SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Guns of August

Why Won't Obama Stand Up For Himself?

No wonder President Obama won't stand up for us. He won't even defend his personal safety!

Two weeks ago, a right-wing man protested outside the president's healthcare meeting in New Hampshire wearing a gun strapped to his leg. Lest we miss his point, he carried a sign that called for the shedding of blood in a new revolution.

A week later, a dozen men appeared outside Obama's appearance in Phoenix brandishing loaded guns. "We will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote," said one, who carried an AR-15 military-style automatic rifle. You read that right—they threatened to use guns to annul the results of the last election.

Cops stood by and watched. The Secret Service did nothing. Strictly speaking, these mooks are allowed to openly carry guns. Which is fine with me. I'm a big fan of the Second Amendment.

It is, however, horrifying to watch goons threaten to assassinate the President of the United States and get away with it. Make no mistake: guns don't have anything to do with healthcare. This is a revival of Klannism. A black man is president, and the good ol' boys don't like it. That's what this is about: putting him in his place. Which, if they or someone they inspire has their way, will be six feet under.

God. The smirks those turds wear! Run a Google Image search on "Klansmen" or "lynching." Same ones.

(Doubt this is about race? Bill Clinton's 1993 healthcare proposal would have gone farther than Obama's. And he wasn't nearly as popular. Yet he didn't face gun-toting loons at his public appearances.)

John Lott of Fox News says the liberal media is making a big deal out of nothing. "A story about an American with a gun who behaved properly is twisted into something else: a narrative about crazy conservatives who want to threaten the president," he argues, too clever by half. But the right-wing media doesn't even try to explain what place guns have in the healthcare debate. These are crazy conservatives who want to threaten the president.

Obamaites' reactions have been breathtakingly blazé. "There are laws that govern firearms that are done state or locally," Press Secretary Robert Gibbs replied to a reporter's question about the gunmen stalking his boss. "Those laws don't change when the president comes to your state or locality."

Federal laws do change. Kody Ray Brittingham, who faces five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 under Title 18, Section 871 of the United States Code for threatening Obama—thinks a lot about that fact nowadays. "We take all threats against the President and other high officials of the United States very seriously," said the U.S. attorney prosecuting the case against the 20-year-old soldier, who said he planned to shoot Obama—but never made any move to do so. "The threat itself represents a disruption of the United States Government, even if no actual attempt is made to carry out the threat."

That was just six months ago.

Why doesn't the Obama Administration want the gunmen taken in for questioning and investigated? He wouldn't even have to file charges. Habeas corpus is gone, eliminated by Bush. Obama's "indefinite detention" continues Bush's policy. These town hall terrorists could be declared enemy combatants and bundled off to Bagram with the stroke of a pen. If ever there were a reason for suspending civil rights, this is it.

Perhaps Obama's team doesn't think gunmen a block or two away from a Secret Service perimeter is a big deal. Maybe the White House has made a political call: better to gamble the life of the president than to risk antagonizing the gun lobby.

They should rethink.

Arthur Schlesinger's classic book "A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House" describes how an atmosphere of violence can contribute to the death of a president:

In late October 1963, former vice presidential candidate and then U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Adlai Stevenson "had gone to Dallas for a meeting…The next day handbills with photographs of the President of the United States—full-face an profile—were scattered around Dallas: 'WANTED FOR TREASON. THIS MAN is wanted for treasonous activities against the United States,' followed by a scurrilous bill of particulars."

What follows reads like last week's news reports about town hall meetings on healthcare: "That evening…While Adlai spoke, there was hooting and heckling, placards and flags were waved, and noisemakers set off. When the police removed one of the agitators from the hall, Stevenson, with customary poise, said, 'For my part, I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.' At the close he walked through a jostling crowd of pickets to his car. A woman screamed at him, and he stopped for a moment to calm her down. The mob closed in on him. Another woman crashed a sign down on his head. A man spat at him."

Schlesinger didn't claim that JFK was killed by a right-wing anti-U.N. protester. Instead, he wrote, "The fundamentalist religious background of many of its inhabitants had instilled a self-righteous absolutism of thought…[Dallas] was a city of violence and hysteria, and its atmosphere was bound to affect people who were already weak, suggestible, and themselves filled with chaos and hate."

Four weeks later, a weak-minded, eminently suggestible man shot President Kennedy to death.

"Supporters of the Second Amendment ought to find another way to send their message," editorialized The Washington Post. It was a typical, reasoned, pointless stance. But it's too late now to call for common sense and self-control. Now that extreme right racists have made a splash, they're only going to double down.

Obama's approach may be a brave one, but it's not his to take. As a recent headline put it, the presidency belongs to all of us. Like JFK, Obama's assassination would lead to a host of tragic consequences, not least in the area of race relations. And what about the more likely danger, a repeat of the Greensboro massacre, when right-wing thugs shot leftists at a rally?

Existing gun laws weren't written with death threats to public officials in mind. Anyone who shows up armed at a forum where a public official or political candidate is due to appear ought to be detained—and possibly prosecuted.

(Ted Rall, President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, is author of the books "To Afghanistan and Back" and "Silk Road to Ruin.")

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for August 17, 2009

Still waiting for Obama to help? Keep waiting.

Cartoon for August 1, 2009

Will we ever see a moment like this again? It's the second that changed everything.

New Animated Cartoon: Googling While America Burns"

Treasury Czar Lawrence Summers told Congress he could tell America was recovering because Google searches for terms like "total economic collapse" had fallen in number. I couldn't resist doing an animated cartoon about this. So here's the latest from me and David Essman.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Heckuva Job, Barry

Obama, Losing Jobs, Soon to Be Shovel-Ready

Pro-Obama political cartoonists have drawn variations of the same cartoon: the president, in the role of badgered parent on a family trip, is driving a car labeled "The Economy." The American public, depicted as Uncle Sam or Joe Average, whines: "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?"

With official unemployment approaching 10 percent and underemployment at 16.5 percent, Americans are running out of money—and patience. Obama's approval ratings are down between 15 and 20 points, meaning that he has lost one in six Americans. His biggest weakness: the economy.

"I think the public knows three things: We inherited a total mess; we're working hard on it; and we're not going to get out of it overnight," says Chief White House propagandist Rahm Emanuel. That part is true.

The trouble for Obama is that people don't see any light at the end of the tunnel. "The key to what this year is about is rescuing the economy from falling off the cliff and trying to put in place the building blocks of recovery"—i.e., bailing out the banks, insurers and automakers, says Emanuel. That's what 2009 has been about for Obama. But for ordinary Americans, 2009 is about keeping or finding a job.

Creating jobs, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be an Obama Administration priority.

Were the bailouts necessary? Economists won't know for years. What we do know is that the Administration's approach won't give the American people what they want and need more than anything else: jobs.

What's the point of being patient? Even Obama admits help isn't on the way.

Obama's plan is Reaganomics redux. Give trillions of dollars to big corporations, he argues, and they'll use it to capitalize new ventures, hire workers, and unclog the credit markets. Eventually. "We must let it work the way it's supposed to, with the understanding that in any recession, unemployment tends to recover more slowly than other measures of economic activity," he says.

But even Obama admits it won't unfold "the way it's supposed to."

Obama says his plan "was not designed to work in four months. It was designed to work over two years." But if current trends continue, if everything goes the way he hopes, it will never work. We will have lost 14 million jobs by 2010. That would leave us up 4 million at most—a net loss of 10 million. That's a disaster.

And that's why Joe Public is so antsy. "Are we there yet?" isn't the right question. People think: "We can see how this is going to end: we'll be upside down in a ditch, plucking safety glass from our scalps."

Obama's approach won't work economically, and it won't work politically. Setting bailouts aside, what the United States needs right now—what it needed over a year ago—was a ginormous federal jobs program.

What happened to the infrastructure construction projects, like high-speed rail, that attracted so much enthusiasm during the campaign? Right-wing economic czar Lawrence Summers and a bunch of wimpy Democrats trashed them. "Transportation spending was gutted by Republicans who insisted on more tax cuts—none of whom voted for the measure anyway—and by Obama advisers who shifted priorities to advance policy goals," reported the AP.

Earlier this year the American Society of Civil Engineers said the nation's long-neglected highways, bridges and tunnels require $2,200 billion in repairs just to get them up to basic safety code—not including high-speed rail. Obama's stimulus plan included a mere $42 billion (less than two percent). Rail got $2 billion out of a needed $25 billion. Unless Obama does something soon, nothing is going to get built and unemployment will continue to soar.

Now that Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs are reporting record profits, it's time to "claw back" the bailouts, pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and direct federal dollars where we need them most: jobs. Give tax breaks to employers who add new workers, direct federal agencies to grow in size, and create zero-interest lending programs to laid-off would-be entrepreneurs. And let's build some friggin' infrastructure. Every $1 spent on infrastructure generates a $1.59 payback in the form of increased tax revenues—and creates a lasting legacy.

Speaking of cartoons, the Treasury Department's Bureau of Public Debt recently came under fire for trying to hire a cartoonist to "discuss the power of humor in the workplace [and] the close relationship between humor and stress." A Democratic Senator nixed the idea.

Too bad: at least Obama could have taken credit for creating one job.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for July 9, 2009

Obama invited gays to the White House, but still treats them like second-class citizens.

ANIMATION: The Asterisk president

I think this one is the best ever. It's a riff on the static cartoon I did recently. What do you think?

Cartoon for June 6, 2009

Be patient. We got nothing but time...

Cartoon for May 28, 2009

I owe this one to one of the commenters here at the Rallblog. He pointed out that Obama prefers to punish people who haven't committed crimes over those who already have. Such a hilarious observation! I hope my cartoon is worthy of it.

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: Excuses You Might Believe In

Democrats Are More Powerful Than Ever. How Will They Justify Doing Nothing?

The defection of Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter and the imminent certification of Al Franken as the winner of Minnesota's election recount has handed Democrats what they always said they lacked in order to pass a progressive agenda: a filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate. Now they face the awful problem of coming up with new excuses for not doing anything.

How will Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and other fake liberals weasel out of making good on their promises for real action on healthcare, the economy and the war? It won't be easy. They control both houses of Congress and the White House. Obama is about to fill a new vacancy on the Supreme Court. The Times of London writes that "Mr. Obama, by some assessments, has more political leverage than any president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1937"—at the peak of the New Deal, just before he overreached by trying to pack the Supreme Court.

The Republican Party, on the other hand, is suffering a crisis of faith—too much God-cheering and not enough adherence to core values like small government, fiscal conservatism, isolationism and protectionist trade policy. A mere 21 percent of Americans still call themselves Republicans, the lowest number since 1983. Similarly, reports the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, "just 21 percent say they're confident in the Republicans in Congress 'to make the right decisions for the country's future,' compared with 60 percent who express that confidence in Obama."

Democrats have never been as powerful. Republicans are weak. Obama won with a decisive, sweeping rejection of the Republican status quo. Harry and Louise, call your agents—socialized medicine is on the way! Not.

Be careful what you wish for—what you say you wish for, anyway. "The left is going to push Obama—now that he's got a veto-proof majority—to drive an agenda that a smart president would realize is a long-term political disaster," GOP pollster Rick Wilson tells ABC. "Long-term political disaster" is mainstream media code for "stuff that corporations hate."

Well, yes. What passes for the left in this country (center-right everywhere else, because they read) now has some not-unreasonable questions for Barack Obama. Such as:

Pretty please, can we now live in a country where people don't have to spend $800 a month to health insurance companies that deny their customers' claims?

Why are we still in Iraq?

How about some help for the victims of Katrina, many of whom never collected one red cent after losing everything?

Why are we paying billions to banks and still letting them gouge us with 25 interest credit card rates? Speaking of which:

How about doing something that might actually help people who live in the economy, rather than just capital markets?

These queries seem all the more relevant coming, as they do, from the liberal base of the Democratic party—the people who got Obama elected.

The trouble for our cute, charming prez is that he has no intention whatsoever of introducing a true national healthcare plan: one that covers everybody for free. He wants to expand the war in Afghanistan and drag out the one against Iraq. He will not punish Bush or his torturers, rescue homeowners in foreclosure, or nail scumbag banks to the wall. These changes would cost trillions of dollars to multinational insurance companies, defense contractors and other huge financial concerns who donate generously to candidates of both political parties and have a history of using their clout to manipulate elections in favor of their favorite candidates. A classic example is oil companies, who push down gas prices before elections in order to help Republicans.

The most that Democratic voters can expect from Democratic politicians is incremental, symbolic change that doesn't cost their corporate sponsors any serious coin. The New York Times marked Obama's 100th day in office with an editorial that approvingly encapsulated his accomplishments to date: "He is trying to rebuild this country's shattered reputation with his pledge to shut down the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, his offer to talk with Iran and Syria, and, yes, that handshake with Venezuela's blow-hard president, Hugo Chávez…The government is promoting women's reproductive rights. It is restoring regulations to keep water clean and food safe. The White House has promised to tackle immigration reform this year."

Trying. Promoting. Has promised.

Guantánamo isn't being closed; it's being moved. Gitmo's detainees will be transferred to a new harsher gulag under construction in Afghanistan. Thawed relations with Iran and Syria would create new business opportunities for big oil. Defending the right to an abortion is popular and doesn't cost Bank of America a dime. Immigration reform is code for legalizing illegal immigrants, not closing the border. Safety regulations reassure consumers and pump up the economy. Closing the border would raise wages. Corporations won't allow that.

Unfortunately for Obama's Democrats, small-bore initiatives only go so far, especially with the economy in meltdown. When people are desperate and angry they don't care as much about flag-burning or creationism or a handshake with Hugo Chávez. They want action—real action.

How will the Democrats avoid genuine change now that they enjoy the ability to enact it? Will they blame obstructionist Republicans? Will Democrats cross the aisle to vote with the Republicans? A new war, perhaps?

If nothing else, whatever dog-ate-my-homework excuse they come up with for sitting on their butts is bound to be amusing. If nothing else.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: One Nation, Two Systems of Justice

Why Bush Must Go to Prison

Do you believe in "intelligent design"? It's the argument that the universe is so logical that it must have been planned out by a master creator. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, single-handedly disproves the existence of such a God.

Friedman is the nation's most prominent opinion writer. He wins journalistic prizes. Audiences shell out big bucks to hear him speak. Book collections of his columns become bestsellers for months on end. Yet the dude can't write. I'm not talking about his opinions. Friedman doesn't know how to arrange nouns and verbs in a way that is pleasing to readers of the English language. He is to writing what George W. Bush is to oratory.

Stranger still is Friedman's role as über barometer of conventional wisdom. When Congress, media tastemakers and thus most Americans bought into Bush's Saddam-has-WMDs story, Friedman did too. When the Iraq War started to go wrong but officially acceptable opinion wanted to stay and "finish the job," so did he. When everyone threw up their hands in disgust, Friedman was there with them.

Of course, he was wrong. He's always wrong. But he's always in perfect sync with conventional wisdom--which is almost always wrong.

Friedman's prose appears to have barely survived the linguistic equivalent of a harsh interrogation technique: "Because that is when Al Qaeda's remnants will try to throw a Hail Mary pass--that is, try to set off a bomb in a U.S. city--to obscure its defeat by moderate Arabs and Muslims in the heart of its world." Did he get this sports metaphor from some think tank neocon, or was he lame enough to make it up himself? Whether he leads or follows the average mean of the mainstream, Friedman's role as the nation's ultimate bellwether is what makes him worth reading.

Which is why it's so disquieting to read Friedman support of Obama's refusal to prosecute torturers. Times Tom may be a fool. His logic is certainly hopeless. But the people who matter--Congress, editors and producers at the big papers and broadcast networks and thus most of the public--agree with him.

Seven years after accounts of torture by American soldiers and CIA operatives first became public, the revelation that one detainee had been waterboarded 183 times in a single month has sticken a Katrina-like nerve. Conventional, mainstream, average, generic U.S. public opinion wants something done about it--an investigation, maybe prosecution of a few of the attorneys who authored the Torture Memos--but nothing close to genuine accountability. Friedman's April 29th column reflects this internal conflict:

"Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has testified to Congress that more than 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, with up to 27 percent of these declared homicides by the military. They were allegedly kicked to death, shot, suffocated or drowned. Look, our people killed detainees [Friedman's emphasis], and only a handful of those deaths have resulted in any punishment of U.S. officials."

By Friedman's math, the military admits to the torture-murders of 27 people. He's low-balling. He doesn't include detainees murdered by the military in other places like Guantánamo or the Navy's fleet of prison ships, killed by the CIA at secret prisons, or slaughtered by foreign torturers after being "extraordinarily renditioned" by the U.S. Even so, 27 is a lot. No one would suggest letting a serial killer off the hook for 27 torture-murders.

Friedman does. "The president's decision to expose but not prosecute those responsible," he writes, is justified. Why? Because "justice taken to its logical end here would likely require bringing George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials to trial, which would rip our country apart."

"Rip our country apart." Wow.

Granting prosecutorial immunity to war criminals like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell is already "tearing the country apart."

First and foremost, it confirms many people's suspicion that there are two systems of justice in America: one for the rich and powerful and another for you and me. If I kidnap a man and hold him overnight, I face the death penalty or life in prison. Bush and his top officials ordered the kidnapping of tens of thousands of men as young as 12 years of age, the torture of thousands and the murder of hundreds. Until America's official mass murderers are treated as harshly as its freelance psychos, Americans will view their justice system as something to be feared rather than respected.

Not only does extending executive privilege into retirement--and not even conservatives think there's a legal basis for this--encourage lawless behavior by current and future political leaders, it feeds partisanship. Republicans impeached Bill Clinton for lying about a BJ. He was also disbarred (and rightly so). Nixon, on the other hand, resigned before being impeached and never faced a jury. If Bush and his minions get away with murder, does that mean that only Democrats are subject to the rule of law?

If the officials who ordered torture, the legislators who let it happen, the lawyers who justified it and the men and women who carried it out are not held accountable, the message will not be--as Obama seems to believe-that the Bush years represented some weird aberration in American history. Obama will be telling the world that the 2008 election changed nothing, that legal illegality could return at the drop of a hat (or the detonation of a dirty bomb), that his Administration protects the criminals and thus endorses their crimes. Millions of Americans, many of whom voted for him, already feel alienated from a country that expresses values that it doesn't live up to. Refusing to prosecute Bush deepens their cynicism.

Cynicism, Mssrs. Friedman and Obama, is what's ripping the guts out of America every second of every day. Only consistent and fair application of the law can begin the healing.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for April 16, 2009

The quote comes from the Washington Post. While this war criminal cozies up with the neighbors, Obama gets kudos for ordering the shootings of three Somali pirates. Charming.

Cartoon for April 6, 2009

With Obama's various plans, the devil isn't in the details.
There are no details.

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: What Obama and Hitler Have in Common

Broke and on a Losing Streak, Obama Doubles Down

Contrary to myth, the Nazis weren't crazy. But during the winter of 1944-45, with the Allied and Soviet armies closing in on Berlin, German leaders made an insane decision. Instead of doing whatever they could to hold out as long as possible, they sped up the Holocaust.

The Nazis' policy of accelerated genocide deprived the war effort of increasingly precious resources. Soldiers and paramilitaries were pulled back from the battlefront in order to arrest and guard ever-increasing numbers of Jews and other "enemies of the state." As battle after battle was lost, trains assigned to transport reinforcement troops were reassigned to ship the regime's victims to the death camps.

Killing Jews was the Nazis' top priority. It came ahead of everything else--even their own lives. Total madness.

But who are we to judge? Here we are 64 years later, doing the same thing. The U.S. is locked in a last-ditch struggle for survival, and the U.S. government is diverting vital resources to its own top priority: killing Muslims.

President Obama and the Democrats always asserted that Afghanistan was the "good war"--the one thing George W. Bush did right before he "took his eye off the ball" by invading Iraq. Not me. I realized that the invasion and subsequent occupation were doomed from the start. My Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment came while watching Afghan villagers sobbing outside a house being searched by U.S. troops. "The Russians never violated our homes," an old man told me. As in many societies descended from nomads, Afghan culture dictates that a man's home is truly his castle. "Even when they came to kill you, the Taliban knocked on the door and waited for you come out. They didn't touch your wife or daughter. They never came inside. Never."

I stared at the house's front door, smashed and splintered after having been kicked in, and thought: They'll never forgive us. Women were shrieking inside the house. The soldiers yelled at them: "Shut the f--- up!" At least they did it in English, so they couldn't understand. Hearts and minds.

I went to my rented room and filed a story with the headline: "How We Lost Afghanistan." It was December 11, 2001.

Bush spent the following seven years sending more and more troops to Afghanistan: 8,000 at first, then 18,000, then 30,000. Afghan resistance fighters killed more and more of them. It became more dangerous to serve a tour of duty in America's "forgotten war" than in Iraq. The more the size of the U.S. occupation force increased, street-level violence, warlordism and opium poppy cultivation spiraled out of control.

Chaos doesn't come cheap. It costs $390,000 to sustain one American soldier overseas for one year.

Now Obama is "doubling down" on a "new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy," reported The Washington Post. "Along with the 17,000 additional combat troops authorized last month, Obama said he will send at least 4,000 more this fall…" There were 38,000 when Obama took office. Soon there will be 55,000. By early next year, at least 70,000. Thousands of more will be moved from Iraq to Afghanistan. There have been few protests. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, we must be out of our collective minds.

I stand nearly alone in my long-running criticism of the Afghan war. But even if you disagree with my pessimistic assessment of the foreign policy repercussions of the "good war," surely we can find common ground on the economic front.

The U.S. is broke. One cause is the $3 trillion we've already wasted on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. (With compound interest, that debt comes to over $10 trillion--or a dozen $700 billion Wall Street bailouts.) In a move that echoes Hitler's misdirected obsessiveness, Obama is about to waste even more money we don't have. According to the Pentagon's notoriously rosy projections, Obama's "Afghan surge" will increase the cost of that misbegotten quagmire (remember when right-wing pundits ridiculed those of us who used the Q-word to describe Afghanistan?) by 60 percent, up from the current $2 billion a month.

Millions are losing their jobs and their homes. Is this best the possible use of our federal taxdollars?

Obama says his war aims in Afghanistan are to fight insurgents, "train Afghan Security Forces," improve the Afghan economy and reduce opium production. Of course, some of these goals are self-actualizing. If the U.S. withdrew, there wouldn't be any insurgents. And Afghanistan wouldn't need so many more security forces to keep order.

As for the Afghan economy and narcotics, Obama doesn't stand a chance. "We're pretty good about getting rid of old governments, but not really good at building new ones. I don't think any other country has that skill, either," said Gordon Adams, professor of foreign policy at American University and former Clintonista. "We can burn millions of dollars and lose thousands of American lives pretending we know how--but we don't know how."

And anyway: so what? As the real unemployment rate in the U.S. surpasses 20 percent and we sail off the cliff of fiscal oblivion, how can Obama justify spending hundreds of billions dollars more? To reduce unemployment in Afghan cities (while increasing it in the countryside, which depends on opium farming)? Even if Obama meets his metrics in Afghanistan, what's in it for us?

In this Depression there's still one gig with high job security: write a column for The New York Times that repeatedly gets everything wrong. Columnist David Brooks, one of the Dying Grey Lady's resident neocons, agrees with Obama that seven years of bombing wedding parties isn't enough. "This energetic and ambitious [Afghan troop surge] amid economic crisis and war weariness--says something profound about America's DNA," says he.

Maybe it does. Seventeen percent of Americans have German roots, more than any other ancestry group.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: Change You Can Parse

Obama Abandons Bush's Talk, Keeps His Walk

You can't blame Dick Cheney for being annoyed at Barack Obama. Obama is closing Guantánamo. He's ordering the CIA to interrogate prisoners according to the rules written in the Army Field Manual, which doesn't allow torture. He's even phasing out such classic Bushian phrases as "enemy combatant" and "war on terror."

But the dark prince of neoconservatism should relax. Obama's inaugural address may have promised to "reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals," but—in all the ways that matter—he's keeping all of Bush's outrageous policies in place. Sure, he talks a good game about "moving forward." But nothing has really changed. From reading your e-mails to asserting the right to assassinate American citizens to bailing out companies whose executives pay themselves big bonuses, Obama's changes are nothing but toothless rhetoric.

Closing Gitmo, reported The New York Times, was merely "a move that seemed intended to symbolically separate the new administration from Bush detention policies. But in a much anticipated court filing, the Justice Department argued that the president has the authority to detain terrorism suspects there without criminal charges, much as the Bush administration had asserted. It provided a broad definition of those who can be held, which was not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration."

What will happen to the 241 POWs still at Gitmo? They won't be called "enemy combatants" anymore but most won't be going home. "The filing signaled that, as long as Guantánamo remains open, the new Administration will aggressively defend its ability to hold some detainees there," wrote the Times. Where will they go after that?

Welcome to Gitmo II—courtesy of Barack Obama.

Countless victims have been tortured by U.S. military personnel at Bagram, the U.S. airbase in Afghanistan where Bush imprisoned 600 people without charges. Some were murdered in the camp's notorious "salt pit." "Even children have not been spared," says Amnesty International.

Now Bagram is being expanded—nearly doubled in size—in order to accommodate 200-plus detainees from Gitmo, as well as future POWs from Obama's expanded war against Afghanistan. As bad as Guantánamo was, conditions at Bagram are worse.

Unless you believe indefinite detention without due process to be torture, Obama says his detainees won't be tortured. Mostly. Probably. Maybe. The Washington Post quotes an Administration insider as saying that the CIA will enjoy "more leeway" than the Army Field Manual allows, in order to "take into account the differences between battlefield interrogations and those aimed at eliciting intelligence about terrorist groups and their plans."

Extraordinary renditions, the Times reports in a different article, will continue under Obama. "In little-noticed confirmation testimony recently," says the paper, "Obama nominees endorsed continuing the CIA's program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights, and indefinitely detaining terrorism suspects without trials even if they were arrested far from a war zone."

During the 2008 campaign Obama's critics accused him of saying nothing, albeit beautifully. Now that we've gotten to know him a bit, it's time to refine that assessment: He's just a weasel. An eloquent weasel. But a weasel who says the right things while doing the opposite.

On March 9th Obama ordered federal agencies to suspend Bush's infamous "signing statements," sneaky documents issued after the signing of a bill that ordered government agencies not to enforce the very same bill he'd just approved in front of the cameras. Signing statements, says the American Bar Association, use one-man dictatorial rule to negate the people's will as expressed by Congress and are thus "contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional separation of powers."

"Yet two days later—literally—Obama signed a $410 billion spending bill and appended to it a signing statement claiming that he had the Constitutional authority to ignore several of its oversight provisions," writes Glenn Greenwald of Slate.

Greenwald regrets having to quote the vile Rich Lowry of the right-wing National Review magazine. So do I. But even the right is right sometimes:

"Barack Obama has perfected a three-step maneuver that could never even be attempted by a politician lacking his rhetorical skill or cool cynicism. First: Denounce your presidential predecessor for a given policy, energizing your party's base and capitalizing on his abiding unpopularity. Second: Pretend to have reversed that policy upon taking office with a symbolic act or high-profile statement. Third: Adopt a version of that same policy, knowing that it's the only way to govern responsibly or believing that doing otherwise is too difficult."

This week's example is Obama's grandstanding over $165 million in bonuses paid to executives of American International Group (AIG), which received billions in federal bailout money. He feigned outrage: "How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat?" But his Treasury Department knew about the bonuses—which amount to roughly 55 cents per American—ages ago. He also knows there isn't much the government can do legally to claw the money back.

Unlike the word count limit of this column, Obama's perfidy knows no limits. He's already become more dangerous to democracy and basic human rights than George W. Bush. Unlike Bush, he has no political opposition. Cheney may nitpick, but most Republicans are happy to see Bush's policies remain in place. Meanwhile, liberals remain loyal, silent, and tacitly pro-torture.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for March 2, 2009

This came out of a conversation with fellow editorial cartoonist Matt Bors. What if Obama were succeeding Hitler? Would he let him off the hook for his crimes too? The parallels are eerie.

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: CEO-Bashing for Fun and Profit

Obama, Media Grandstand on Executive Pay

SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS--On July 14, 1789 an angry mob invaded Paris' Bastille prison, igniting a chain of events that became the French Revolution. The insurgents may have been provoked by a prisoner, the notorious Marquis de Sade. "They are killing the prisoners here!" he shouted to the crowd two weeks earlier, on July 2nd. The authorities moved him to another prison before the 14th.

The storming of the Bastille was pretty much a BS event. There were only seven prisoners for the revolutionaries to liberate, several of whom were living lives of considerable ease in fully furnished cells with servants. Yet the Bastille remains a symbol of monarchist oppression smashed by righteous people seeking freedom and equality. Sometimes empty symbolism means a lot.

Not so much here or now. Revolution doesn't seem imminent in Obamaland, where polls show people pro-Bama despite losing their jobs, and a government bailout for everyone and everything except the people and institutions who actually need help. But revolution's second cousin--symbolic scapegoating--is all around, like love in the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song minus the beret toss.

"In 1980, according to a Forbes magazine study, executive compensation was 40 times the average worker's pay; by 2007, that had soared to more than 400 times," CBS News reported on February 25th. Now that the companies those ridiculously compensated executives were charged with running are tanking, CEO pay is coming under attack by pundits and politicians.

President Obama won headlines and plaudits for a $500,000 income cap on top corporate executives--an idea that I and other progressives have been promoting for ages (and that was derisively dismissed as socialism before the U.S. began sliding into oblivion in September). As with the Bastille, however, there's a lot more symbolism than substance here.

First, the $500,000 cap doesn't cover 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies--only those receiving federal bailout cash. Firms like Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and AIG, which got the first round of TARP moolah, won't be affected. Only a handful of companies would be covered, and even they'll escape the restriction. First, most CEOs receive relatively low salaries anyway. Most CEO compensation comes in the form of bonuses and stock options, which aren't subject to Obama's cap. And even the income cap cab can easily be evaded; CEOs simply have to notify company shareholders.
That's not all. "[Obama's income cap] excludes the midlevel execs who also received some of those Wall Street bonuses and who in many cases made the risky bets that sparked the crisis," reports The Politico.com. There are more loopholes, so many you could drive a gold-plated Hummer through it if you could afford the gas, but you get the idea.

"America needs to understand that this is cosmetic, that this is to appease taxpayer ire," says "Naked Capitalism" blogger Yves Smith, who has worked on Wall Street for 25 years. But that would be true even if Obama's cap were real and applied to every CEO in America.

Universally blamed for the fiscal meltdown, Wall Street investment bankers are under fire for taking in billions in bonuses in 2008, a.k.a. The Year America Died. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate banking committee, grandstanded thusly, vowing to use "every possible legal means to recoup the $18.4 billion in Wall Street bonuses." Vice President Joe Biden said: "I'd like to throw these guys in the brig."

Of course, nothing of the sort will happen. The bankers will keep their bonuses; they won't be checking into the Greybar Hotel any time soon.

What's gotten lost in the populist uprising is why seven-digit CEO salaries were worth talking about in the first place. They're a symbol and litmus test of a bigger problem, skyrocketing income inequality, that has gotten worse and worse since the late 1960s. As the rich have grown richer--not just rich CEOs, but everyone in the top one to five percent of income earners--the poor, and especially the middle class, have become poorer and poorer.

The overall social problem of rising income inequality is at the root of our current economic ills. If corporations had paid the vast majority of workers the raises they deserved over the past 40 years, raises commensurate with increases in efficiency and productivity, people would have saved more and borrowed less. The real estate and credit bubbles wouldn't have grown as big. When they burst, people would have had resources to fall back upon. We are broke, unemployed, and maxed out--not because we bought too much stuff, but because our bosses paid themselves instead of us.

CEO and executive compensation in general aren't the problem, or even the cause of the problem. They are symptoms of a malady inherent in the capitalist system: the tendency of those who gain an early advantage to monopolize assets and aggregate wealth and influence at the expense of everyone else. You can see it when you play the board game "Monopoly." More times than not, whoever gets an early lead wins.

It isn't just CEOs. It's millions of Americans at the top of the income scale, many of whom consider themselves middle class. Because they earned too much, others earned too little.

Insulting CEOs (while letting them keep their perquisites) may be fun. But it doesn't begin to address what's killing the U.S. economy: the rancid notion that one person's hard day's work deserves more pay than another's.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for February 21, 2009

Liberal bloggers and pundits say they're taking a breather after eight years of Bush. After all, everything's perfect now!

Cartoon for February 14, 2009

Obama's bailout plan helps the corporations who caused the economic mess, and not one of their victims.

Cartoon for February 2, 2009

Incredibly, mass murderer and mass torturer George W. Bush remains at large. Justice, apparently, is not something Obama cares about.

Cartoon for January 31, 2009

Radical problems call for radical solutions. Sadly, Obama is obsessed with the centrists who've gotten everything wrong every single time.

Cartoon for January 29, 2009

Obama likes to read up on the Civil War. Compared to Bush, it's nice to see someone who likes to read. Based on his cluelessness about Afghanistan, however, he needs to expand his reading list.

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hopelessness You Can Believe In

Why Obama is Scarier Than George W. Bush

Dave Eggers preceded his memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" with a section titled "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book." It's a brilliant attempt to disarm the reader and preempt criticism. Among its warnings, referring to chapter four: "The book thereafter is kind of uneven." (Disclosure: Eggers edited my work at two magazines in the '90s.)

Barack Obama shares Eggers' talent for managing expectations. "There will be false starts, there will be setbacks, there will be frustrations and disappointments,” Obama said upon his arrival in Washington. “I will make some mistakes." In other words, don't expect much.

The soaring optimistic rhetoric of the campaign ("yes we can") is no more, replaced by the sober, string-synced cello strains of Yo-Yo Ma. So is Obama's million-dollar smile. The Dour One is demanding patience. And he's getting it, for now: "Most respondents [to the New York Times/CBS News poll taken January 19th] said they thought it would take Mr. Obama two years or more to deliver on campaign promises to improve the economy, expand health care coverage and end the war in Iraq."

Setting the bar low seems to be working. Seventy-nine percent of Americans say they're optimistic about the next four years under Obama.

Sad, pathetic Americans! Like a dog that's been beaten eight long years, they're so psyched about the fact that their new master doesn't drool and speaks coherent English that they'll follow him anywhere. The media is in love with The One and so, therefore, is the public. No one questions him.

Frightening but true: Barack Obama is even more dangerous to liberal ideals than George W. Bush. Obama, who didn't appoint a single liberal to a senior position, has neutered the left. "Protesters, a fixture of every inauguration since President Nixon’s in 1973, were few and scattered on Tuesday as Barack Obama assumed the presidency," reported the Times.

The antiwar types have thrown away their signs. The sight of the first black president has the fair weather pacifists goo-goo-ga-gaing over a man who plans to transfer U.S. occupation troops and the carnage they bring from Iraq to Afghanistan.

No demonstrators in the streets. No reporters asking tough questions. A political honeymoon based on nothing. Didn't we learn anything from 9/11, when 90 percent of Americans, and the media, and Congress, issued George W. Bush a similar blank check?

People think things will be better four years from now, but there's little reason for hope. America faces radical problems. Radical problems require radical solutions. Unfortunately, Obama's proposals, and the moderates and conservatives with whom he has filled his cabinet, are woefully inadequate to the challenges at hand.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman calculates that there's at least a $2.1 trillion hole in the economy--an "output gap" between production capacity and consumers' ability to buy goods. Filling that hole would require direct investment (like Obama's public works proposal) of at least $1.5 trillion. But Obama's plan only contains $355 billion, of which only $136 billion would be spent within the next two years. It's better than nothing, but not by much. Obama wants to plug a gushing artery with a Band-Aid one- tenth the size of the wound.

It's churlish to predict that Obama's approach won't work. But even Obama admits it won't. He promises to create 4 million new jobs by 2011. But we're currently losing 4 million jobs every five months. If Obama delivers, 25 million Americans will have lost their jobs by 2011. (The math differential is due to the fact that population growth increases the workforce by 2.8 million jobs annually.) With unemployment figures like that, no one will doubt that we're in a real Depression: breadlines, suicides, the whole bit.

Obama's order to close Guantánamo and the CIA's secret "black site" torture prisons within a year is heartening. But as with his other initiatives, it doesn't go far enough. The detainees should have been freed, paid a generous compensation package, and received a formal apology by the U.S. government on Day One of his Administration. Gitmo should have been shuttered immediately. All the torture criminals from Bush to the U.S. Navy guards should have been thrown in prison and put on trial.

Instead, Obama's goons (they're his now) will keep torturing the detainees for at least another year. Some detainees may still be subjected to kangaroo courts. And Obama's executive orders contain weasel words that let him take back America's renewed commitment to constitutional rights with the snap of a finger. The orders, reports the Times, "could also allow Mr. Obama to reinstate the CIA’s detention and interrogation operations in the future, by presidential order, as some have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another top-level leader of Al Qaeda were captured."

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration creeps who personally ordered the murder and torture of innocents kidnapped by the military, including young children, will not face prosecution.

During the campaign, Obama promised there would be "no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens." He has since changed his mind. Obama will keep the USA-Patriot Act. Habeas corpus, eliminated by the Military Commissions Act, won't come back.

The biggest reason hope doesn't stand a chance is Afghanistan, where Obama plans to send the soldiers he wants to pull out of Iraq. The international community, which understands that the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had no more to do with 9/11 than the war against Iraq, will not take kindly to this escalation. Moreover, the war against Afghanistan is even less winnable than Iraq. At a time when we can least afford foreign adventurism, Obama plans to pour billions of dollars and thousands of lives into an Afghan charnel house with no prospect of victory.

Bush faced energetic opposition. Obama, on the other hand, is adored by the very people who should be shouting at him the loudest. Conservatives lost their credibility by supporting Bush, leaving Republican voices out in the cold.

Give the man a chance? Not me. I've sized up him, his advisors and their plans, and already found them sorely wanting. It won't take long, as Obama's failures prove the foolishness of Americans' blind trust in him. Obama isn't our FDR. He's our Mikhail Gorbachev: likeable, intelligent, well-meaning, and ultimately doomed by his insistence on being reasonable during unreasonable times.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for January 22, 2009

So much for change you can believe in: the torture continues at Gitmo and will continue at least another year. And nary a word about the NSA's despicable warrantless wiretapping and espionage program against American citizens.

Unimpressed in Advance

Like all sane people, I am relieved that that worthless shit-for-brains is leaving office tomorrow. It wasn't always certain, you know. After he all, he did steal the presidency in the first place.

But I am not likely to be thrilled by Obama, either. Tomorrow, we will no doubt hear an excellent speech, maybe even a great one. We will also read about some presidential executive orders, including one to close Gitmo, that will give cause for optimism to many Americans.

But it shouldn't.

Pretty words are nice, but the facts belie them. Every indication is that Obama is a DINO--Democrat in name only. His cabinet, which doesn't contain a single liberal, makes centrist Bill Clinton look like a Marxist in comparison. Conservatives and centrists are not going to be able to deliver the radical solutions needed to solve our many radical problems.

Obama's economic program only promises to create 4 million jobs by 2011--when we will have lost about 29 million at current projections. By 2011, if Obama gets his way, we will be in a deep, deep Depression. We will be lucky if the country still exists in its present form if that happens.

The Gitmo closing is nice, but Obama doesn't plan to prosecute those who ordered the torture and other war crimes that occurred there. Moreover, he doesn't plan to release all the inmates. Gitmo could stay open another year or more. The CIA secret prisons could stay open. CIA torturers won't be prosecuted. Neither will Bush and Cheney, who ordered it personally.

You get the idea.

Pretty words. Not much meat.

Don't be taken in. Take it out--to the streets. Now, more than ever, is the time for intelligent Americans to speak out and be heard.

Cartoon for January 10, 2009

There's no reason to be hopeful. Obama's economic program is too little, too late. His cabinet is too moderate, too in-the-box to understand that he may well end up being the last president of the United States. There's no dot-com-type event on the horizon that could rescue our overextended asses. And yet, despite everything, hope persists for the rats in the cage.

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: Eat the Rich

Soak the Rich, Corporations

A moratorium on housing foreclosures and evictions is a good idea. So is making the tax code more progressive. Obama's plan to build new public works is smart. But those are half-measures. Even if they don't come out of Congress watered down and wankified, they'll come too little and too late to kill the rapidly metastasizing disease that threatens to kill the U.S. economy: income inequality.

Employers are shedding jobs at a breathtaking rate: more than 560,000 per month. The rate of job losses could soon hit a million. People who still have jobs are being squeezed by pay cuts and freezes; even those who have yet to be affected are closing their wallets out of fear that they'll be the next to get chopped. So consumer spending, which accounts for two-thirds of economic activity, is plunging. Moreover, millions of individuals and businesses have lost access to credit and thus the movement of capital that might have pulled us out of this tailspin.

"The key is that the consumer is in the worst condition since the Great Depression," retail consultant Howard Davidowitz told NBC News. Boarded-up shops will abound. Experts expect 73,000 retail locations to close during the first few months of 2009. Between 20 and 40 percent of national retail chains will shut down. This isn't a recession. It's a depression, and it could destroy the country.

If broke consumers are the problem, shoveling money into their pockets is the way to get them spending again. Where do get it? The reason Willie Sutton robbed banks, he supposedly said, was because "that's where the money is." These days, the money is the hands of corporations and rich individuals.

(Warning: boring economic statistics and analysis follow. But stick with me. You could get a check!)

Tax returns give only a partial picture of a nation whose riches have been aggregated in the hands of a tiny elite. "The Internal Revenue Service," reported The New York Times in 2007, "captures only about 70 percent of business and investment income, most of which flows to upper-income individuals, because not everybody accurately reports such figures." So actual income inequality is bigger than IRS data indicates.

Even so, the IRS finds a huge pay gap between the very rich and the rest of us. "The wealthiest one percent of Americans earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005," the most recent year for which IRS data is available, according to a 2007 piece in The Wall Street Journal.

What if we played Karl Marx and left that one percent of the population (people who earn over $350,000 a year) with their fair share--one percent of national income? If we divided the rest of the loot equally, everyone else--99 percent--would get a 20.2 percent pay raise.

I don't know about you, but I could use it. And because I'm a patriot, I pledge to fritter away half of my 20.2 percent windfall on wine, women and frivolous American-made consumer goods.

What would happen if we adopted the communist principle of total income equality? That would require closing the gap between median (the halfway mark of income distribution) income and average income. Due to wage inequality, the average worker earns 40 percent more than the median. Close the gap, and two-thirds of Americans get a raise. One-third gets a cut. But only a small group, the top five or ten percent, would feel significantly pinched. Most of the third wouldn't lose much. And everyone would benefit from the increased economic activity that would result from equal income distribution.

Call it trickle-up economics.

Wouldn't socialism remove people's incentive to work hard? Though not a perfect economic model, the Soviet experience seems to disprove the idea that you can't find good CEO help for under a million bucks a year. Soviet physicists, athletes, filmmakers, novelists, composers and other innovators led their fields, yet were rewarded with little more than a medal and a puff piece in Pravda. Mikhail Kalishnikov invented the AK-47, the world's most popular firearm. He was never paid a dime, and never cared.

Here in the U.S., brilliant people become schoolteachers and priests. Salary isn't the biggest motivation for most people.

Another thing to bear in mind is an aspect of wealth Americans don't usually think about: assets. Eliminating income inequality wouldn't address asset inequality. The rich, who've had years of high income with which to save and invest, and have inherited assets from parents and grandparents who did the same, would still be rich. A truly efficient attempt to put more money in the average person's pocket would require redistribution of these accumulated assets.

If Willie Sutton were still around, however, he might find it easier to go after biggest 4000 U.S. corporations than its richest 40 million households. So let's look at big business income.

After-tax 2007 profits for U.S. corporations totaled $1.8 trillion, up 10 percent since 2001. (Bear in mind: this figure doesn't include CEO salaries, capital reinvestments, and the acquisition price of other corporations.) The effective average corporate tax rate in the U.S. is about 13 percent--one of the lowest in the industrialized world. If we were to double the effective tax rate to 26 percent, the U.S. would remain a tax haven compared to Germany and other major European countries.

Let's say the IRS took that extra 13 percent corporate profits tax and cut a check to the American people. Why not? Without us, the U.S. consumer, these companies wouldn't be in business. In 2007, every worker in the U.S. would have gotten a check for $12,000. That's a lot of xBoxes, not to mention mortgage payments.

There's plenty of cash left in the U.S. economy. Sooner or later, the tiny minority of corporations and rich individuals who are hoarding our nation's wealth will be forced to share it with the rest of us. The question is when, and how.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for January 5, 2009

Read to the tune of The Kinks' "Low Budget."

Cartoon for January 1, 2009

Now that the U.S. is used up like an old crumpled piece of tissue paper, they hand it over to a black guy.

Cartoon for December 15, 2008

Barack Obama's cabinet is widely praised by the mainstream press is diverse. But ideological diversity doesn't seem to be part of it. If this is a cabinet that looks like America, then America is 80% conservative Democrat, 20% Republican.

Cartoon for December 13, 2008

The One is calm. Very, very calmmmmmmmmzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

Cartoon for December 11, 2008

First Obama's transition team bogarted the official .gov domain suffix to invent some wacky "Change.gov" website. Then he invented a fake "Office of the President-Elect." (Yes, federal law provides funds for the president-elect to rent an office. But that's not an official government Office.) What else is he going to stagemanage?

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: Smells Like Bob Dylan

Why Obama is Just Another Boomer

Barack Obama, people are saying, is the first Generation X president. Are they right? And if so--does it many any difference?

"The battle for the Democratic nomination in the U.S. presidential election," reported Agence France Presse wire service nearly a year ago in January, "is as much about 'Generation X' wresting power from Baby Boomers as it is a battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton...Most significantly, analysts say, it is the first time someone from the so-called Generation X has run for the White House."

A Gen X president is, or would be, a big deal. Xers' major concerns--student loan debt, underemployment, age discrimination against the young, the environment--have never gotten much attention in the media or in mainstream politics. But is Obama Gen X?

Membership requirements for Gen X have long been fungible. Demographic purists say Generation X began with those born after 1964, when a sharply dropping birth rate marked the end of the postwar Baby Boom. Sociologists, who look to common cultural and economic reference points as generational signifiers, include everyone born from 1961 to 1976. If you grew up with LBJ, Nixon and Hendrix, you're a Boomer. If your touchstones are Carter, Reagan and Molly Ringwald, you're X.

Some analysts put Gen X as late as the 1981 birth year, but I side with Canadian author Douglas Coupland because, well, he wrote the book. When Coupland published "Generation X" in 1990, its subjects were twentysomethings. Do the math. That includes anyone born in the 1960s.

By any account, Obama's birthdate--1961--barely admits him to Gen X. Yet Gen X won him the presidency. Sure, a higher proportion of Gen Y voters than Gen Xers supported Obama (66 to 52 percent). But twice as many Xers showed up at the polls. The One couldn't have done it without the X factor.

Prominent Xers embraced Obama early in the process. "[Obama] attended an anti-apartheid rally in Southern California," said "X Saves the World" author Jeff Gourdinier during the early primaries. "He writes about his doubts about the effectiveness of that form of protest...He is very honest about his skepticism. That is the Gen X sensibility."

"Our time to lead has come," gushed Elizabeth Blackney, a 35-year-old Republican blogger from Oregon. But she and the rest of my underemployed, underrecognized generation may have to wait. Now that Obama has our votes, he has a lot more love for Generation Y than for Generation X.

The Nation, the Bible of liberal Baby Boomers, is atypically smart on this point. "For Obama, who is 46, and his followers, Boomer politics clearly have to go," writes Lakshmi Chaudhry of the 1980s and 1990s "culture wars," which constantly rehashed Vietnam and other hoary so-last-century conflicts. "What is less obvious is whom Obama represents. He often speaks to the Millennials, recently telling cheering college kids in South Carolina, 'It's your generation's turn.' But rarely mentioned is Obama's own generation, i.e., Generation X, the Lost Generation, whose name has been virtually erased from the national conversation."

In my 1998 Generation X manifesto "Revenge of Latchkey Kids," I called it "generational leapfrog." Generational leapfrog is the tendency of the good things in American life--high-paying entry-level jobs, generationally directed social programs, free love--to jump from the Baby Boomers born between '46 and '64 to their children, Millennial/Generation Y types born after '77.

It happened in editorial cartooning, my chosen profession. The vast majority of political cartoonists working at daily newspapers, those who get decent salaries and actual benefits, are Boomers in their 50s and 60s. If and when a new job opens up, it goes to an artist fresh out of college--a Gen Yer. Thirtysomething and fortysomething Gen Xers need not apply.

Demographers William Howe and Neil Strauss predicted this phenomenon in their 1991 book "Generations." They argued that Xers belong to a "reactive" generation doomed to be ignored by everyone that matters--Hollywood, Madison Avenue and Washington. Like prior "reactive" generations (the last one was Hemingway's "Lost Generation"), they will probably not see one of their own become president.

Howe and Strauss note that members of a generation can exhibit cultural signifiers and other traits more closely related to another generation. As a self-identified Gen Xer (1963/age 45), I spent my college years attending concerts by late-period Blondie, the Dead Kennedys, Flipper and the Clash. Punk rock and New Wave defined my coming of age. Like most of my peers, I later got into post-punk and grunge bands like Nirvana. But many of my classmates were more into the Doors and Bob Dylan. Born too late to enjoy the Summer of Love, they nevertheless identified as Boomers.

By this measure, Obama is a Boomer. His favorite music? According to his Facebook page: "Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Johann Sebastian Bach (cello suites), and The Fugees." Yech. His favorite movies? "Casablanca, Godfather I & II, Lawrence of Arabia and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Great films. I love them all. But a Gen Xer would have been more likely to namecheck "Repo Man" and "Slacker."

Generation Xers who hope that one of their own is finally in a position to address their long ignored concerns had better believe this: Obama is paying attention to the young and the old. You in-between types, still paying off your college loans and facing discrimination in the workplace because of your age, will have to keep on keeping on the best as you can.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Cartoon for December 4, 2008: Liberal Projection

Hoping against hope, liberal Democrats hope the most conservative Democratic primary candidate will use his conservative staffers to promote progressive policies.

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Rest and the Rightest

Obama's Center-Right Cabinet Foreshadows Center-Right Presidency

A bunch of Clinton- and Carter-era hacks. George W. Bush's leftover defense secretary. Of the dozens of Obama's top appointments announced to date, there's only one liberal: David Bonior, who ran John Edwards' primary campaign, as secretary of labor. Maybe.

Remember the Democratic primaries? Among the top three presidential contenders, Edwards was the liberal. Hillary Clinton, she of repeated votes for war against Afghanistan and Iraq (and Iran!), was to Edwards' right. Obama, who also voted for war but didn't commit to Clinton's bigger healthcare plan, was even more conservative than she. "Mr. Obama," David Sanger writes in The New York Times, "is planning to govern from the center-right of his party."

If nothing else, I had guessed, the U. of Chicago egghead would appoint a team of the Best and Brightest. We're getting the Rest and the Rightest.

Asked by a reporter how his center-right coalition of Republicans, pro-war Democrats and other assorted has-beens squares with a campaign marketing hope, change, and Soviet-inspired propaganda posters, Obama pledged to "combine experience with fresh thinking."

"Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost," Obama said. "It comes from me. That's my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure then that my team is implementing [that vision]." Pretty words.

Obama's argument--that his center-conservative cabinet will carry out radical change if he orders them to do so--is denied by recent history. The U.S. government, as micromanager Jimmy Carter learned, is too big for the president to manage on his own. And, as George W. Bush learned after 2000, the people you hire are more likely to change you than you are to change them.

As governor, Jacob Weisberg wrote in his book "The Bush Tragedy," Bush was fondly remembered by Texas Democrats as a moderate Republican who crossed the aisle to get things done. But campaign manager Karl Rove "used his influence to steer Bush away from being the president he originally wanted to be--the kind of center-right consensus-builder he was as governor of Texas--and into a too-close alliance" with the right wing of the GOP.

Even more fateful was Bush's choice of Dick Cheney to head his vice presidential search committee. Cheney chose himself (!), then hijacked the would-be "compassionate conservative"'s presidency by packing it with "neoconservative ideologues, who combined hawkish American triumphalism with an obsession with Israel," as Juan Cole put it in a memorable 2005 essay for Salon. By February 2001 Cheney had already ensured that the Bush Administration would focus on international affairs to the exclusion of everything else. He also made sure that his aggressive, Manichean worldview would prevail in cabinet discussions. "Cheney had 15 military and political advisors on foreign affairs, at a time when the president's own National Security Council was being downsized," marveled Cole.

The moderate guy who ran against "nation building" in 2000 never stood a chance against his own staff.

It's possible that Obama has stronger force of will than Bush. But, so far in the 219-year history of electoral politics, there is no example of a president successfully enacting radical changes without likeminded lieutenants to carry them out. Will Obama be the first to change his cabinet's spots? Probably not.

"The last Democratic administration we had was the Clinton Administration," Obama said in his attempt to calm his liberal base, which is starting to get hip to the reality that Obama is about to betray them. "So it would be surprising if I selected a treasury secretary who had had no connection with the last Democratic administration, because that would mean that the person had no experience in Washington whatsoever." Or maybe not. What about Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist and Times columnist who won the Nobel Prize this year? He's progressive. As a bonus, he's been right about everything for years.

"We want ideas from everybody," Obama continued. But not from liberals. And not from the socialists John McCain had everyone stirred up about. Speaking of McCain, the right-wing Arizona senator is tickled pink: "I certainly applaud many of the appointments that President-Elect Obama has announced," McCain said last week. "Senator Obama has nominated some people to his economic team that we can work with, that are well-respected."

What Obama and McCain consider respectable might not pass muster with polite company. Obama's economic advisor Lawrence Summers thinks women aren't good at math or science, which bodes poorly for the quality of his own thinking. Marie Curie, call your office.

Former Bush intelligence official John Brennan was, until last week, Obama's pick to head the CIA. ABC News reported: "Brennan had been a top aide to former CIA Director George Tenet during what critics of the Bush administration refer to as that agency's descent into darkness post 9/11, and he had spoken in favor of various controversial counterterrorism strategies, including enhanced interrogation techniques and rendition--sending terror suspects to allies where torture is legal." After Congressional liberals threatened to block his nomination, Obama crossed Bush's torturer off the list.

Lefties who swooned on Election Night had might as well get used to the truth: Obama isn't one of you. Never was. Never will be.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Cartoon for November 27, 2008

Hillary Clinton, architect of the Iraq War, is Obama's secretary of state. Obama says "America doesn't torture. It was only a matter of time before Obama let us down, but this is unprecedented. And not even one liberal in the cabinet. And Larry Summers! And...

Cartoon for November 22, 2008

Now that they've been defeated, the same Republicans who called liberals anti-American traitors are talking about the benefits of bipartisanship.

Cartoon for November 20, 2008

At Obama's insistence, Joe Lieberman gets to keep his chairmanship of the homeland security committee. Is there nothing one can do to have to pay a price for defaming Democrats?

Speaking of questions, I've been looking at the lists of people being considered for top spots in the incoming Obama Administration. Not...one...leftie. (Like Robert Reich.) Not one.

I expected change to be something I couldn't believe in, but I thought they'd cover it up a little better.

Cartoon for November 15, 2008

A new president takes over. Will he prepared for the looming threat of attack?

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: Will Obama Wuss Out on Gitmo?

Prez-Elect May Ratify Bush's Torture Trials

The accused terrorist appeared before the military tribunal, charged with conspiracy in a plot against national security. Because state secrets were involved and because harsh interrogation techniques were used to extract information, the defendant was deprived of a look at the evidence. Also denied were the defendant's traditional right to a lawyer, to face accusers, even to see the judges--they wore hoods.

No, this wasn't at Gitmo. This "court" met in the military dictatorship of Peru. And the defendant wasn't an Afghan or Arab turned over to U.S. troops by a warlord out for the $10,000 bounty. She was Lori Berenson, a 31-year-old American citizen accused of aiding the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, members of whom she befriended.

The Washington Post and New York Times condemned Berenson's 1996 trial, calling the tribunal and the brutal circumstances of her detention a mockery of justice. In the U.S., most American liberals agreed.

Now President-Elect Barack Obama--a self-identified liberal Democrat who campaigned as a champion of human rights--wants to use the same kind of kangaroo court to try victims of the notorious Guantánamo torture camp.

Obama's advisers confirm that the incoming president wants to close Gitmo. It's long overdue. But they deny that they've made a final decision about what to do with the detainees. (There's no word about the secret prisons, Navy prison ships or CIA black sites where thousands of Muslim men kidnapped by the U.S. have been "disappeared.") However, there's troubling evidence that Obama is reneging on his promise to do the right thing by the long-suffering detainees.

Insiders say that Obama is leaning toward the creation of "national security courts"--secret military tribunals where detainees would be tried without basic due process rights. They wouldn't get the right to review evidence against them, cross-examine prosecution witnesses, or—obviously, at this point--a speedy trial. Moreover, Obama hasn't ruled out subjecting future detainees to "preventive detention"--i.e., holding them without charges, like Bush.

"The legal team advising Mr. Obama on Guantánamo believes that prosecuting the 'high value' terror suspects such as [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed--a group of about 30--will require the creation of a court designed to handle highly sensitive intelligence material, a cross between a military tribunal and a federal court," reports The Times of London.

"What a national security court is designed for is to hide the use of torture and allow the consideration of evidence that is not reliable," says J. Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents some of the detainees.

Of the 255 prisoners, about 60 have been cleared for release but remain at the base because their home countries, including China, view them as political enemies and might execute them. Of the remaining 195, the Pentagon admits that there's no evidence whatsoever against 135. Obama's team doesn't know what to do about these 195 misérables.

That leaves 80 men, including the 30 "stars" like KSM, the alleged 9/11 mastermind. "If Obama wanted to move as swiftly as possible to close Guantánamo," reports Time magazine, "the strongest step he could take as president would be to simply shutter the camp by executive order and transfer all of the detainees to prison sites inside the U.S. At that point, in theory, the detainees would face four possible fates: being charged with offenses that could be tried in federal courts; court-marshaled according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice; turned over to the governments of their native countries; or simply released."

Courts-marshal of the detainees, who were dumped in Gitmo's supposed legal limbo specifically in order to deny them POW status and Geneva Conventions rights, would be bizarre. As discussed above, many can't go home. Moreover most, if not all, of the high-profile detainees were tortured--a fact that would almost certainly destroy any chance of obtaining a conviction in a fair trial.

You can't hold a fair trial after holding a suspect for years while depriving them of access to a lawyer, family visits, or the ability to prepare for trial. The Founding Fathers understood this fact, which is why they ratified the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial," reads the Sixth. A secret "national security court" held six years after "arrest" doesn't come anywhere close to satisfying this requirement.

Municipalities' interpretation of the Sixth Amendment varies. In New York City, cops have to bring you before a judge for arraignment within 24 hours of your arrest, or let you go. Other places allow a few days. Six years? Not even in Texas.

There's only one valid legal and moral option for rectifying the human rights nightmare at Guantánamo. On January 20, President Obama should fly to Gitmo, address its inmates and personally apologize to each one for the abuses and indignities they have suffered, and which have brought shame and contempt upon the United States.

The detainees should be set free. They should be paid enough money that they should never want for anything again, then offered the right to fly home or, if they prefer, anywhere in the U.S. Finally, Obama should walk out the camp's main entrance to Palma Point, where he should sign over control of the base to Cuban President Raoul Castro.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

First of a Series: Annoying Obama Quote

On Tuesday night, Obama opined:

Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us.

What a maroon. The election results were still being tabulated, and he had already swallowed the right-wing Kool Aid.

Newsflash: The wars against the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq are not designed to keep us safe. They are designed to keep us afraid. You can't keep people nervous without recruiting new enemies.

Anyone who thinks Obama is a progressive has only to read that idiotic quote.

Cartoon for November 10, 2008

Obama and the Democrats have achieved a sweeping victory. Now it's time for them to dismantle Bush's gulag archipelago of torture. Not after forming a committee to look into it. Not after we've found the best way to do it. Immediately.

Revised: "President Obama's First Day"

The first animation has been tightened up. Check out the new and improved version here. It's also a little more relevant than prescient now:

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: No We Didn't

Obama Win More Hysterical Than Historical

There is less here than meets the eye.

Yes, the election results are notable. But they don't mean as much as people think.

First, the important stuff: The first black president has been elected. And not just elected by a majority of voters, many of whom were black and/or first-time voters, but by nearly half of white voters. Twenty-eight years after the Reagan Revolution, the electorate has repudiated Republican inaction—on Iraq, in New Orleans, most of all on the economy—to an extent not seen since Watergate. Americans delivered a proxy impeachment of George W. Bush, holding McCain less to account for his policies than his association with a (cough) leader they blamed for their troubles.

It isn't quite fair. George W. Bush, lest we forget, had a 90 percent approval rating during the fall of 2001. Now that Bush's support is down to a Carrot Top-like 22 percent, it's only fair to remember that he's the same guy in 2008 that he was in 2001. And, for that matter, when a majority of Americans thought he was doing such a good job that they voted for another four years in 2004

Nothing much has changed. The economy sucks, but that's been true since 2000. It's been one continuous meltdown since the dot-com crash. We lost Afghanistan the day we invaded it; ditto Iraq. Doing nothing to help New Orleans during Katrina—well, that was just Republicans being Republicans. The difference now? There is no difference.

Don't be fooled by the electoral college rout. The popular vote reveals that United States remains a deeply divided country. Bush got 51 percent of the vote in 2004; Kerry drew 48 percent. Obama defeated McCain 51-48. A surge of newly registered voters, including many African-Americans energized by Obama's candidacy, accounts for the three percent difference.

No one's mind has changed. People who voted for Bush in 2004 voted for McCain. If everyone who voted for Obama had shown up at the polls four years ago, John Kerry would be president. Obama's victory is the triumph of retail fundraising, computer metrics, and a team of smart, focused advisors who knew how to exploit them.

It helped to have a weak opponent. McCain ran as the new Bob Dole—cranky, out of touch, and untelegenic. "That one" was a terrible speaker. Every aspect of his campaign, from his fascism-influenced slogan ("Country First"), to a Silver Star logo that riffed on his POW experience to a public tired of war, to picking a vice presidential running mate with whom he'd spent 15 minutes (less than you'd need to get hired at Wendy's), was tone deaf. As so many American elections do, this one came down to fear. People were scared of losing their jobs, their homes, and their 401(k)s. McCain, his mindset stuck in the '60s, thought they were more worried about the Weathermen and the SDS.

All things considered, McCain did well.

If he follows his win by closing Bush's gulag archipelago of black sites, secret prisons and concentration camps at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantánamo (and don't forget Diego Garcia and the prison ships), if he quickly orders a withdrawal from Iraq and reconsiders his foolish campaign pledge to double down against Afghanistan, Obama will be good for the United States' international image.

If he acts to restore economic confidence with two vast infusions of federal money into people's pockets—first, with a new WPA-type national infrastructure program to create jobs and, second, with a bailout of homeowners and renters in danger of foreclosure and eviction, he will still have something of a country left to run four years from now.

But no one should delude themselves into believing that racism or its kissing cousin conservatism are dead. Barack Obama, after all, is only half-black, and not even half-African-American at that. Jeremiah Wright aside, Obama had a white upbringing. A product of the elite, he went to an Ivy League college (the same as mine, at the same time). If we were looking at President-Elect Sharpton, I'd believe in this change. (Too scary? Exactly.) As things stand, the rich white people who own and run the country have little to fear.

Meanwhile, very nearly half of the American electorate voted Republican. After seven years of not finding (or looking for) Osama. After five years of horror in Iraq. After eight years of shrinking paychecks. After everything that's happened, nearly half of voters wanted more of the same.

If the Republicans had picked a better candidate, they would have won. If Obama had presented a truly distinct alternative to conservatism—socialized healthcare, say, or opposing both stupid wars rather than the least popular stupid one—he would have lost. Conservatism? Dead? Not a chance.

A change is gonna come. But this ain't it.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Cartoon for November 6, 2008

Deep down, John McCain has got to be feeling relieved to have lost. He gets to go back to the Senate and relax. Obama is screwed, having inherited a country in a state of collapse.

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: Don't Think About Reelection

Why Obama Should Consider Himself a One-Term President

Barring some unforeseen cataclysmic event, Barack Obama will be elected president Tuesday. Please allow me to be the first to congratulate you, President-Elect Obama, on an historic victory following an extraordinarily disciplined campaign. Are you sure you're really a Democrat?

Enough BSing.

As a student of history and the American presidency and a guy who plans to vote for you despite serious doubts, here's the best advice I can give you: Starting on Inauguration Day, consider yourself a one-term president.

This isn't exactly an original idea. When John McCain launched his own run for the Republican nomination, he originally planned to center his entire campaign around a promise not to seek a second term. "Less than a day before he was set to speak in New Hampshire on April 25," The Atlantic magazine reported, "McCain ordered his aides to excise…the pledge." But McCain was on to something. Voters want a president who isn't constantly triangulating, studying polls, and sucking up to contributors.

I realize that telling anyone you're a one-termer would be dumb. Why tie your own hands by declaring yourself a lame duck on Day One? So don't.

I'm suggesting that you privately adopt a state of mind. Back in 2007, you laid out three guiding principles to your campaign: "Run the campaign with respect; build it from the bottom up; and finally, no drama." It worked. Now it's time to transmit a new guiding principle to your cabinet officers: "We don't care about 2012."

With one exception, I've never understood why presidents worry about getting reelected. The "second-term curse"--the tendency of lame-duck presidencies to flounder in scandal, blowback and impotence--has prevented every modern president from accomplishing anything worth bragging about during years five through eight.

Harry Truman squandered his credibility by playing footsie with McCarthyism and doubling down on a disastrous stalemate on the Korean peninsula. Johnson screwed up in Vietnam and on the burning streets of American cities. Nixon had Watergate; Eisenhower and Reagan succumbed to virtual senility and scandal (the U-2 spy plane affair and Iran-Contra, respectively). Of course, Clinton had Monica.

The exception, of course, was George W. Bush. His quest for a second term was understandable. "Bush knows that he did not carry the popular vote in 2000," Gus Tyler wrote in The Forward in 2003. "He ran a half-million votes behind Democrat Al Gore. He knows that he really did not carry Florida to give him his thin edge in the Electoral College." Dubya wanted to win in 2004 because he lost in 2000.

Technically, 2005-to-2008 was Bush's first term. Nevertheless, the second-term curse struck again. Bush had an ambitious agenda, but it was thwarted by both circumstance and the consequences of policies he pursued during his first four years. Privatizing Social Security, tort reform, stricter test standards for high school graduation--all abandoned and forgotten in the fires of Iraq and the maelstrom of Hurricane Katrina. Bush's approval rating is now 23 percent, the lowest in the history of the Gallup Poll. He wasn't even invited to the Republican National Convention. He seems destined to be added to the short list of our worst leaders.

So forget that second term. They never do anyone any good.

George Clinton said, "Free your mind and your ass will follow." Give up the hope you can't believe in and embrace the reality you have already achieved.

So, President-Elect Obama: It's true. You face challenges: Iraq and Afghanistan (which you are wrong wrong wrong about) and torture and our international standing and--obviously!--the economy. But think of what you've got going for you. You are young and sharp-minded and vigorous. The electorate is desperately worried, and thus more willing to embrace big changes. Your party will enjoy a commanding majority in Congress--I'm guessing 58 seats in the Senate and 268 (to 167) in the House, the biggest since Watergate. I'm pretty sure you're going to pick a team of top officials that will make Americans wonder how they ever tolerated intellectual midgets like Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice--the Best and the Brightest for the new millennium. The rest of the world already loves you, and you haven't even begun.

But be careful. The second you move into 1600 Penn, you will be surrounded by people, many of them your close friends, who will want nothing more than to keep the cool jobs you give them for as long as possible, i.e. eight years. Beware the "permanent campaign"--the drive to make every decision based on how they will affect you and your party's chances for reelection. "[Pollster] Dick Morris even asked voters where Bill Clinton should go on vacation," remembered Joe Klein in Time.

"[The permanent campaign] has been a terrible thing," Klein continued. "Presidents need to be thinking past the horizon, as Jimmy Carter belatedly proved. Some of his best decisions--a strict monetary policy to combat inflation, a vigorous arms buildup against the Soviet threat--bore fruit years after he left office and were credited to his successor, Ronald Reagan."

Radical problems require radical solutions. Guess what? We have radical problems. Your kids-only healthcare mandate concept would be a Band-Aid where major surgery is required. Iraq and Afghanistan don't need another division of Marines here, another detachment of Special Forces there. Nothing short of immediate pullout will satisfy the world, our ruined national budget or, for that matter, the Iraqis and Afghans. Your 90-day proposed moratorium on foreclosure evictions is nice as far as it goes--well, 90 days--but it's going to take years of direct government assistance to millions of Americans to save the country from economic disintegration.

Even with a bully pulpit and a Democratic Congress, it's going to take some serious nads to ignore the special interests. Big insurance companies like the current healthcare "system" just the way it is. Defense contractors are psyched about our serial preemptive wars against anyone and everyone (except those who actually attack us). And the banks aren't going to stop taking people's homes unless you take over the banks. It isn't going to be easy.

But running the country as if you had nothing to lose--running your first term as if it you knew it will be your last--will make it a little easier. For all you know, it might make a second term more likely.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL