Ted who now?

Hey, Ted's got a point.

http://garfieldridge.blogspot.com/2005/03/gob-smackingly-vile.html

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

P.S. Eat your breakfast, Ace-- remember, it's the most important meal of the day.

Wow, could his drawings possibly suck any worse? It's like he's perpetually running the Family Circus "Billy's drawing the comic today" gag without telling anyone.

I'd like to point out that douchebags perform a vital function that I, for one, appreciate greatly. I doubt you could find anyone that would say that about Ted Rall. I'd say he's more like the stuff that forms around the rim of public toilets, only a slimier version of it.

Bullwinkle: Actually, I was thinking Ted Rall makes a great bad example. :)

Rall is a jackass, but his enablers in the mainstream media give him a pass because he says out loud what they believe inside. Sort of like a one-man Daily Kos.

I'll simply add my two cents by providing links from a brilliant set of columns on the larger issue here written by Thomas Sowell:

Column "Believing the True Believers," March 1, 2005
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20050301.shtml

When the propagandizing activities of educational institutions were recently criticized in this column, a defender of these institutions sent an e-mail, claiming that there was nothing wrong with pushing particular beliefs, if those beliefs were correct.

Violating my New Year's resolution to stop trying to reason with unreasonable people, I replied, asking if this man would feel all right, if he were a member of a jury, to vote after having heard only the prosecution's case or only the defendant's case.

His reply was that he would -- if the people presenting one side of the case were people he knew and trusted.

Column Two, "Tainted Media," February 18, 2005
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20050218.shtml

This is not about the past or ultimately even about Kerry or Bush. It is about the future of this country. A gullible public learning only what is filtered to them by a biased media is not a hopeful sign for the future of a democracy.

Column "Academic Freedom?" February 16, 2005
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20050215.shtml

In this era of dumbed-down education, when rhetoric has replaced both logic and evidence for many people, some think the issue is "freedom of speech." Indeed, some critics of Professor Churchill have been shouted down by his supporters, in the name of freedom of speech.

Too many people -- some of them judges -- seem to think that freedom of speech means freedom from consequences for what you have said. If you believe that, try insulting your boss when you go to work tomorrow. Better yet, try insulting your spouse before going to bed tonight.

While this column is protected by freedom of speech, that does not stop any editor from getting rid of it if he doesn't like what I say. But, even if every editor across the length and breadth of the country refused to carry this column, that would be no violation of my freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech does not imply a right to an audience. Otherwise the audience would have no right to its own freedom. Editors, movie producers, speakers' bureaus and other intermediaries have every right to decide what they will and will not present to their audiences.

The man's a genius. Simple, blunt and lethal. And seems to have more guts in his pinky nail than Rall and his ilk have in their entire body. Who's the brave one: The pussy, whiny little cartoonist who's been correctly dissed, or the black conservative scholar who is willing to buck the trend? I pick Sowell, hands down. I wouldn't use the PC epithet "African American" to describe Sowell; he doesn't like it. He prefers, "American," and if racial descriptions are applied, "black" is just fine by him. What do I base that on? Simple, every time Limbaugh goes on vacation, Walter Williams fills in for him, and he'll get Sowell on the phone for at least an hour each time. I've heard about 20 of these broadcasts, and Sowell and Williams have said that more than once.

I'd love to see Rall and Sowell argue this one. How about a debate?

KCTrio

Ted draws his cartoons by holding the pen with his forked tongue. Hence: Very bad, never true, seldom funny, but "laughable" in a way he didn't intend. He's obviously a very disturbed and angry man. He'll die a lonely death, to paraphrase one of George Carlin's funnier riffs: "Fat, drunk and alone on the floor of a filthy bathroom with his hand down the front of Al Franken's pants."

Ted Rall must be mentally retarded. I am serious. His cartoons seem like those of a little child...

Teddy:

Don't start that stuff. The moonbats will start popping up and saying he's a genius. You know, he's not mentally retarded, he's so damn smart, he's an abstract minimalist. You just aren't enlightened enough to get it.

Retarded? Yes. Asshole? Yes. Delusions of self importance? Yes. Media keeps giving him a podium? Yes. Asshole? Yes. Asshole? Yes. Asshole? Yes. Asshole? Yes.

KCTrio

Ted Rall and company are the best recruiting tools the VRWC could ever hope for. I say they not only need to keep it up, they need to get even more outrageous.

Putting aside the vileness of the cartoon for a moment, it has a liberal trope in it that I am so sick of. Hitler WAS NOT FUCKING DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED!! He was appointed Chancellor by that senile old fart Von Hindenburg. He held two elections in order to get a majority in the Reichstag, but they were fixed elections, with selected candidates. Can we PLEASE put this one to rest?

CraigC:

Of course we can't put this one to rest. Didn't you read the Sowell quote? "Violating my New Year's resolution to stop trying to reason with unreasonable people..." As long as people say it's true, and the media buys into it, and the echo chamber gets going, people will buy this shit.

Never forget, there are also nutjobs that try to say that the Nazi ovens and gas chambers weren't true, they were staged.

There's even more nuance in that crowd. First, you have people deny the Nazi horrors. But then, I've heard some say, "Why all the attention to the Jews? Don't you know that they only represented 50% of the people Hitler slaughtered in those ovens?"

What they don't mention is that while there's truth in that, they also leave out the percentage of the population that Jews lost. Proportionally, the number of Jews slaughtered was considerably higher. That doesn't make the murders of others less horrific, but the fact that others were slaughtered in great numbers doesn't take anything away from the terrible suffering of European Jews.

I even have a friend who is of Polish heritage that hated "Schindler's List" because of the above reasoning, that Spielburg was only telling half of the story. No, he was telling that story, not the other story. You want the other story told, go find that movie.

KCTrio

Hitler WAS NOT FUCKING DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED!! He was appointed Chancellor by that senile old fart Von Hindenburg. He held two elections in order to get a majority in the Reichstag, but they were fixed elections, with selected candidates. Can we PLEASE put this one to rest?

He was appointed Chancellor because it was Hindenburg's duty to do so. The Nazi party had the largest vote in the election and formed a coalition that would give them a majority. That's how proportional representation systems with more than two parties work.

It's true that the Nazis did not get a majority of the vote, but it's also true that the majority of Germans voted for totalitarianism -- the Commies got 10% of the vote.

Floyd:

There are several things you are leaving out of your short analysis. You jump from coalition building to Hitler getting his power through democratic means.

You fail to mention:

1) Article 48 of the German Constitution, which granted dictatorial powers to the president in times of national emergency. The President frequently evoked this clause, and it led to the downfall of the Republic.
2) The complex system of proportional voting and voting by list, which in its basic construct was designed to give minorities fair representation. Other democracies have different means of securing minority rights, such as our Bill of Rights. This inevitably led to a splintering of parties, 28 of them, competing for votes. This made it impossible to gain a majority in the Reichstag (remember, the Reichstag appointed the Cabinet and the Chancellor, and those would remain in power as long as the coalition majority remained in power). This little problem led to frequent changes in the cabinet and the Chancellor.
3) The German Constitution did not have a strong centralized government. German states kept a large degree of autonomy. The chief writer of the Constitution, Professor Hugo Preuss did not intend this. He wanted the States to be turned into Provinces (like Prussia) under a unified Germany. But this desire of his was voted down, and thus the separate states played power struggle games.
4) President Paul von Hindenburg was in his mid-80's and was senile by the time Hitler starting achieving real power. Even though Hindenburg hated Hitler, he underestimated Hitler's political skills and power-hungry nature.
5) The military was not subordinate to the government, but maintained another, separate point of political power. Lt. General Kurt von Schleicher was a major political power broker and close to Hindenburg, but Hitler also forged his own ties in the military.

The above conditions were in place when Hitler began his ascent to power.

Then, the elections of September 14, 1930 gave the Nazi party 18% of the vote and 107 (of the approximately 600) seats in the Reichstag. This made them go from the 9th to the 2nd largest party in Germany (remember, there were 28). This led to chaotic deal making and breaking, in real-time, fluid and ridiculous.

In 1932, Hindenburg held two presidential elections. A vote for Hindenburg was a vote for the continuation of the Republic (Hitler was one of many running against Hindenburg). Nazi and Communist thugs committed bloody acts of murder in their street fights during the campaigns. Many politicians were murdered during this time.

In the first of the two elections, March 13, 1932, Hitler got 30% of the vote while Hindenburg got 49.6% of the vote. Since Hindenburg didn't get a majority, there was a run-off; Hitler's share of the vote increased to 37%, but Hindenburg got 53%.

But the Reichstag remained in tenuous power struggle, despite these elections. Hindenburg constantly evoked the dictatorial powers accorded him under Article 48. He then tried to induce stability again and called for elections on July 31, 1932.

The Nazis won 230 seats out of 608; now they were the #1 party in the Reichstag. But they did not have enough votes to make Hitler Chancellor.

In the November 6, 1932 elections, the Nazis lost 34 seats in the Reichstag, now holding 196. And by this time, the public knew quite well of the Nazi party's virulent hate speech, violence and hard-right positions.

All of these elections led to a splintering of the Nazi party, and they started suffering from within.

Backroom deals gave the Nazi party the keys it would need to get back power. Schleicher was the last German Chancellor before Hitler held office for 57 days.

Hitler found an unlikely friend in a man named Franz von Papen, who was a former Chancellor (unseated by Schleicher) and wanted revenge. He invited Hitler's Nazi party to join him, and offered him to become Co-Chancellor with von Papen if Hitler joined him.

Hitler said, fuck you, I'll do it, but only if I get to be head of the government, but I'll give your little people some nice cushy Cabinet appointments.

During this time, Schleicher was incompetent beyond measure, so Hindenburg forced him to resign. Civil war was a very real possibility. Rumors spread that Schleicher was plotting a military coup with the intent to imprison Hindenburg and create a military dictatorship; and, Hitler had bribed Hindenburg's own son in supporting him. Hindenburg had no choice, against his better senile judgment, and appointed Hitler Chancellor under the false assumption that this move would SAVE the Republic.

So, Hitler was made Chancellor through deal-making, not Democracy. His party still had no majority in the Reichstag, even with the coalition with von Papen. The coalition of Nazis and Nationalists had 247 out of 583 Reichstag seats. Hitler flexed his new powers and began wiping out his competition (those that stood in his way of a majority). New elections were held on March 5, 1933.

von Papen proudly thought he had Hitler cornered, and claimed that "Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far in the corner that he'll squeak." On February 26, 1933, the Reichstag burned to the ground. Hitler blamed it on the Communist party, and used it to introduce an emergency order entitled "For the Protection of the People and the State." It read:

Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and associations; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are all permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed."

Hitler convinced Hindenburg (senile) to sign the damn thing. Following this order, the Nazis began a wave of murder, terror, torture and virtually eliminated any troublesome disagreement from any party. Goering was now in charge of the police.

Well, the March 5 elections yielded the Nazis 44% of the vote, still not a majority, but they got 288 seats in parliament. This added to the 52 seats of the Nationalists gave them an effective majority in the Reichstag.

Hitler's final master stroke came with the "Enabling Act," which would move power from the Reichstag to the Cabinet for 4 years, including the power of legislation, budget, approval of treaties and the initiation of constitutional amendments. Laws enacted by the Cabinet would be drafted by the Chancellor (Hitler).

Hitler needed 31 extra votes to get this act approved (it needed two/thirds of the seats), and if it got approved, the Reichstag would basically be eliminating itself and make Hitler dictator. The Social Democrats wouldn't submit to Hitler's terror (the tool he used to get his 31 votes), but the Catholic Center party bought into his lies (sound familiar? he used terror and violence to persuade the Soc*alist Democrats, he used deceit to win over the Catholic Center party).

On March 23, 1933, the Enabling Act came up for vote, and Nazi storm troopers surrounded the building. Legislators had to pass through this ring of thugs to enter the building. While voting for the act, the storm troopers shouted "Full powers or else! We want the bill, or fire and murder!"

The Social*st Democrats were the only party to fight Hitler on this vote, but it really didn't matter.

Now, does this really sound like the rise of a democratically elected politician? Please.

KCTrio

Note:

Credit for most of the above post goes to Steve Kangas, a political journalist for "Votelink" out of Boulder, Colorado. Mr. Kangas has his Bachelor of Arts in Russian Studies from U of C Santa Cruz and served in the US Army in Berlin as a Russian Communications Spec*alist from 1982 to 1986.

His sources include:

William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," Simon & Schuster, 1960, and
Alan Bullocks's "Hitler: A Study in Tyrrany," HarperCollins, 1962.

Most of my summation is a paraphrase of Mr. Kangas's essay.

Loose shit, but worthwhile shit.

KCTrio

Hitler's rise is about as "democratic" as modern day commie creeps like Rall care to be. They know the public is too smart (and that's not saying a whole lot) to buy into their crap without behind the scenes skullduggery and vote rigging.

"You know, he's not mentally retarded, he's so damn smart, he's an abstract minimalist. "

Moonbat Savant

I love that minimalist crap. So, he's SO good, producing quality work bores him to tears.

LauraW:

I love it, "Moonbat Savant." Now the only challenge left is to figure out who's on the list. I'll add Howard Dean. Granted, he's no minimalist (oratory-wise), but with a little stretch of the definition, one could consider him quite capable of primal screams, which is rather minimalist, in a peripheral sort of way.

Add to the list, PLEASE. Your powers of creativity are far beyond mine. I beg you.

Thanks for the minimalist post.

KCTrio

KCTrio, I have read Shirer and much of what you wrote is familiar to me. Yes, there were extenuating circumstances and the elections were tainted by violence.

But there are plenty of other countries where the highest officer can be elected without 50% of the vote. (Remember a guy named Bill Clinton who took 43% of the vote in a three-way election?) And there are plenty of other countries which have many political parties, so that splinter parties hold the key to electoral coalitions. No one accuses Schroeder or Sharon of being illegitimate because they rose to power by partnering with small weird parties.

The Nazi rise to power was a failure of German democracy. The Germans had their chance to repudiate totalitarianism and failed. This was at a time when the American Nazi and Communist parties polled, what, a tenth of a percent?

Even the non-totalitarian German parties had nasty odors of fascism. Shirer noted that one of the major parties (I forget who specifically but I think the Christian Democrats) had their own brownshirt-SA-wannabes.

Yes, Floyd, I agree with your statements regarding coalition building in other democracies. America is rather unique in the fact that we only have two major parties; most European democracies and Israel have multi-party democracies. Even in the US, we have coalition building between our two parties and within a majority party to get legislation passed.

But there is one key difference between the coalitions that you've cited and Hitler's:

He did it using terror. I don't recall these other countries using such means, unless you want to start stretching the definition of "terror" to include the President of the US making calls pressuring congressmen to vote for this or that legislation if he promises to back theirs.

I'd aver that your statement:

The Nazi party had the largest vote in the election and formed a coalition that would give them a majority. That's how proportional representation systems with more than two parties work.

leaves out important details such as Hitler's end-game, his reign of terror in forming the coalition and that preceding the votes to get himself appointed Chancelor. And you also leave out the important detail that Hindenburg was senile. All of these things make Hitler's rise to power unique.

Your are obviously a very wise man, and I didn't try to nullify your observation, I simply felt compelled to provide these other details. Why? Because people use the statement that Democracy produced Hitler to somehow undermine Democracy in general. That's a wicked little trick.

What democracies need are institutions and a willingness on the part of the populace to respect the law and embrace the form of government. Those institutions take decades to build. Germany didn't have those in place prior to its depression, while America did. So it was only natural that a defeated Germany coupled with economic malaise could produce a Hitler since Germany didn't have solid institutions in place prior to their economy getting the shit kicked out of it (like ours and the rest of the world's).

Heck, I've heard people call FDR a dictator, but that's moral equivalence. Yes, FDR did a lot of power-grabs, but he was no dictator.

Great discussion, though off-topic.

Now, will you contribute to the yet-to-be-created Moonbat Savant list? I would love your opinion.

Thanks for your kind feedback.

Best regards,

KCTrio

Ted should learn history. Hitler didn't build the autobahn:

http://german.about.com/library/blgermyth08.htm

It's nice to see that Ted isn't selective about the fascist propaganda he swallows.

Hey KCTrio,

Wasn't Steve Kangas a moonbat savant? I remember a Steve Kangas who was a poli sci student at UC Santa Cruz, jousted with various people on Usenet, and was found dead with a gun in his mouth in the office building of Richard Scaife's newspaper.

Is that the same Kangas? Or has my memory totally failed me?

Anyway, my constructive suggestion for bat-vant:

Josh Marshall.

Or his special sailor dog.

Whichever you prefer.

Yep, same guy.

The essay on Hitler that I paraphrased was from his pre-lefty years (he wrote it in the '80s as far as I can tell).

I wouldn't dare quote from his work from the '90s before giving it a very careful review.

Regardless, he's no idiot. Though his turn from right to left was pretty extreme.

Best regards, and thanks for contribution to the Moonbat Savant list.

KCTrio

Floyd:

My loose shit factor has plummeted faster than I'd even thought (and I keep a measuring stick; sort of a measuring tool that consists of a pencil and a sheet of paper).

I thought it was pretty safe to paraphrase his essay, considering his current mortal status, but I still had to give credit to the man, dead or alive.

I would really like to know what was the tipping point in his life to make him go so far to the left. His own writing prior to his conversion was lucid and well researched.

Sorry for the loose shit.

KCTrio

The loose shit never ends.

He says on his own "About Me" page that:

Going from the Army to USCS was like going from conservative heaven to liberal heaven at warp speed.

Which happened in 1986. So the essay must have been written prior to then.

As I said, loose shit.

I do feel pretty sorry for the guy. Was he murdered, or did he commit suicide? The Web's crawling with theories on this.

KCTrio

Honestly, why bother with Rall? To be fair, do most liberals even claim this pathetic loser as their own? It's a waste of energy to even reply to him. BTW, KCTrio, are you in KC, just wondering b/c I am.

Bob:

KCTrio stands for the (Nat) King Cole Trio, my musical hero. Both his trio work and his solo work. But I like his trio work the best (pure jazz, invented bebop).

I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and have a brother in KC, MO. He drove here for Christmas right during that ice storm, and got stuck in Paducah, KY for a day. On his way back, he drove right into that ice strom that blasted Kansas City in early January.

But I currently reside in Florida. I'm enjoying 60 degree weather at night, 75 degree days, with clear skies and low humidity. Ask me in July. It'll be quite different. Yeah, I know it's hotter up there, but with the intensity of the sun, the high humidity, and nights that never drop below 85 degrees, your summers are much more tolerable than ours. But you live in a great town, no doubt about it.

As to Rall, I couldn't agree more.

Best regards,

KCTrio

Huh. In the recent past, wasn't this guy saying that if anyone could find a left-wing parallel to the hateful statements of right-wingers in the blogosphere, he'd eat his own head or some such nonsense? Ladies and gentlemen, I think we've found a winner.

I guess introspection doesn't rank very high on the moonbat list of virtues. Not as high as compulsive Nazi references and amoral, self-loathing cultural relativism, anyway.

utron:

This is rather gross, I'll warn you, but it's fitting and only describes insects, so...

If Rall said that he'd eat his own head, I think you are on to something. Being self-righteous and insane, he'd probably eat someone else's head. With that leap in logic, let's christen him:

Mantis religiosa

Here's the mating ritual of this type of Mantis (of which there are over 1,500 types). I take this from Cecil Adams, author of the Straight Dope column. The full column can be found here:

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_007.html

"The male usually tries to approach the female undetected, to seize her unawares, but often he is seen, and the female then catches and eats him, usually beginning at the head. The loss of his head, however, galvanizes the male into action, and he can successfully complete copulation without it. [The male climbs on the female's back and assumes the position before his partner starts to dig in.] This behaviour pattern, in which she devours the male, is of obvious advantage to the female, and to the species, because she is able to put to good use an otherwise worthless mass of protein."

"If a male praying mantis is decapitated the body will immediately assume the reflex attitudes which are characteristic of copulation." In other words, we are talking about a species that has become dependent not just on cannibalism but on S&M to perpetuate itself.

So in this example, we must assume that Rall is an insect, is female, and is into S&M/cannibalism all for the purpose of procreation.

I see some connections here, rather tenuous, but hopefully funny to some.

Great observation, utron.

Best regards,

KCTrio

It's like he's perpetually running the Family Circus "Billy's drawing the comic today" gag without telling anyone.

That's so funny because it's true.

It's sad that something so utterly useless as this "cartoon" is taken seriously enough to even merit a comment. But since it is...

While we could nitpick details as in some of the discussion above, I think it's true that basically none of the "points" made the frames of the cartoon hold up to any serious thought as a comparison between Hitler and Bush. There is no logic, no creativity, only sickness. For example the idea that Hitler won "most of his campaigns" is a bit of a joke when you look at things like the Russian campaign and his eventual defeat with much of Germany bombed into oblivion.

But most of all the lack of logic and sick implication of the last frame: Killing yourself as is not taking responsibility. If is the ultimate avoidance of responsibility.

Sorry, the last sentence should read: "It is the ultimate avoidance of responsibility."

Chuck:

Great stuff. Now, I have two questions for you:

1) Do you have a name for our Moonbat Savant list?
2) Do you think Rall is a Mantis religiosa?
3) Where's Joe?

Thanks, by the way, for shining a little reason into this thread, to you and everyone else. This thread has everything I like; humor, history, commentary on and of of the subject matter, and no pissing contests.

KCTrio

I'll concede the Bush {binary operator} Hitler thing if it means we get to flay Ted Rall slowly and with exquisite attention to detail.

Actually, what's the fucking point? Rall's like those useless wankers Gilbert and George who shat on some cardboard, took pictures of it, and called it 'art'. He's a silly little boy who can't get any attention from real people, so he's gone the shock avenue. Maybe if we ignore him he'll go away.

Of course if I ever meet him in person I will punch his lights out.

You DON'T want him to "go away" - you want to somehow encourage him and get him favorable (or at least neutral )coverage in the MSM.

With Rall stuck to their shoes like old chewing gum, liberals/democrats will always be fighting off their backs. Dingbats like this are pure "electoral gold" if presented and managed properly.

The wonderful thing is - clowns like this are so jam packed with hubris they never realize the kind of damage they do. This boob could be another Michael Moore/Hollywood classlib/dem Kryptonite bomb with a little encouragment.

Rall is mana from heaven if we are sharp enough to recognize him as such.

Ted Rall lost me completely when I saw his infamous "Terror Widows" strip, which depicted relatives of 9/11 victims as greedy attention-seekers.

I even wrote him an e-mail, and explained that he'd broken the iron law of satire: Always kick upwards, and never kick the victims.

But apparently he ignored my advice. And then cartoonists like Oliphant and Danziger published their racist caricatures of Condi Rice... what is this madness, this self-destructive drive to debase one's own talent and character, and alienate readers at the same time? Is it a symptom of the imminent demise of newspaper cartoons?

It makes me sad.

-A.R.Yngve

Read the section at the bottom, "About Ted Rall", if you want a good laugh.

Dave:

Unfortunately, I just took your wonderful advice and read his "About Ted Rall" paragraph. It's below, in all of its glory:

Ted Rall writes for a generation unjustly maligned as a pack of lazy slackers. He voices Generation X's frustration and resentment at the excesses of the baby boomers who've left a spent America in their mammoth wake. Ted's irreverent attitude and deft use of satire combine to make his work as fun to read as it is thought-provoking. And Ted's ability to connect with current culture gives his writing an of-the-moment perspective that is edgy and sharp.

I'm a Gen-Xer/Baby-Boom straddler (actually, depending on where you draw the line, I'm at the tail end of the baby boom generation or the beginning of the generation X), I'll admit, but this really is frightening.

In this little paragraph, you find chest-pounding, dissing all baby boomers, and best of all...a nice little trick to shield himself against anyone that says he's any idiot or not funny. See, he connects with Gen-Xers, and therefore you just don't get it if you aren't one, no matter how accurate your critique is. And if you are a Gen-Xer and don't find his deft use of satire thought-provoking, well, you're just dumb, too.

I don't know if this is a good laugh or frightening. Frightening because this is what his syndicator came up with to explain his message. I suppose they did the best they could.

KCTrio

I'm an X-er. Is it OK for me to say I don't find his stuff funny?

Sonetka:

Well, first you'll have to answer a few questions:

1) Are you unjustly maligned as a lazy slacker?
1a) If yes, who unjustly maligned you?
1b) If no, are you a lazy slacker, or are you not a lazy slacker?

You see the problem with this. Not very good wording in this first go around, but that's because the text about Ted assumes you are not a lazy slacker and also assumes your are unjustly maligned.

For conveniece, we'll assume you are not a lazy slacker (you're productive, hard working, etc.), and that you have been unjustly maligned.

Next round of questions. For these we must assume that it's a given fact that baby boomers left a spent America in their mammoth wake (my aren't those fiery words):

2) Do you feel resentment and frustration because of this mammoth wake?
2a) If yes, do you believe that Ted Rall adequately voices your frustration and resentment?
2b) If no, where does Ted Rall fall short of adequately expressing your frustration and resentment?

Same problem. These questions don't work very well because we must assume you harbor resentment and frustration towards your baby boomer elders. So, we haven't even touched upon the concept of "funny." We've only seen "voice" and "Gen X-ers feel frustration and resentment."

But to be fair, an editorial cartoonist doesn't have to be funny, but it helps, doesn't it? At the very least it should be thought-provokingly funny, at least sometimes. This man is no Honore Daumier, that's to be sure.

Let's try a third round of questions.

3) Do you find Ted's work thought-provoking?
3a) If yes, what thoughts does he provoke?
3b) If no, how could Ted be more thought-provoking.

This doesn't work either. We must assume for these questions that Ted's work has an irreverent attitude and he makes deft use of satire. We must also assume that this combination of skills makes his work fun to read. Fun doesn't equal funny, but we're getting kind of closer, I guess. We've got the first three letters of the word "funny."

Oh shit; why bother? The rest of this just assumes that Ted has an ability to connect with current culture and this gives his writing an of-the-moment perspective that is edgy and sharp.

Where's the funny?

Ted Rall doesn't even claim to be funny. He does claim a whole lot, though. None of which I find in his work.

Unless you consider Hitler's suicide as taking responsibility for his actions and the implication that Bush should do the same "thought provoking."

What an asshole.

KCTrio

I find his work immensely thought-provoking.

First I wonder why The Smart People (tm) haven't noticed that he can't draw.

If I were him, my little bio would read, 'Ted's crude drawings reflect his frustration and resentment at modern society, and the fact that he draws with his feet.'

Then I wonder how much money he makes and if it would be worth it to do his schtick, but better, and take The Smart People (tm)'s money.

thank you, i just wanted to give a greeting and tell you i like your blog very much.

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