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Saturday, January 5, 2008
Cartoon for January 5
Barack Obama says people are tired of the partisan bickering in Washington. Why is that, after Democrats have spent eight years getting the shit beat out of them, it's suddenly time to make nice? Tell you what: let's spend eight years destroying everything the Republicans hold dear. After that, we can bridge the red-blue divide.
Barack Obama says people are tired of the partisan bickering in Washington. Why is that, after Democrats have spent eight years getting the shit beat out of them, it's suddenly time to make nice? Tell you what: let's spend eight years destroying everything the Republicans hold dear. After that, we can bridge the red-blue divide.
Click on the cartoon to make it bigger.
Friday, January 4, 2008
The 2008 Campaign: Huckabee, Obama Win Iowa
The New York Times has a funny line today: "Mr. Obama's victory in this overwhelmingly white state was a powerful answer to the question of whether America was prepared to vote for a black person for president."
Well, Obama is black*, not black. It does answer the question of whether a biracial guy can get votes in white America, though.
What Iowa did not do on the Democratic side is establish a clear frontrunner. Obama took Iowa. Hillary should still take New Hampshire. Edwards is still in the race, holding out for South Carolina and Florida, where stands an excellent chance.
I think Hillary's candidacy is mortally wounded, but we'll see. This is now an Obama-Edwards race. Lord, please let Edwards win the nomination--he'd be the first political figure in my lifetime I actually admired. He'd get us out of Iraq and he'd fuck over the corporations. Obama is an accomodationist; if he wins, it'll be the do-nothing Nineties all over again.
If anything nasty comes out about Obama or he has a meltdown, Edwards wins. If not, then, well, I don't know.
On the Republican side, David Brooks' assertion in today's Times that the GOP will turn to McCain is laughable. McCain is done. Huckabee is the clear and present frontrunner, propelled by anti-Mormon bigotry. Nice party you got there! It is an amazing victory, considering how little money he had to spend, representing the victory of hatred over cash. Romney could and should win New Hampshire, but you never know.
Huckabee may be nice and slim and stuff, but if he wins the presidency we'll look back on George W. Bush and wonder why we didn't appreciate him when we had him. Huckabee is either an idiot, or worse, a fake idiot who pretends to be dumb to pander to idiots.
A person who doesn't believe in Evolution should be barred from holding any public office. Anyone who doesn't believe in Evolution is too stupid to get the French fries into the big basket.
The New York Times has a funny line today: "Mr. Obama's victory in this overwhelmingly white state was a powerful answer to the question of whether America was prepared to vote for a black person for president."
Well, Obama is black*, not black. It does answer the question of whether a biracial guy can get votes in white America, though.
What Iowa did not do on the Democratic side is establish a clear frontrunner. Obama took Iowa. Hillary should still take New Hampshire. Edwards is still in the race, holding out for South Carolina and Florida, where stands an excellent chance.
I think Hillary's candidacy is mortally wounded, but we'll see. This is now an Obama-Edwards race. Lord, please let Edwards win the nomination--he'd be the first political figure in my lifetime I actually admired. He'd get us out of Iraq and he'd fuck over the corporations. Obama is an accomodationist; if he wins, it'll be the do-nothing Nineties all over again.
If anything nasty comes out about Obama or he has a meltdown, Edwards wins. If not, then, well, I don't know.
On the Republican side, David Brooks' assertion in today's Times that the GOP will turn to McCain is laughable. McCain is done. Huckabee is the clear and present frontrunner, propelled by anti-Mormon bigotry. Nice party you got there! It is an amazing victory, considering how little money he had to spend, representing the victory of hatred over cash. Romney could and should win New Hampshire, but you never know.
Huckabee may be nice and slim and stuff, but if he wins the presidency we'll look back on George W. Bush and wonder why we didn't appreciate him when we had him. Huckabee is either an idiot, or worse, a fake idiot who pretends to be dumb to pander to idiots.
A person who doesn't believe in Evolution should be barred from holding any public office. Anyone who doesn't believe in Evolution is too stupid to get the French fries into the big basket.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Cartoon for January 3
Readers have been complaining that the cartoons have been hard to read. I'm hoping the problem will be fixed starting with this cartoon.
Today's cartoon responds to the generally respectful tone accorded Mike Huckabee, who does not believe in evolution and is therefore, by definition, a lunatic.
Readers have been complaining that the cartoons have been hard to read. I'm hoping the problem will be fixed starting with this cartoon.
Today's cartoon responds to the generally respectful tone accorded Mike Huckabee, who does not believe in evolution and is therefore, by definition, a lunatic.
Click on the cartoon to make it bigger.
Mensatocracy
The blog Right Wing News has listed me as #1 in its Most Obnoxious Quotes of 2007, or whatever it's called, and the right-wing blogosphere are spreading it around.
The "quote" in question, however, isn't a quote in the sense that it's something I wrote or said in an interview. It's a line from one of my cartoons, which was called "Mensatocracy" (dated October 22, 2007).
Anyway, I received the following email, which is fairly representative of the response I've been getting:
First, this cartoon was a response to and riff upon the cult Mike Judge movie "Idiocracy." The reference to Mike Judge is an indication of that. If you haven't seen "Idiocracy," you're probably not going to understand my cartoon. (And you're missing out on one of the most effective cinematic satires in years.)
That said, I'd like to take this email point by point, because it contains so many common fallacies:
Nobody "needs to go [into the military] for monetary reasons." We all have free will. Right now here in New York, it's 13 degrees outside. There's a homeless guy out in front of my building, shivering like a bastard. He didn't go to Iraq; as far as we know, he didn't kill anyone. If he dies today, he dies innocent of war crimes. He is better off, morally, than anyone willing to shoot someone who has done them no harm for a (small) salary. And seriously: there are other jobs. Work at McDonald's, for God's sake.
And who feels "obligated to go"? What does that mean?
People make choices. No one ever said that one choice would be easy. But one is always better.
Wrong. There is no draft. National Guardsmen volunteered. They signed a blank check to the government that allows it to send them to fight any war, including an illegal and immoral one (which they all have been since 1945). They knew the deal when they signed up.
Fighting for this nation would, indeed, be a noble (or at least morally acceptable) act. Those who fight in Iraq and Afghanistan are actually hurting the United States, making it more vulnerable to terrorism in the future by destroying our international reputation. And only an idiot thinks we have to fight them there so we don't have to fight them here.
The blog Right Wing News has listed me as #1 in its Most Obnoxious Quotes of 2007, or whatever it's called, and the right-wing blogosphere are spreading it around.
The "quote" in question, however, isn't a quote in the sense that it's something I wrote or said in an interview. It's a line from one of my cartoons, which was called "Mensatocracy" (dated October 22, 2007).
Anyway, I received the following email, which is fairly representative of the response I've been getting:
I just want to tell you that I found your comic suggesting that troops were stupid, (http://www.gocomics.com/rallcom/2007/10/22/) and that natural selection will somehow make the US closer to utopia to be bordering on incoherence, tasteless, and utterly offensive. I have no military background; I don't support the war, lest you think this has anything to do with ideology. I urge you to do your research on what sort of people actually go to Iraq. Guess what? They're people who either need to go for monetary reasons, or feel obligated to go [and some are legally obligated to go, which means they have no choice in the matter. See: The National Guard]. You may not feel the compulsion to go fight in the war [and neither do I] but get off your high-horse and realize that just because you think the war is ridiculous or being fought for a bad cause does not in any way invalidate the utterly noble act of fighting for this great nation.
First, this cartoon was a response to and riff upon the cult Mike Judge movie "Idiocracy." The reference to Mike Judge is an indication of that. If you haven't seen "Idiocracy," you're probably not going to understand my cartoon. (And you're missing out on one of the most effective cinematic satires in years.)
That said, I'd like to take this email point by point, because it contains so many common fallacies:
I urge you to do your research on what sort of people actually go to Iraq. Guess what? They're people who either need to go for monetary reasons, or feel obligated to go
Nobody "needs to go [into the military] for monetary reasons." We all have free will. Right now here in New York, it's 13 degrees outside. There's a homeless guy out in front of my building, shivering like a bastard. He didn't go to Iraq; as far as we know, he didn't kill anyone. If he dies today, he dies innocent of war crimes. He is better off, morally, than anyone willing to shoot someone who has done them no harm for a (small) salary. And seriously: there are other jobs. Work at McDonald's, for God's sake.
And who feels "obligated to go"? What does that mean?
People make choices. No one ever said that one choice would be easy. But one is always better.
[and some are legally obligated to go, which means they have no choice in the matter. See: The National Guard].
Wrong. There is no draft. National Guardsmen volunteered. They signed a blank check to the government that allows it to send them to fight any war, including an illegal and immoral one (which they all have been since 1945). They knew the deal when they signed up.
You may not feel the compulsion to go fight in the war [and neither do I] but get off your high-horse and realize that just because you think the war is ridiculous or being fought for a bad cause does not in any way invalidate the utterly noble act of fighting for this great nation.
Fighting for this nation would, indeed, be a noble (or at least morally acceptable) act. Those who fight in Iraq and Afghanistan are actually hurting the United States, making it more vulnerable to terrorism in the future by destroying our international reputation. And only an idiot thinks we have to fight them there so we don't have to fight them here.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
COLUMN: An Iron First in a Velvet Glove
How American Democracy Relies on Fascism
What would you do if you learned that Bush Administration officials wanted to round up thousands of Americans and throw them into concentration camps?
For all we know, there is no slippery slope. It's entirely possible that extraordinary rendition, eliminating habeas corpus, and the torture camps at Guantánamo and elsewhere are exactly what the government says they are--tools for fighting terrorists, not domestic political opponents. But how likely is it?
History is clear: Over and over again, the U.S. government places fascists in powerful positions. Once in office, they exploit wars and national tragedies to roll back hard-won freedoms. They're Democrats as well as Republicans.
As has happened with increasing frequency in recent years, another blockbuster story revealing the anti-democratic impulse within the top echelon of the U.S. government has appeared and vanished overnight. According to Cold War-era files declassified last week, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly advised President Harry Truman to arrest "all individuals potentially dangerous" to national security, jail them in military prisons and try them before kangaroo tribunals that "will not be bound by the rules of evidence."
"For a long period of time the FBI has been accumulating the names, identities and activities of individuals found to be potentially dangerous to the internal security through investigation," Hoover wrote in a 1950 memo. "These names have been compiled in an index, which index has been kept up to date."
Capitalizing on anti-communist hysteria at the start of the Korean War, Hoover asked Truman to preemptively detain 12,000 people, 97 percent of them American citizens, in order to "protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage."
Hoover was a lunatic. Truman ought to have fired him on the spot. Instead, in September 1950 Congress took his advice and passed a law authorizing the detention of "dangerous radicals" if the president declared a national emergency. Truman signed it. In fact, he declared such an emergency three months later. No one knows why, but the president never actually followed through with mass arrests. Hoover's "subversives"--people suspected of left-wing political sympathies--remained free. He was wrong. There were no acts of sabotage.
It wasn't the first time the government went "crazy."
Between 1919 and 1921 the Bureau of Investigation (predecessor of the FBI) carried out the Palmer Raids, named for Alexander Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's attorney general. The BOI rounded up 10,000 lefties, anarchists and foreigners on a list compiled by a young J. Edgar Hoover, then in charge of the Justice Department's General Intelligence Division. Many were tortured. Five hundred fifty were deported.
Palmer's clampdown accomplished nothing. On September 16, 1920, a bomb attributed to anarchists went off on Wall Street, killing 38 people and wounding over 400.
Crazy...like a fox.
During the 1960s and 1970s the CIA--in violation of its charter, which limits the agency to acting overseas--cooperated with local police departments across the country to compile a list of 300,000 Americans and organizations suspected of opposing the Vietnam War.
On April 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive No. 52. Reagan targeted 400,000 people for arrest and confinement at concentration camps in mothballed Army bases. The National Security Council's "secret government within a government," as Congressional investigators later described it, planned to cancel the 1984 presidential election so Reagan could remain in office indefinitely.
"Lt. Col. Oliver North, for example, helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad," The Miami Herald reported on July 5, 1987.
People who hate The People never sleep. In 2006 Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which overturns the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibited the use of combat troops on the soil of the United States. For the first time in 128 years, the president can declare martial law in case of a hurricane, riot or terrorist attack. In May 2007 Bush attached a National Security Presidential and Homeland Directive to the National Defense Authorization Act. In case of a "national emergency"--the president could declare it without consulting anyone--he could suspend the Constitution and appoint an unelected provisional government under a "national continuity coordinator."
To an optimist, America's brushes with fascism seem like comforting evidence that the system works. Despite it all, even taking into account grotesqueries such as the concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II, the First Amendment remains in force. Few Americans feel threatened by government tyranny. Few worry about getting shot by trigger-happy soldiers or being detained in concentration camps (unless they're flood victims in New Orleans).
So why does a democracy need fascist schemes like Reagan's Rex-84 Alpha Explan (a FEMA plan to put American protesters against a planned war against Nicaragua into camps)? Because American democracy is an iron fist in a velvet glove, a glove that's becoming increasingly transparent.
Threats of repression are rarely carried out. They don't need to be.
If potential opponents are afraid, there's little need for concentration camps. The threat of repression (and actual crackdowns, explained away as exceptional excesses and brushed off with a token apology) creates a chilling effect on people who might pick up a rock instead of a sign.
A dog doesn't have to bite everyone every day to earn a fearsome reputation. Mount cameras all over the place, and you don't need to have anyone actually watching on the other side.
In a country whose legal framework authorizes the government to kidnap, torture and murder them, opponents of U.S. policy must decide whether getting out of line--anything from a letter to the editor to direct action--is worth the risk of getting kidnapped, tortured and murdered.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
How American Democracy Relies on Fascism
What would you do if you learned that Bush Administration officials wanted to round up thousands of Americans and throw them into concentration camps?
For all we know, there is no slippery slope. It's entirely possible that extraordinary rendition, eliminating habeas corpus, and the torture camps at Guantánamo and elsewhere are exactly what the government says they are--tools for fighting terrorists, not domestic political opponents. But how likely is it?
History is clear: Over and over again, the U.S. government places fascists in powerful positions. Once in office, they exploit wars and national tragedies to roll back hard-won freedoms. They're Democrats as well as Republicans.
As has happened with increasing frequency in recent years, another blockbuster story revealing the anti-democratic impulse within the top echelon of the U.S. government has appeared and vanished overnight. According to Cold War-era files declassified last week, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover repeatedly advised President Harry Truman to arrest "all individuals potentially dangerous" to national security, jail them in military prisons and try them before kangaroo tribunals that "will not be bound by the rules of evidence."
"For a long period of time the FBI has been accumulating the names, identities and activities of individuals found to be potentially dangerous to the internal security through investigation," Hoover wrote in a 1950 memo. "These names have been compiled in an index, which index has been kept up to date."
Capitalizing on anti-communist hysteria at the start of the Korean War, Hoover asked Truman to preemptively detain 12,000 people, 97 percent of them American citizens, in order to "protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage."
Hoover was a lunatic. Truman ought to have fired him on the spot. Instead, in September 1950 Congress took his advice and passed a law authorizing the detention of "dangerous radicals" if the president declared a national emergency. Truman signed it. In fact, he declared such an emergency three months later. No one knows why, but the president never actually followed through with mass arrests. Hoover's "subversives"--people suspected of left-wing political sympathies--remained free. He was wrong. There were no acts of sabotage.
It wasn't the first time the government went "crazy."
Between 1919 and 1921 the Bureau of Investigation (predecessor of the FBI) carried out the Palmer Raids, named for Alexander Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's attorney general. The BOI rounded up 10,000 lefties, anarchists and foreigners on a list compiled by a young J. Edgar Hoover, then in charge of the Justice Department's General Intelligence Division. Many were tortured. Five hundred fifty were deported.
Palmer's clampdown accomplished nothing. On September 16, 1920, a bomb attributed to anarchists went off on Wall Street, killing 38 people and wounding over 400.
Crazy...like a fox.
During the 1960s and 1970s the CIA--in violation of its charter, which limits the agency to acting overseas--cooperated with local police departments across the country to compile a list of 300,000 Americans and organizations suspected of opposing the Vietnam War.
On April 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive No. 52. Reagan targeted 400,000 people for arrest and confinement at concentration camps in mothballed Army bases. The National Security Council's "secret government within a government," as Congressional investigators later described it, planned to cancel the 1984 presidential election so Reagan could remain in office indefinitely.
"Lt. Col. Oliver North, for example, helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad," The Miami Herald reported on July 5, 1987.
People who hate The People never sleep. In 2006 Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which overturns the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibited the use of combat troops on the soil of the United States. For the first time in 128 years, the president can declare martial law in case of a hurricane, riot or terrorist attack. In May 2007 Bush attached a National Security Presidential and Homeland Directive to the National Defense Authorization Act. In case of a "national emergency"--the president could declare it without consulting anyone--he could suspend the Constitution and appoint an unelected provisional government under a "national continuity coordinator."
To an optimist, America's brushes with fascism seem like comforting evidence that the system works. Despite it all, even taking into account grotesqueries such as the concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II, the First Amendment remains in force. Few Americans feel threatened by government tyranny. Few worry about getting shot by trigger-happy soldiers or being detained in concentration camps (unless they're flood victims in New Orleans).
So why does a democracy need fascist schemes like Reagan's Rex-84 Alpha Explan (a FEMA plan to put American protesters against a planned war against Nicaragua into camps)? Because American democracy is an iron fist in a velvet glove, a glove that's becoming increasingly transparent.
Threats of repression are rarely carried out. They don't need to be.
If potential opponents are afraid, there's little need for concentration camps. The threat of repression (and actual crackdowns, explained away as exceptional excesses and brushed off with a token apology) creates a chilling effect on people who might pick up a rock instead of a sign.
A dog doesn't have to bite everyone every day to earn a fearsome reputation. Mount cameras all over the place, and you don't need to have anyone actually watching on the other side.
In a country whose legal framework authorizes the government to kidnap, torture and murder them, opponents of U.S. policy must decide whether getting out of line--anything from a letter to the editor to direct action--is worth the risk of getting kidnapped, tortured and murdered.
COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL
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