Support Ted’s Work

DMZ America Podcast #138: Alabamapalooza, Haley’s Last Stand, Two Years in Ukraine

•
Ted Rall

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.

This week, Ted and Scott start with Alabamapalooza! Scott lives in Alabama, which happens to be the improbable center of the week’s news. After a botched execution using a novel Neue asphyxiation method, the state pronounces itself ready to do a lot more. At the same time, the State Supreme Court has declared that frozen embryos developed for in vitro fertilization are full human beings entitled to the full protection of the law, with devastating consequences for women.

In the 2024 election campaign, former ambassador Nikki Haley takes on Donald Trump in her home state of South Carolina with the polls showing her behind by about 65% to 35%. Ted and Scott wonder aloud why exactly she’s still in the race and what is her strategy. On Tuesday, the race moves to Michigan, where Muslim Americans angry about the Biden administration’s support of Israel against the people of Gaza are trying to organize a substantial protest vote against the incoming president.

Finally, it’s the beginning of the third year of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Clearly Russia has won the war. When, if ever, will American policy makers recognize the reality on the ground and reflect that with their funding decisions in Washington? What will a negotiated settlement look like? What should it look like?

Watch the Video Version: here.

Official Lies Aren’t What They Used To Be

•
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.)

 

Ceasefire in Gaza, An Offer Israel Can’t Refuse—Yet It Is

•
Ted Rall

            The Left is doing something right.

            And it’s something that I initially disagreed with, even though I didn’t comment in a public space.

            When Israel overreacted to Hamas’ October 7th attack on western Israel with a brutal saturation bombing campaign against the Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip, defenders of human rights, antiwar activists and supporters of the Palestinian liberation movement demanded a ceasefire.

            To me, that felt like yet another example of the Left settling for too little, negotiating against itself. Ask for the stars, I usually advise, and you might settle for the moon. Ask for the moon and you might wind up with nothing. A ceasefire isn’t an armistice, much less a peace agreement. It’s merely an interruption in a war. What kind of antiwar activist doesn’t ask for an end to a war?

One of the most famous examples is the Christmas Truce of 1914, when German and British troops crawled out of their trenches and met in no-man’s land to exchange presents, play soccer and celebrate the holiday together. A day or two later, however, World War I resumed. It’s a cute story that changed nothing.

            Israel owes the people of Gaza nothing less than an immediate cessation of hostilities and official acceptance that the current conflict is a war crime for which top Israeli governmental and military officials should be prosecuted. The IDF should withdraw. Israel should pay to rebuild everything it destroyed and compensate the families of dead and wounded Palestinians. It should house everyone it has displaced on Israeli territory, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem if need be. It should recognize a free and sovereign Republic of Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital, within 1967 borders along with a safe corridor to connect the currently non-contiguous borders. The 700,000 settler-colonists should leave the West Bank and return to Israel.

            A ceasefire seems so tiny by comparison.

            Which is why it’s proving effective as a demand.

            When people confront two parties engaged in a conflict, one of their first reactions is to try to assess which, if either, is right (or at least more right). This determination is affected by such cognitive biases as whether one side looks or acts more like the person making the assessment. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some Americans have baked-in personal allegiances because they are Jewish or Muslim.

            Which leaves the other 97% of the population. Citizens of the United States are notoriously ignorant about politics and cultures beyond their borders. To the extent that they pay attention to the Middle East conflict, there has been a historical bias in favor of Israel, a fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ally President Joe Biden relied upon at the beginning of the war in Gaza. As we have seen in the past, however, Israeli overreaction has prompted the public to take a closer look and, following the usual practice, led them to a “pox on both of their houses” stance. Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland repeated that trope in 2020 when she claimed on Fox News that in “…the Middle East, they’ve been fighting for 4,000 years. It’s been an ethno-sectarian battle and psychodrama, and they’ve been killing each other for millennia. Their normal state of condition is war.” (This is not even a little bit true, but let’s leave that for another time.)

            20,000+ dead Palestinians into the latest episode of the conflict, the Gaza war has become a catastrophe too big to ignore or dismiss with glib inanities. Day after day, as Americans’ social media feeds fills with bloody images of dead Palestinian babies, initial public sympathy for Israel has given way to a feeling that the Palestinians of Gaza are victims at least as much as the Israelis of October 7th. Choosing sides is no longer easy. But one thing is clear: the carnage has gone on too long and, even if a long-term conclusion like a two-state solution is impossibly elusive, the bombing simply has to stop.

            By mid-December, three out of five American voters—with few differences between political parties—supported a ceasefire, up significantly from October. The public had caught up to the pro-Palestinian activists. By not asking for much, the Left appears moderate and reasonable.

            Meanwhile, voters keep reading headlines in which the Israeli government is refusing a ceasefire. To the contrary, Netanyahu says the war will continue for “many more months.” Israel is framing itself as rabid, overreaching and bloodthirsty.

            Because it is out of sync with public opinion, good will for Israel is ebbing like the pulse of a man bleeding to death from a gunshot wound. Although older voters still tend to support Israel, a mere 28% of voters between ages 18 and 29 told the latest New York Times/Sienna College poll that they believed Israel was seriously interested in a peaceful solution. On the other hand, half said the Palestinians do want peace.

(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.)

One Domino Theory After Another

•
Ted Rall

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?

Trump Will Get Rid of Democracy

•
Ted Rall

Donald Trump, Biden and the Democrats warn, wants to get rid of democracy. Sometimes, however, you have to ask yourself what your government has done for you lately. When it comes to American democracy, the answer is not much.

Victimhood or Vengeance? Israel Wants, But Cannot Have, Both

•
Ted Rall

Victimhood or vengeance: choose one.

You can’t have both.

Israel is about to learn that. Supporters of Israel’s government (as opposed to Israel writ large, which includes millions of Israelis who distrust their government) ask: Why are so few people still talking about October 7th? “It is striking and in some ways shocking that the brutality of the slaughter has receded so quickly in the memories of so many,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken remarked in early November.

Hamas’ attack was vicious, claimed many victims and was so recent—how can it be that those pitiful “kidnapped” posters are falling so flat so soon?

Blame Netanyahu and his co-conspirators.

They chose vengeance over victimhood.

They had a choice. Instead of gleefully indulging themselves in an unseemly orgy of destruction and murder after Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took 240 as hostages, Israel’s far-right government might instead have embraced the role of victim: Weep. Express confusion. Witness the personal stories of the dead and the lost. Beg Hamas to return the people it had kidnapped.

No bombs, no invasion, no psychotic rants about “human animals” or officially-tolerated banners genocidally screaming “Zero Gazans” hanging from a bridge in Tel Aviv.

Turn the other cheek.

Precise violence would have been acceptable. A raid against Hamas’ leadership, say. A hostage rescue attempt.

Had Israel not attacked Gaza in a wholesale campaign so devastating that historians have already declared it one of the most destructive in the history of warfare, it would continue to enjoy the sympathy and support of a world which, before the IDF saturation bombing campaign began on October 8th, had abandoned the Palestinians and forgotten the brutality they’d endured at the hands of the Zionists. U.N. resolutions would currently be directed against Hamas, not Israel. The Palestinian liberation movement, theretofore dormant and close to dead, would be a non-entity. America would be as festooned with Israeli flags as it was with Ukrainian ones a year ago.

Victimhood comes with downsides. Like, you can’t ethnically cleanse a couple of million Palestinians you’ve always hated and whose land you’ve long coveted. You look weak.

Look, I get it. War is fun. It keeps you in office even/especially when you’re facing prison time for corruption. Not to mention 141 square miles of beachfront real estate—that’s a land grab far too tasty to pass up.

But vengeance too, Israel is learning, is not without its own costs.

Israel has the right and the duty to defend itself, but this is not that. We’re hearing this linguistic construction a lot, notably from careful politicians and pundits whom, pre-war, would have omitted the qualifier phrase. Even allowing for the president’s imprecise command of English, Joe Biden’s complaint about Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” (using mostly American bombs) was remarkable.

Israel has used 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs to kill 20,000 Gazans and make 2 million homeless by transforming their territory into a wasteland, all while penning them inside a death zone subject to typhoid, cholera and mass famine because Israel refuses to permit food trucks to enter the territory which they have occupied and subjugated for decades. If October 7th was a horror, what Israel has wrought since is that horror hundreds of times over. There must easily be least 100,000 Palestinian bodies buried beneath countless piles of rubble.

We didn’t forget October 7th. Israel eclipsed the Hamas attack, erased it, sacrificed its survivor-hostages to its war so thoroughly that it intentionally shot three of them when they managed to escape. We’re following Israel’s lead.

The U.S. made a similar call after 9/11. I wouldn’t call it a mistake as much as a conscious decision. For the most part, with the exception of the mawkish “never forget” yellow-ribboned grief porn still adorning some police stations and oversized pickup trucks driven by a certain type of right-winger, Americans accepted the erasure of their 3,000 dead in exchange for the mindless purposefulness of Bush’s Global War On Terror, deployed in the post-Cold War period to justify everything from invading Afghanistan to arming Yemen against the Houthis.

Unlike our whiny Israeli allies, we Americans know better than to ask why the world forgot 9/11. We forgot 9/11. We made our choice and we kill with it. “We are all Americans,” Le Monde editorialized the day after; we replied thanks but no thanks, we’ll kill anywhere and everywhere and Freedom Fry you wimps. That much grace and class, we have: we own our thug life and we’re totally good with the fact that the world hates us more than ever.

Meanwhile, that giant ripping sound is Israel’s blank check being torn up.

The whining is what happens when you keep doing the same thing while the world is changing all around you and then complain about it.

Since 1948 Israel has had Big Bad Sam across the ocean to fund and arm them while running interference for them at the U.N., no matter how much Palestinian land they stole or how many Palestinians they killed. After October 7th they assumed they could keep doing whatever they wanted. Biden confirmed their assumption.

Nice run. It’s done now.

Israel no longer controls the narrative. It no longer matters that Al Jazeera is censored by American cable companies because its Gaza footage is now available on social media.  Israel is no longer admired as a safe haven for Holocaust survivors because they are almost all dead and gone; for Millennials and Zoomers Israel is just another country, albeit an anachronistic, uncomfortable vestige of the settler-colonial era with a major stank of apartheid. Israel’s star is sinking.

Sympathy for the vengeful peaked out in the “Dirty Harry”-“Death Wish” 1970s, when violent retribution was expected, accepted and even admired following an unprovoked wrong. Lashing back is now as passé as old white men on a college campus.

Israel is a young country and like a teenager it wants to have things both ways, both to be loved and feared. Now that it has destroyed Gaza, love is off the table. If it is lucky, it will retain a few of its former allies as tolerant frenemies.

If you want to be admired now, you need to get yourself some victimhood status. Consider affirmative action, the politics of transgenderism and income tests for government benefits unrelated to poverty—societal benefits accrue to those perceived to have been oppressed, repressed, tortured, traumatized and brutalized by those with power, wealth and strength—the very definition of nuclear-power Israel’s status in the Middle East. After Palestinians exchanged their retributive PLO of the 1970s for an impotent PA under occupation, the global Left began to embrace their cause. October 7th, a shocking throwback to Munich and the Achille Lauro, might have shifted victimhood back to the Jewish state, at least for a time, had Netanyahu’s gang not rejected self-restraint in favor of ultraviolence and opportunism.

Israel, a nation whose architecture, general aesthetics and fashion is stuck in the 1970s, is paying the price for its failure to grasp 21st century reality:

It’s better to have people feel sorry for you than to be afraid of you.

(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.)

DMZ America Podcast #126: Gaza Left vs. Right, Alabama’s Universal Basic Income

•
Ted Rall

Political cartoonist Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) discuss the week in politics and current events and culture. This week, the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Birmingham, Alabama’s experiment with a universal basic income.

In the first segment of this week’s DMZ America podcast, Ted and Scott dig deeper than ever before into the domestic and international implications of the war in Gaza. The two cartoonists delve into Israel’s right to exist, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in administrative detention, hostage exchanges, and whether there is a future two-state solution or whether a future single Republic of Palestine could reasonably accommodate members of all ethnic groups.

In the second part of the DMZ America podcast this week, Scott explains an experiment in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama in which single women are paid a universal basic income of $385 per month. The mayor says he wants to renew it because it’s doing well. Should a universal basic income be adopted by the United States? Ted and Scott talk about the economic and cultural risks and rewards of giving people a paycheck without having to work, with an emphasis on the fact that automation and artificial intelligence may make it so that society has no choice.

Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:

DMZ America Podcast Ep 126 Sec 1: Gaza — Left vs. Right

DMZ America Podcast Ep 126 Sec 2: Alabama’s Basic Universal Income

Blessed Be the Warmongers

•
Ted Rall

The Biden had what they thought would be a clever solution to their fear that the president would lose the New Hampshire primary. They decertified NH and made South Carolina first. Then Dean Phillips challenged Biden in NH. Faced with the prospect that Biden will lose the first primary (even if it’s unofficial), Biden has launched a write-in campaign for the race from which he asked to be removed from the ballot.

Mr. President, Please Kill the Homeless Woman Who Lives Outside My Apartment

•
Ted Rall

            Dear Mr. President,

            Won’t you please kill the homeless woman who lives on a bench on the median strip of the street near my apartment building?

            She doesn’t bother me. As far as I know, she doesn’t bother anyone else either. The woman who lives in the middle of the street is nice. I like her. Last week, as I was waiting for the traffic signal to change, she beckoned softly from under her pile of soiled blankets, asking for change, and I gave her a ten-dollar bill. I’m not usually that nice. She’s that sympathetic.

            I pitied her. I’ve watched her decline since spring. As six months dragged by this probably-fiftysomething-year-old woman has deteriorated from “how did someone so normal become homeless?” to talking to herself to severely sunburned to “this person will die this winter.”

It was in the high 30s last night and it will only get colder and it is not a question of when or how she’ll die—the answers are (a) this winter and (b) hypothermia—but whether the usual circle of votive candles and $5 bouquets of flowers will be placed by her bench or on the southwest corner of the intersection near the other one.

            They say that dying of cold isn’t that bad. That you feel warm, cozy, disoriented.

            I don’t believe them. Whatever the physical sensations, dying from cold a hundred feet from a couple hundred housing units so overheated that many New Yorkers keep their windows open all year long has got to be one hell of a lonesome suck of depressing. The nice woman who lives in the median deserves better than drawing her final breath while staring at the glow of a laptop screen through a frosted window pane the opposite side of which, under different circumstances, she would live inside.

            So, Mr. President, won’t you please kill this lady? You’d be doing her a favor.

            I know this isn’t your fault, sir. In a different world, you could allocate the tens of thousands of dollars needed to provide my outside neighbor with emergency shelter, transitional housing, permanent rehousing, substance abuse and/or mental health treatment. In reality, that money is tied up. The government’s budget is stretched thin. You have a massive deficit to think about.

            Plus you have big expenses. For example, you’re asking Congress for $106 billion “in funding for Israel, Ukraine, countering China in the Indo-Pacific, and operations on the southern U.S. border.” These are, obviously, all very important needs. Before she succumbed to schizophrenia, the woman who is going to die in my New York neighborhood wouldn’t dream of suggesting that her desire to live indoors ought to come ahead of countering China in the Indo-Pacific.

            I understand. If she hadn’t gone crazy, she’d understand too. Defense is one pot. A big pot. Anti-poverty is another pot. A very small pot. Like the tiniest pot in the smallest dollhouse ever. Everyone knows—you can’t “just” move money from one pot to another pot. That’s not something we even want to think about.

            All that military spending got me thinking, though. Although Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan clearly need fighter jets and tanks and drones and ships and cyber weapons and missiles and bombs and light arms and bullets in order to kill as many Russian and Palestinian and Chinese people as possible, will they really miss…one?

            Euthanizing a homeless New Yorker wouldn’t require anything as fancy as one of the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile Systems we’re sending to Ukraine. This lady isn’t worth $1.5 million. Not to mention, one ATACM would take out a whole block or two—including my place!

            I’m thinking something more modest, along the lines of the Switchblade 300 “suicide” drone, another gizmo we’re providing to Ukraine. As I’m sure you’re aware, Mr. President, the AeroVironment Switchblade is an expandable loitering munition so small it can fit in a backpack. You launch it from a tube. Then it flies to and crashes into its target, where its explosive warhead detonates. Like the homeless, it’s expendable. And it’s only $6,000!

            Come on, Mr. President: We both know the Ukrainians and the Israelis and Taiwanese don’t need all the weapons we’re sending them. The Ukrainians don’t; they’re selling the extras we send them on the black market and the dark web. I only need one. One!

I know—“operations on the southern U.S. border” address an existential threat to America. What if an illegal terrorist migrant were to sneak past the border wall and make his way to New York and then were to kill the homeless woman on my street who would otherwise die of exposure this winter? Of course, that would be OK.

Still. It’s not like you can’t let $6,000 “accidently” fall out of your budget for “operations on the southern U.S. border.” Send that drone. Please blow up the old lady.

(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.)

Related: Biden Sends Billions Overseas As Americans Starve (Short Video)

keyboard_arrow_up
css.php