Get Ready for a Shock: Far-Left Cartoonist Ted Rall's Claims About Being Oppressed After 9/11 Are Contradicted By Recorded Reality

Like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, though, he stands by his memory.

A left-wing cartoonist’s recent depiction of a 14-year-old encounter with the LAPD has gotten him canned as a freelance contributor to the LA Times after the paper said it had "serious questions" about the accuracy of the encounter.

He claimed that he was "roughed up" by a cop for jaywalking in 2001.

But there's an audiotape of the encounter, as well as multiple paper records (including Rall's own complaint).

These appear to disagree with Rall's newer, more histrionic memories of the minor, barely-worth-mentioning encounter.

...

"An audiotape of the encounter recorded by the police officer does not back up Rall's assertions; it gives no indication that there was physical violence of any sort by the policeman or that Rall's license was thrown into the sewer or that he was handcuffed," the [Los Angeles] Times wrote on Thursday in the space above where Rall’s blog post was originally published. "Nor is there any evidence on the recording of a crowd of shouting onlookers."

Rall says he stands by his post.

This is hard to square with what the audiotape recorded. If he was so roughed up by the cop, abused, with his license tossed in the sewer as a crowd of frightened onlookers cried out to let this innocent man go free -- why oh why did he ask the cop for recommendations for what restaurant to eat at that night when the encounter was over?

No, that's not a joke. That's apparently what happened.

Here's Rall's explanation. You might want to brace yourself against something solid, but with some cushioning.

"Listening to the tape now, I can't imagine what I was thinking," Rall writes. "The only explanation I can fathom is that I had classic Stockholm Syndrome. I was stunned at the time. Not that I'm comparing myself with a rape victim -- far from it -- but now I better understand why sometimes a raped woman will question pressing charges or call a date-rapist at home hours after he left her. I was blathering nonsense, I guess."

Mm-hm.

I frequently discuss the left-wing as not being possessed by a politics so much as by a psychological disorder -- neuroses and hysterias which they project on to the world. They scream at their hysterias the same way as any disordered mental patient might, except they've ritualized and codified their hysterias in a cant which they've taught the other hysterics. This cant, this jargon of disordered-mind speech, is the leftist Culture of Complaint.

Walk into any mental health clinic and you will find dozens of patients there claiming to be raped on a weekly (or daily) basis by the staff, and much abused by conspirators in their families or at their jobs.

These people have simply taken the standard paranoid hysterias known to every psychiatrist and given them the veneer of a passable "reality," by claiming them to be "political," and hence part of the actual world.

posted by Ace at 03:34 PM

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