed.
(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.)
Do As I Say, Not As I Did
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Presidential libraries for several former U.S. Presidents wrote a joint statement for the first time to warn about the state of American democracy. “Others see our own house in disarray,” they declared. But they didn’t mention their namesakes’ roles in undermining U.S. credibility.
Now You’re a Cis
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Transgender people want to be recognized for who they are, and called accordingly. Nothing could be more reasonable. Why do they insist on slapping labels and names on non-trans people?
America’s Bizarro Take on Guantánamo: Punish the Victims, Reward the Criminals
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A country that loudly and repeatedly expresses what it purports to be its principles, yet cavalierly ignores them on a whim, rightly earns the contempt of its own citizens and those of other nations, especially when the hypocritical government of that nation criticizes others for failing to adhere to their pompously proclaimed rules-based international order.
Guantánamo Bay concentration camp epitomizes this phenomenon.
Now in its third decade of operation under four presidents, Gitmo still houses 30 men. None of them has ever been charged in a court of law. Indeed, none of them ever will. It is a bedrock principle of American jurisprudence that we are all, citizens and non-citizens alike, presumed innocent until proven guilty. Which makes all 30 prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as innocent as a newborn child as far as the law is concerned.
For whatever it’s worth, the Pentagon itself says it has no evidence that half of these people committed a crime. They are all cleared for release, but the U.S. refuses to admit them and no other country has issued an invitation.
These 30 innocent men and the 750 others who have cycled through and subsequently been released were kidnapped (after having been sold for a bounty in many cases), deprived of their constitutional right to a speedy trial and their right to legal counsel, tortured in order to deprive them of their right not to incriminate themselves, prohibited from receiving visits from family members and blocked from using a telephone. Unsurprisingly, the Red Cross has determined that these innocent men are “experiencing the symptoms of accelerated aging worsened by the cumulative effect of their experiences and years spent in detention.”
According to The New York Times: “Lawyers for some of the prisoners, particularly those who spent years in harsh, secret CIA custody before Guantánamo, have said detainees have brain damage and disorders from blows and sleep deprivation, damaged gastrointestinal systems from rectal abuse and issues possibly linked to prolonged shackling and other confinement.”
Linger on that: damaged gastrointestinal systems from rectal abuse. Nice rules-based international order you got there, Uncle Sam.
Though he hasn’t made it a priority, President Biden would like to close Guantánamo. Toward that end, the military has talked to lawyers for some detainees. “Settlement talks are underway at the U.S. military court in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that would allow alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants to plead guilty, avoid the death penalty, and serve life in prison—although some of them may try to negotiate lesser sentences,” NPR reported a year ago. There’s been no word since.
This is an obscenity. A law-abiding society doesn’t negotiate a reduced sentence for innocent men. Innocent men are released. Innocent men released after having been mistreated are compensated financially and otherwise for having been abused and deprived of their rights.
The Gitmo 30 should be released and brought to the United States if their home countries don’t want them or it’s dangerous for them to go back. They and the 750 former detainees should be housed, given healthcare and treatment for mental trauma, jobs if they want them, as well as generous financial compensation. The federal standard for compensating the wrongfully imprisoned is $50,000 per year of incarceration plus an additional amount for time spent on death row. Conditions at Guantánamo demand more.
We do, however, need to punish those at Guantánamo—not the prisoners, who are innocent victims, but the guards and commanding officers. Anyone who has served at Guantánamo concentration camp is guilty of kidnapping, punishable by up to 20 years in prison under federal law. If two or more people conspire to commit kidnapping, which is plainly the case here, they face life imprisonment.
Everyone involved in keeping innocent people confined at Guantánamo should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This includes the last four presidents of the United States, generals, and others in the chain of command down to the guards, as well as lawyers like John Yoo, who authored convoluted legal opinions justifying kidnapping and torture. Let’s not forget the CIA agent-torturers who gleefully carried out “enhanced interrogation techniques” as well as their superior officers. Hey Democrats! Really want to get rid of Donald Trump? Here’s your chance.
Writing an essay like this annoys me. Calling for justice for the wronged and accountability for the evildoers, and pointing out that people are innocent until proven guilty, is kindergarten editorial commentary that takes away time and energy I ought to be devoting to complex policy issues. These concepts are so simple and self-evident that there should be no more need to express them than to announce in a newspaper that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning.
Yet I have to do it. No one else is talking about Gitmo. The American people don’t think, much less care, about what’s being done in their name and at their expense. Reality has been turned inside-out so thoroughly that seemingly otherwise sane journalists don’t see anything strange about America having its very own concentration camp, where 30 innocent people are trying to negotiate life imprisonment instead of execution, while those who actually committed crimes have suffered no punishment whatsoever. One torturer was subsequently appointed to run the CIA and is now a big-deal lawyer, while another is a top contender for the U.S. presidency!
The U.S. keeps talking about human rights—in other countries. People might start to pay attention if it closed Guantánamo, released its victims and prosecuted its employees.
(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 and co-hosts “The Final Countdown” radio show Mon-Fri 10 am – 12 noon ET. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Never Mind My Crimes, What about Your Issues?
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When whistleblowers catch the government breaking the law, the government distracts us by criticizing the whistleblower. Why can’t us ordinary people get off the hook by attacking our accusers?
