Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Ted Rall: Just Another Peace Lovin' Liberal

Sure to be in a bargain bin near you soon, Ted Rall's written a book and he wants to declare secular jihad on Christians.

Christian fundamentalists, the millennial end-of-theworlders obsessed with the Left Behind series about the End Times, neo-Nazi racists, rural black-helicopter Michigan Militia types cut from the same inbred cloth as Timothy McVeigh, allied with “mainstream” gun nuts and right-wing Republicans, have been planning, preparing, and praying for the destruction of the “Godless,” “secular” United States for decades. In the past, they formed groups like the John Birch Society and the Aryan Nations. Now the hard Right has a postmodern, decentralized non-organization organization called the Tea Party.

Right-wing organizational names change, but they amount to the same thing: the reactionary sociopolitical force—the sole force—poised to fill the vacuum when collapse occurs. The scenario outlined by Margaret Atwood’s prescient novel The Handmaid’s Tale—rednecks in the trenches, hard military men running things, minorities and liberals taken away and massacred, setting the stage for an even more extreme form of laissez-faire corporate capitalism than we’re suffering under today—is a fair guess of how a post-U.S. scenario will play out unless we prepare to turn it in another direction...

A war is coming. At stake: our lives, the planet, freedom, living. The government, the corporations, and the extreme right are prepared to coalesce into an Axis of Evil. Are you going to fight back? Will you do whatever it takes, including taking up arms?

I dunno how Rall plans to take up arms against right wingers, considering liberals hate arms. And I guess it would be inconvenient for Rall to remember that more people were killed by communism in the 20th century than any bunch of Crusaders. Those are mere details.

If you recall, Rall is the cartoonist who called NFL player-cum-soldier Pat Tillman an idiot for going to serve his country. There was quite a furor over that one, but it wasn't his first time insulting normal people for not being a whacked out liberal. Take a look at Rall's interview with the equally whacked out Dylan Ratigan:

Notice how both Rall and Ratigan calmly talk about people not paying their mortgages--not because they can't afford it but because it's "not fair" that the evil banks and mortgage companies get that money. The idea that living in a house you don't own and aren't paying for is squatting doesn't bother these guys because in their eyes, the ends (bringing down the evil corporations) justifies the means (theft). Moreover, they seem incapable of understanding that bringing down those evil corporations will throw a lot of people out of work who aren't mortgage bankers. While they howl at the idea of firing government employees, these jerks think nothing of tossing thousands of normal joes out on their ears for the crime of working in the private sector. Sheesh.