Semi Truths A highly irregular weblog dedicated to Truth, Justice, and American Cheese…!

As semi-regular readers of this site know, I am an admirer of these personalities:

• Cartoonists
• Columnists
• Intelligent and progressive thinkers
• Satirists
• Rabble rousers

One man who wears all these labels proudly is the inimitable Ted Rall.

I was a Ted Rall fan before I even knew there was a Ted Rall. I first noticed his wickedly funny (and often scandalous) comics when they began appearing in many alternative newspapers in 1996; in 1999, he became a weekly syndicated columnist. It was a few years before I realized that the writer “Ted Rall” was the same guy who drew the cartoons.

Ted Rall is a freethinking iconoclast, a cynical idealist who loves his country and is appalled by its “leaders”. As a satirist, he is unapologetic, frequently skewering subjects others dare not touch. He is often excoriated by his critics who consider him unfeeling and unfunny. To be honest, it is hard to always agree with him, but I marvel at his cheekiness. It is hard not to admire someone who ranked #2 on a recent 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers list (#3 is another personal hero, Michael Moore).

There was no question, then, that I’d be in the audience last week when the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice sponsored an appearance by Ted Rall right here in my new home town…

This being a left-leaning gathering in a university town, I was not surprised to see plenty of organic food being served to scruffy looking people sporting sandals and bad haircuts. By the time I arrived, Ted had already been there for a couple of hours schmoozing and signing books as the county auditorium filled to near-capacity.Ted opened with a talk titled “THE BUSH CHRONICLES”, illustrating the web of deceit that led us from a judicial coup d’état and a day of terrorist attacks on American soil to the U.S.-led invasion of oil-bearing Muslim nations in the mid-east. Ted went into Afghanistan during the American occupation and spoke movingly of the conditions there before and after. He then presented an abridged history of our recent involvement in the area.North of Iraq and Pakistan is Kazakhstan, the second-largest republic of the former Soviet Union, which currently sits on 50 billion gallons of oil, the largest untapped reserves in the world. The shortest route from the Caspian Sea to deep sea ports for our tankers is through Iran, but we have difficult diplomatic ties with that country. The second shortest route is through Afghanistan and to the Pakistani port of Karachi on the Arabian Sea. Within days of the Bush takeover, the White House began meeting with representatives of the Taliban to discuss oil routes. 911 provided a publicly-justifiable excuse for moving into Afghanistan, and though this administration keeps citing the billions of dollars that have been poured into the country, most of that is going into the infrastructure necessary to build the pipelines. (The first road to be repaved was the Herat-Kandahar highway, which services the proposed route for the pipelines).

However, this shift in power has brought a boondoggle. The ethnic Pashtun government of Pakistan will not cooperate with the Northern Alliance Tajiks who replaced the Pashtun Taliban in Afghanistan. Without that cooperation, the oil will never flow and the region will remain unstable. This, said Ted, is the main problem with linear conservative thinking. “These are two conflicting thoughts, both of which are true, which is impossible for Republicans to grasp: 1) they invaded Afghanistan to build an oil pipeline; 2) because they invaded Afghanistan, the pipeline will never be built.”

It is all about oil, it’s only going to get worse, and all of it stems from an illegal takeover of the government by a right-wing cabal of oil men. The first solution to all of this is to get these nuts out of the White House. We need to reach out to our conservative friends and find common ground, say to them “Clinton was a liar, and so is Bush”, and help them understand that this administration isn’t just “Republicans gone too far”; these guys aren’t Republicans at all, they’re radical religious zealots, and you don’t have to support them!

Finally, Ted urged all of us to converge in D.C. on July Fourth, surround the White House, and refuse to leave until the police evacuate the squatters on federal land at 1600 Pennsylvania.

Here are a few memorable Ted Rall quotes from the presentation and talk:

• Regarding the evolving litany of reasons to justify our invasion of Iraq: “a bestiary of bullsh*t.”
• On the notion that we are “spreading democracy” in Afghanistan, Ted cited the Bush administration’s squelching of the Afghani movement to bring back their deposed king and the substitution of former Unocal consultant Hamid Kharzi: “consistent with Bush’s history of election manipulation.”
• On the argument that we have brought stability to Afghanistan: “We’ve replaced the Taliban with the Northern Alliance. Warlords run the country…it is complete and utter anarchy.”
• That we are going into Iraq to ” liberate” its citizens: “Look at our history. We (the U.S.) don’t liberate, we exploit.”
• By taking on Saddam, Bush is “defending America” : “Bush had his chance to defend America from 1972 to 1974 and he hid like a wuss.”
• Bombs: “An immoral, cowardly form of welfare. Like landmines, they should be outlawed.”
• On September 11: ” The whole purpose of terrorism is to keep us confused, scared, and clamped down. It worked.”
• The war on terror: “It has been used as an excuse to declare war on the left … You can’t eliminate terrorists by attacking them. You have to get to the roots of their cause and work to resolve the situation until those who are genuine moderates stop funding them.”
• On the lapdog media: “To paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith, the mission (of the press) should be to `comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable´…
• On AM talk radio: “(It) is inherently conservative. Conservatives like to have their ideas regurgitated back to them, liberals like to think.”
• On the Department of Homeland Security: “We should have a program for domestic security. September 11 happened because of a massive breakdown in communication between the CIA and the FBI, and they’re not even part of the new department…!“
• On the French: “Yes, they have a history of colonialism and a financial interest in Iraq’s oil. But they get to take the moral high ground on this one because they’re not killing anyone.”
• On polls indicating that growing numbers of the American public believe that Iraq was involved with the 911 attacks: “Years of educational budget cuts have been very effective.”
• On Osama bin Laden: “The venture capitalist of Islamic extremism.”
• On Democrats: “They haven’t had any balls since Watergate.”
• On Israel: “Their government was hijacked by extreme right-wing tyrants … too!“
• On “patriotism”: “These people (the Bushites) aren’t patriots. They don’t even like the Constitution. We like the Constitution and we want it back!“
• On impeaching Bush: “You can’t impeach him…he was never elected! We have to evict him.”

“In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.” —John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908), U.S. economist. Guardian (London, July 28, 1989).