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Official Lies Aren’t What They Used To Be

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Ted Rall

            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.)

 

Here’s What a Progressive Platform Looks Like

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Ted Rall

           “Be realistic. Demand the impossible.” —Situationist slogan, 1968.

            Demand #1: The $30-per-hour Minimum Wage.

            Not phased in over so many years that today’s $30 is worth $20 by the time it takes effect. $30 an hour for all workers, no exceptions, now. This is an eminently reasonable demand. If anything, it’s too little to ask. $7.25 is a sick joke. Congress’ abdication of its moral duty to reward American workers for their extraordinary productivity by increasing the minimum wage at or faster than inflation has eroded the base salary since the Vietnam era. Corporate profits have soared as workers’ wages have stagnated.

The federal minimum wage was $1.60 in 1968. Adjusting for the official inflation rate, that’s $30.00 today. Let’s party like it’s 1968.

Demand #2: Free national healthcare.

Not market-based, not a hybrid—we need real, actual, universal healthcare. Every nurse and every doctor becomes a federal employee. Health insurance vanishes as a business sector. Every check-up, every test, every doctor’s visit, every medication, every surgical procedure is fully covered, no questions asked, as long as it’s approved by a physician.

This is not too much to ask. Germany, where only 0.5% of the population is uninsured, pays only 10.7% of GDP for healthcare, compared to 16% here in the U.S. Norway, where hospitals are operated by the government, has a $210 per citizen per year deductible after which the government picks up the tab for everything; like Germany, overall healthcare costs in Norway are about 60% of ours.

Throw in dental, vision and mental health.

Demand #3: Slash military spending by 80%.

We’re not the world’s policeman. We’re its deranged serial killer. The U.S. squanders $800 billion a year to invade, occupy, assassinate, intimidate and bomb people who mean us no harm and destroy their infrastructure. That’s more than the next nine biggest-spending militarist nations combined. And those countries total 10 times our population.

Slashing the Pentagon budget would make the world safer. Fewer U.S. wars and proxy wars would reduce anti-Americanism and thus reduce the chance of another terrorist attack, save thousands of American lives and millions of people overseas, not to mention massively helping out the environment.

Those savings would easily cover…

Demand #4: Free four-year college.

Young Americans have long been coerced into a devil’s bargain: without a college degree, they’ve been told, you won’t land a decent-paying job. College is insanely expensive so you’ll have to accept the burden of student loan debt. If you don’t make enough money after graduation due to bad luck or a bad economy or a changing workplace, too bad, you still have to pay. You can’t even discharge the loans in bankruptcy.

If the corporations who own our politicians require job applicants to have a college degree, a college degree should be free. 39 countries have free college. We deserve, and can afford, the same as Kenya, Iceland and Panama.

            Demand #5: Leadership to ban the most frightening weapons.

            As the world’s most aggressive militaristic nation and its biggest international arms dealer, only the U.S. has the standing and power to stop the arms races we’re starting. The U.S. should forswear its currently-stated, insane option of launching a nuclear first strike and invite all other nuclear powers to make the same commitment. It should join the 80% of the world’s nations that have pledged not to use landmines. It should ban drone-based weapons in its military, police and civilian sectors and demand that other nations do the same. The world must come together to ban lethal autonomous weapons; the U.S.’ early lead in this technology gives it leverage to lead the way.

            More to come.

(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.)

Fight for Your Democratic Right to Be Ignored

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Ted Rall

Much of the Democratic campaign for the 2022 midterm elections centers around efforts by Republicans to suppress Democratic votes. If you love what the Democratic Party stands for, it’s an outrage. Not so much if you don’t.

Biden is Giving $40 Billion to Ukraine. Here’s What That Money Could Do Here.

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Ted Rall

            On top of the $2 billion it already sent to Ukraine, the Joe Biden Administration has asked Congress to ignore its previous request for a $10 billion to pay for updated COVID-19 vaccines for American citizens (pandemic? what pandemic?) and send an additional $33 billion to Ukraine instead. The House of Representatives not only obliged, but authorized more than Biden wanted, $40 billion.

            The U.S. Congress does this with military spending all the time. They live to please!

            Every Democratic congressman voted “yes” to send weapons to a country that has “several hundred monuments, statues, and streets named after Nazi collaborators,” according to The Forward. That even includes AOC’s “Squad,” who claimed to be progressive.

            In the Senate, a rare voice of opposition was raised by libertarian Republican Rand Paul. “We don’t need to be the sugar daddy and the policemen of the world,” Paul remarked. For his trouble, Paul was bizarrely accused of “treason” by online commenters who suggested that his surly Kentucky neighbor should assault him again. All Paul wanted was a week to go over exactly where all that money is going.

            Whatever you think of the crisis in Ukraine, Paul has a point. A week isn’t going to make any difference. We should distrust bullies who tell us there’s no time to think, hurry up, shut up, do what we tell you. The total lack of debate in Washington, and in the news media, over the quick transfer of $40 billion to a country that is not a U.S. ally, has a grim human rights record and recently banned a bunch of political parties and opposition cable news channels, ought to prompt some sort of discussion. First and foremost, we ought to consider just how much money $40 billion is and what it could do here in the United States, for Americans.

            The $40 billion we are sending to Ukraine will not change the outcome of the war. The United States would never commit enough money or ground troops to do that because it would risk World War III with Russia. The $40 billion will buy a lot of weapons and ammunition that will kill Russians and Ukrainians—nothing more, nothing less.

            So how much, exactly, is $40 billion?

Here in the United States, here are some of the things that $40 billion could do:

            A $2,000 scholarship for every college student.

            A $6,000 scholarship for every college student who is officially in poverty.

            $72,000 to every homeless person.

            $2,400 to every veteran.

            $410,000 to every public school.

            $1.3 million to every public high school. It could be used to buy books and other equipment, fix broken infrastructure, build something new for the kids. $1.3 million would pay the salaries of 20 new teachers for 10 years.

            $500 to each American family. I pledge to use my $500 not to kill any Russians or Ukrainians.

            $420 to every cat. That’s a lot of kibble and litter. Cats don’t kill Russians or Ukrainians.

            $2 million each to every person wrongfully convicted of a murder they didn’t commit.

            Give a new, fully-loaded car to a million people.

            Give a sweet, fully-loaded Macbook Pro laptop to 10 million people.

            Give a sweet new TV to 100 million people.

            Everyone who currently subscribes to Netflix gets three years for free.

            Every adult gets a free subscription to the Washington Post digital edition for three years.

            Every adult gets 15 free tickets to the actual, real, in-person, not-at-home movies.

            $40 billion would repair almost all of the 220,000 bridges in the United States that need to be repaired and replace all of the 79,500 that need to be replaced. Add the $2 billion we already sent to Ukraine and you can delete the word “almost.”

            $40 billion would buy Twitter.

            $86,000 for everyone raped over the last year.

            $7,000 to help the caregivers of everyone suffering from dementia.

            It would hire 50,000 journalists for 20 years. There are only 6,500 now.

            $4,000 to every self-identified Native American and Alaska Native. It’s not nearly enough considering what has been done to them, but it’s better than the current nothing.

            What if, for some strange reason, we don’t want to use that $40 billion to help our own people right here at home, one out of nine of whom is officially poor—some of whom are actually starving? While the inclination to shovel money at other countries while so many of our own citizens are suffering is nearly impossible to understand, some people (the President, several hundred members of Congress) have such a mindset and therefore must be addressed.

            If we’re looking for a country in dire need of, and richly deserving of, $40 billion, we need look no further than Afghanistan.

            Afghanistan, which the U.S. brutally occupied for 20 years after invading without just cause, is suffering from the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world. Half its population—20 million people—is suffering from “acute hunger,” according to the UN. The nation collapsed because the U.S. pulled the plug on the economy when it withdrew, imposed draconian economic sanctions in a fit of spiteful pique and seized $7 billion in Afghanistan government funds. Biden has promised a little aid, though none has shown up in Kabul.

From the Intercept: “A senior Democratic foreign policy aide, who was granted anonymity to openly share his thoughts on the Biden administration’s actions, said the policy ‘effectively amounts to mass murder.’ According to the aide, Biden ‘has had warnings from the UN Secretary General, the International Rescue Committee, and the Red Cross, with a unanimous consensus that the liquidity of the central bank is of paramount importance, and no amount of aid can compensate for the destruction of Afghanistan’s financial system and the whole macro economy.’”

Democrats recently joined Republicans to vote no on a modest proposal to study the effect of U.S. sanctions against the Afghan people.

            Then again, we really do need that COVID money.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

The Real Question

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Ted Rall

Regardless of how you feel about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the fact that Congress quickly allocated $13.5 billion for military aid to a country which is not even an American ally while over half a million Americans are sleeping outside should make us reconsider our national priorities.

The Difference between Democrats and Republicans Equals Zero

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Ted Rall

Democrats often ask progressives: how can you say that there’s no difference between Democrats and the Republican party? While there are differences of tone, on the most important issues there is little to no difference in policy. And Congressional votes reflect that.

To the Barricades

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Ted Rall

Americans who oppose the healthcare mandate under ObamaCare have no problem paying half of their federal taxes to defense.

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