What do you do when you're not very bright, want to be a cartoonist, but can't draw, and hate the country you live in.
Well, if you're Ted Rall you do a cartoon like this...
There's nothing to endear you to leftists than using false information in order to offend soldiers, Christians, and just about anyone else in America who doesn't keep their head wedged between their buttocks.
But why would he do something so offensive?
It's simple. Leftists like Rall don't know what they like anymore, they only know what they hate. And what they hate right now is America and all the things that make it great and powerful, namely its free society, its all volunteer military, and its Judeo-Christian societal foundation.
And yet Rall will probably be the first person to declare anyone who criticizes him of using 'hate speech.'
Hat Tip to Newsbusters.
Well, if you're Ted Rall you do a cartoon like this...
There's nothing to endear you to leftists than using false information in order to offend soldiers, Christians, and just about anyone else in America who doesn't keep their head wedged between their buttocks.But why would he do something so offensive?
It's simple. Leftists like Rall don't know what they like anymore, they only know what they hate. And what they hate right now is America and all the things that make it great and powerful, namely its free society, its all volunteer military, and its Judeo-Christian societal foundation.
And yet Rall will probably be the first person to declare anyone who criticizes him of using 'hate speech.'
Hat Tip to Newsbusters.
6 comments:
It'll be a wonderful day when Raaallph is found with a self-inflicted gunshot through the back of his brain(less)pan.
Ted Rall is an A Number One Asshat.
I don't wish him death. I want him and all of the leftist assclowns who have been backstabbing, shrieking, undermining, and pretending they are brave resistors to an oppressive regime get to live a long time.
I want them to live to see a generation or two come after them who not only never lived through the Sixties, but yawns at its very mention.
I want them to see documentaries on the Killing Fields, Sendero Luminoso, Saddam Hussein, the Cold War, and Castro's Cuba done after the reporters, editors, producers, and program managers who defended any or all of the above have retired.
I want them to live to see declassified the lists of American citizens who willingly placed themselves on Castro's or the USSR's payroll (pre-1992, it was the same thing), and I want them to see many of their ideological heroes there.
Most of all, I want them to live to watch 20th Century Leftism become some old-fashioned, quaint, and hard-to-understand thing like flagpole sitting.
Leftist, Leftist, Leftist, the root of all evil. Give me a break you freaks!
Leftists aren't the root of all evil.
They are simply the root of all that is wrong in the Western World. How can anyone be correct when their idea of reasoned debate is to grievously insult the people protecting the Leftist's right to exist?
Modern leftism is counter-evolutionary. How else can one describe a belief system that actively supports its own destruction?
Thus endeth the lesson.
First of all this is a humor blog (correct?). Some responses you receive are “insulting” because it is funny. You insult Leftists all the time in an attempt to be funny. They can do the same to you.
This cartoon offended you. So what? Your humor posts offend me.
BTW- Have you ever heard of a Christian Democrat? They exist in droves. Even if I did not believe in God, is it not our “duty” as good Christians to have tolerance?
Here is my take on the conservative vs. liberal mind set. It is much less abrasive than your gloom and doom depiction of liberals. I’m sure you will post it and dissect it like you do all my responses but that’s ok maybe we can both learn something.
It may surprise you that I am not a far left individual. I actually agree that a faaaaaaaar left political mind set is counter-productive. It may also surprise you that liberals are actually more in the center of the political landscape. Let me explain my take on political extremes:
WARNING: THIS IS GOING TO BE PAINFULLY LONG. HOPEFULLY YOU CAN MAKE IT TO THE END.
On the far left, socialists and communists believe all businesses should be nationalized, owned and run by the State. No one hears this from liberals, Democrats or Greens; nevertheless they're called the "extremist left." Pure socialism and communism are unworkable; everyone knows it.
On the far right, libertarians and "free market" Republicans believe virtually all government functions should be privatized. We hear it every day from the Republicans who control our government. They're even privatizing much of national defense (e.g., logistics, food service, even some security functions); and they're profiteering from it. Pure "free market" capitalism is unworkable; conservatives just don't realize it.
In the center are liberals. They're not extremists; what a shock! They realize for some things free markets are best and for others only government-regulated or government-run work.
Unfortunately, Republicans have successfully redefined the "middle" as the "extremist liberal left." The country has moved so far to the right that, practically, there is no "left," much less "far left," left.
Now here is where it gets sticky:
Liberals seem to know instinctively that government solutions are required to solve certain problems. But they don't understand these principles and so don't communicate them, leaving us open to charges of just wanting unwarranted "big government." That's made it too easy for conservatives to convince too many voters that liberals are the evil that's responsible for the problems. Let’s look at some examples:
Taxes on dividends and capital gains
Conservative: "Dividends and capital gains are double-taxed. It's immoral to require individuals to pay taxes on earnings that are already taxed."
Liberal: First, time is money. It's immoral to require that people who invest their time to make money pay taxes, but not those who invest their money to make money. It's class warfare to make those who work for a wage pay for the infrastructure, courts, police & fire protection, and national defense that make it possible for investors to make money. Second, dividends and capital gains are not double-taxed because the law defines a corporation as an "individual" that is legally separate from individual stockholders to shield them from liability. Because the taxes apply to distinctly different "individuals," there's no double-taxation. Note that there is triple-taxation when people pay income taxes, Social Security taxes, and sales taxes on the same income.
Human Capital Gains Tax Cuts
Conservative: Completely unaware of the concept.
Liberal: Award the same kinds of investment incentives to individuals and their children that corporations have enjoyed. Instead of "capital gains tax cuts" for those who invest in corporations, provide "human capital gains tax cuts" for those who invest in themselves.
• Create education investment tax credits, similar to R&D investment tax credits for corporations.
• Create education depletion allowances. Little becomes obsolete faster than education. Such allowances make more sense than giving corporations "oil depletion allowances" for extracting oil from public lands.
• Allow education expense depreciation so individuals can write-off education expenses against future income. Now, even when deductible, education is expensed in years in which there’s no income due to attending school full time.
• Apply these incentives to learning related to retooling for a different career field, not just to enhancing skills relevant to current employment, because so many are being forced to totally change their field of employment.
• Give all of these tax credit status, rather than making them tax deductions. This will treat those with lower incomes as favorably as those with higher incomes.
In other words, provide incentives for people to invest in themselves. Increase the positive externality effects associated with education; that is, we'll all benefit from such policies because we’re all more productive when working with those with better skills.
Our economy depends on a better educated and capable workforce to provide the knowledge capital necessary for the country to prosper. Let’s foster the ability of individuals to do their part in our economic and national recovery by treating individuals as favorably as we do corporations. What a concept.
Corporate taxes
Conservative: Corporations shouldn't pay taxes at all because that expense is passed on to consumers and it's ultimately individuals who pay the taxes.
Liberal: Corporations selling products and services require the support of common infrastructure and government services. The market can only efficiently allocate resources when the costs of supporting the creation of those products and services is built into all the products people purchase. Individuals in turn pay sales tax to pay for the services that support their own economic activity.
Minimum Wage & Unions
Conservative: A minimum wage is unwarranted government interference because wages should be determined by market forces. A minimum wage interferes with market regulation of labor supply and demand. Unions also interfere with the free market and no employee should be required to pay dues.
Liberal: There is no free market for labor due to prior interference by the Federal Reserve Board. Whenever the Fed perceives unemployment is too low, it raises interest rates to slow the economy and reduce demand for labor. Unions are also needed to at least partially make up for the Fed's manipulation of labor demand, though the current large excess labor supply now undermines union strength. In addition, capital organizes itself in corporations and a labor union counterpart is a necessary counterbalance. Corporations are virtual dictatorships, unions are democracies and just as messy to manage. "Right to work" laws are simply a means to undermine union strength by letting some employees "free ride" on those who do pay dues; the equivalent in our democracy would be letting people opt out of paying taxes.
Note: Official unemployment is vastly understated, 6% official unemployment is over 10%, if we only include those who have given up and those working part-time but wanting more work. Including other not fully engaged categories that provide sources of labor (on-call, "disappeared," temporaries, contract workers, and self-employed but underemployed), slack in the labor force at more like 20 to 30%. The number of mainly low-wage temporaries has tripled since the early 1980s. The Fed game of "musical chairs" keeps 10 to 20% slack in the workforce all the time, which means that the added value of any one worker is zero and wages at the bottom approach subsistence level. This depresses all wages, not just those at the bottom.
"Free Trade"
Conservative: "Free trade" and offshoring of jobs is good for the U.S. because it supplies consumers with inexpensive goods and services. The market will take care of itself because productivity gains will eventually lead to job creation and workers will learn to adapt. Poor countries benefit because it raises them out of poverty.
Liberal: The short-term effect is inexpensive goods; but long-term, competition from low wage labor undermines overall market purchasing power, increasing cost pressure for more offshoring and a downward economic spiral in a world economy with a virtually unlimited supply of cheap labor. People eventually find new jobs, but at a significantly lower wage; and this drives down pay for workers with similar skills profiles. Workers in undemocratic low-wage countries don't benefit because individuals don't value and "purchase" clean environment and workplace safety, governments do. If a government isn't a democracy, it doesn't represent the interests of its citizens.
"Moral values" are more important than economics
Conservative: Citizens should vote for their conservative Christian individual moral values.
Liberal: There's more to moral values than individual behavior. Values include access to education and health care, freedom from poverty, freedom from war, and protecting God's creation. Values include how we treat the least fortunate among us.
Note: This is especially true because many are less fortunate because of a Federal Reserve policy that assures that there are always more people than there are jobs.
Note: Government policies create winners and losers, even when there are net gains for the whole. The winners don't share their gains with the losers; either the losers totally lose or their losses are partially offset by government support, that is, the winners privatize the gains and socialize the costs onto everyone.
Note: If Republicans can keep Christians thinking about a "threat to their afterlife," they calculate that Christians won't notice that they're being taken advantage of financially in this life.
This quote explains the alliance:
"Religion has always had one very useful role,
it keeps the poor from killing the rich." Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821)
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Conservative: Republicans Endorse what they call "fiscally responsible policies ... based on ... cost-benefit analyses." They believe that if the benefits obtained by correcting a safety problem don't exceed the costs a company incurs to correct the safety problem, then it should not be done. They use the same logic for arguing against pollution controls to maintain clean air and clean water.
Liberal: On the surface, this sounds reasonable. But it's not. Here's why: "Cost-benefit" analysis is valid when an individual decides whether to spend to obtain benefits: the person who saves the costs loses the benefit. But it's not valid when a corporation decides whether to spend to protect public health and safety. That’s because the corporation saves costs and increases profit, but the public loses the benefit. That is, some people get to die. But no one gets jail time, much less the death penalty. (Examples: The Pinto gas tank; 55,000 Vioxx deaths even though company studies revealed problems years earlier.) Corporate cost-benefit analysis privatizes profits and socializes costs; it's an insidious form of the socialism that libertarians despise. Socialism is a no-no when it comes to redistributing income, no matter what the social good. But it's OK to redistribute costs, no matter what the social harm. More importantly the problem with cost-benefit analysis is that it's “people in service of the market,” rather than “the market in service of people.” William Greider notes in his book, Who Will Tell the People, that "cost-benefit" analysis has the "whiff of fascism."
Abortion
Conservative: Abortion is an immoral taking of life and all abortions should be banned.
Liberal: There must be a balance between concern for the life and health of the mother and concern for the fetus. A bill including protections for the life and health of the mother could pass constitutional muster and reduce the number of abortions; conservatives were more interested in keeping the issue alive than in making progress. In addition, when the State interferes with the decision of the mother to prevent an abortion, then it takes on a moral responsibility for supporting and raising the child.
WhaT does it mean to be "liberal"?
Conservatives have distorted it to mean soft-headed and naive at best, ignorant and stupid at worst. They conflate liberals and the "left," even calling liberals socialists and communists.
In response, many have taken to referring to themselves as "progressive." But that's a weak label compared to "liberal," a word rooted in liberty. I won't shy from it. I'm proud of it.
That's because to be liberal is about getting beyond "left" and "right." It's the opposite of ideologue; it's not limited or bound by dogmas. It's "open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others." It's "broad-minded" and "open-minded" in understanding the world and identifying what works. For economics this means sometimes free market, sometimes government, sometimes a combination.
It's intelligent and practical, not socialist, to apply government (collective) solutions when privatizing (individualistic) solutions are doomed to fail.
It's even mandated in the U.S. Constitution. In some cases we can't "form a more perfect Union," "promote the general Welfare" or maintain the economic power to "provide for the common defense" without collective solutions that consider "the whole" instead of "the parts."
Liberal is about creating community. Collective solutions value community and honor people's desire to belong to something larger than themselves. Liberal principles comprehend that, to a large extent, we're all in this together. And they comprehend that, in some situations, we'd better be in this together, otherwise we're courting disaster. Soldiers on the war front know this; they support each other because they know that "there, but for the Grace of God, go I."
Our society values radical individualism and fears the collective. But unless we want to stand by and watch our social and economic systems fail, we'd best get over this fear of collective action.
Beyond this irrational fear, libertarians abhor the idea of society putting any kind of restraints or burden on individuals. They maintain they are protecting the freedom of individuals. They say that it is tyranny for individuals to be taxed to provide a benefit to others in our society; they say that, after all, government has the power to lock you up if you don't pay your taxes. (Never mind that, as noted above, they have no problem with individuals or corporations externalizing and redistributing costs onto individuals as part of the population at large).
But the truth is that they really don't care about the well-being of individuals. Their interest is actually in requiring that all individuals remain subject to risk, even if society decides they want to mitigate the risk to individuals ... such as providing a social safety net or health care.
They are fundamentally opposed to allowing a democracy to even decide the issue and actually are even opposed democracy itself. They oppose collective or governmental solutions to a society's problems, even when individualistic or privatized solutions are doomed to fail as described above. Their individualistic ideology denies the right of a society to effectively address its problems. This is the real tyranny.
True freedom is about more than the ability to take action; it's more accurately about the ability to take effective action. Libertarians and economic conservatives would rather have someone who wants to exit a room be free to run into walls than be truly free and able to find the door.
Mahatma Gandi described why the country is failing under Republican leadership. "The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity and worship without sacrifice."
Thus endeth the lesson.
Yumping yiminy!
I was expecting you to start going on about your place in Biblical prophecy like that "Ahmadinejad" guy who drops off long Michener length comments like that.
It's obvious that you're not happy here.
So I, in my benevolent munificence, grant you your freedom.
Fly, be free!
Start your own blog!
You can call it "Under The Bridge With AnonyTroll."
Let somebody cut & paste long talking points memos in your comments section.
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