If There's a Warrant for Your Arrest, the Government Should Have to Tell You By Ted Rall
There ought to be a law.
There ought to be a law.
America has lots of leftists. Forty percent of voters say that they would prefer to live in a socialist country than a capitalist one.
Nothing, leading Democrats say, matters more than beating Donald Trump. 2020, they argue, is the most important election of our lifetimes (OK, they always say that).
In 1991, demographers Neil Howe and William Strauss published their awkwardly titled tome "13th Gen," about Generation X -- the Americans born between 1961 and 1981. If Xers had paid attention, they would have committed suicide.
Earlier this year, Portuguese cartoonist António Moreira Antunes drew one of the most controversial political cartoons in history. His cartoon about U.S.-Israeli relations sparked so much controversy that The New York Times, whose international edition published it in April, decided to fire its two staff cartoonists, neither of whom had anything to do with it. Then the Times permanently banned all editorial cartooning.
The political left, center and right do share something in common in today's polarized America: We're all in denial.
History, they say, doesn't so much repeat. It rhymes.
Let's talk about fraud: "A person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities," Lexico dictionary calls it.
There is no other way to say it: It was a political assassination.
Osama bin Laden was unarmed. SEALs captured him alive. Following brazenly illegal orders from Washington, they executed him. "The (Obama) administration had made clear to the military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command that it wanted bin Laden dead," The Atlantic reported on May 4, 2011.
Two weeks ago, Bernie Sanders announced his "right to a secure retirement" plan. The media didn't notice, the voters didn't care, and no one's talking about it. But the problem is huge and about to get huger. And the government isn't doing jack.
Strictly speaking, Nancy Pelosi is right. Led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the four Congressional freshmen known as the Squad are, by Beltway standards, relatively powerless -- just four votes, as the speaker said. They chair no committees and head no broad coalitions that can be counted upon to cast yeas and nays at their command.
How should the Democratic Party resolve its civil conflict between progressives and centrists? Society has a simple rule. When an argument gets out of control, it's up to the side with the most money, power and social standing to extend an olive branch.
Living as they do in a bipolar political world where politics consists of Democrats and Republicans and no other ideology is real, media corporations in the United States use "left," "liberal" and "Democrat" as synonyms. This is obviously wrong and clearly untrue -- Democrats are a party, leftism and liberalism are ideologies, and Democratic politics are frequently neither left nor liberal but far right -- but as Orwell observed, after you hear a lie repeated enough times, you begin to question what you know to be true rather than the untruth.
A century ago, newspapers employed more than 2,000 full-time editorial cartoonists. Today, there are fewer than 25. In the United States, political cartooning as we know it is dead. If you draw them for a living and you have any brains, you're working in a different field or looking for an exit.
Eventually, tech theorist Clay Shirky has argued, so many people will have nude photos on the internet that there will be no shame in one of them being yours. Privacy will no longer be necessary. It will be a halcyon time for politicians: No matter how much dirt your enemies dig up, none of it will stick, because having done bad things and making stupid mistakes will be considered normative.
Supporters of center-right Democrats such as Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have a response to left progressives who criticize their candidates for cozying up to Wall Street banks and trying to execute innocent men: Stop with the purity tests!
British goon cops acting at the request of the United States government entered Ecuador's embassy in London, dragged out WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and prepared to ship him across the pond. After this event last month, most of the mainstream media reacted with spiteful glee about Assange's predicament and relief that the Department of Justice had exercised self-restraint in its choice of charges.
As one of the few pundits who correctly called the 2016 election for Donald Trump, it would be wise to rest on my laurels rather than risk another prediction, one that might turn out wrong.
Journalism is in trouble. Writers of articles pointing this out typically argue that this is really bad for democracy or America or whatever. Anyone who disagrees is too stupid to read this, so I won't bother to repeat this obviousness. Such writers also point out contemporaneous evidence of the media apocalypse; here are the three I came across this week:
Throughout 2016, the presidential candidates who were not Donald Trump complained to Jeffrey Zucker.