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some people, George W. Bush will always be far, far more despicable
than Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and the Dark Lord Sauron all
rolled into one. Take syndicated political cartoonist Ted Rall,
for instance. Not content with his illustrated soapbox, Rall offers
up these pearls of wisdom in a recent
column for the Associated Press: "We've been treated to
some astonishingly vile images over the last two weeks: office workers
hurling themselves into a hundred-floor-high abyss. A gaping, smouldering
hole in the financial center of our greatest city. George W. Bush
passing himself off as a patriot, even as he disassembles the Constitution
with the voracious glee of piranha skeletonizing a cow." Not
to mention Ted Rall losing any sense of proportion and making a
fool of himself in print — but more on that later.
How is Bush
going about this "skeletonizing?" By declaring, in defiance
of Mr. Rall, The Nation's editorial board, and The New
York Review of Books crowd, that we are at war. "War
against whom?" Rall wants to know. "Afghanistan? Iraq?
Canada? You declare war against a nation-state, not against terrorists
living inside a country. You can ask a foreign government to extradite
accused terrorists for trial, but you're not likely to get very
far if you don't share good diplomatic relations." In other
words, if only we had joined Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United
Arab Emirates in establishing good diplomatic relations with
the collection of twenty-something zealots who have turned Afghanistan
into an Islamo-fascist wasteland, then we wouldn't be in
this mess. (Presumably, Kumbaya Watch missed the pre-September 11th
column in which Rall called for glasnost with the Taliban.)
But really,
Rall doesn't seem terribly interested in foreign-policy details.
He's out to whack Bush, and any stick will do. "Now we know
why 7,000 people sacrificed their lives — so that we'd all
forget how Bush stole a presidential election," he writes,
as if the Florida "bloody shirt" mattered in a time when
blood has become more than just a political metaphor. He gripes
that "Bush has capitalized on a nation's grief, confusion and
anger to extort a political blank check payable in young American
blood." (And people think the Right is isolationist?)
In the end, Rall concludes, "We're at war with whoever Bush
decides is our enemy. Not only won't he tell us how or why they're
our enemies, he won't tell us how or why we're attacking them or
how or why our citizens are getting killed trying to do it. Welcome
to 'cause-I-said-so-ocracy."
None of this
vitriol should come as any surprise to regular readers of Mr. Rall's
comic strip. On September 20, he
offered a peek into "Jihad H.Q.," where a cartoon
version of a fundamentalist cleric complained that "U.S. sanctions
have killed millions in Iraq and Afghanistan," meaning that
the attacks on America were just a "drop in the bucket."
(Never mind that Iraq's people starve while Saddam spends millions
on new palaces — it's not his fault they're dying, it's
ours.) And in his
latest strip, Rall remarks that "before September 11th,
George W. Bush was a big fat zero, a drunken frat boy who cheated
and bulled his way into the presidency," and then depicts the
President nuking the entire world in a quest to boost his popularity
ratings to 100%.
To which one
can only reply that before September 11th, Ted Rall was a big fat
zero, an ignorant, talentless hack with a flair for recycling leftist
pieties into snarky cartoons that inspired breakfast-table chuckles
among the leftist literati and the granola-munching types.
And since September
11 — well, very little has changed.
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