Tikrit Teddy
By Michael P. Tremoglie (05/11/04)
Cartoonist, columnist, radio host, and agitprop Ted Rall, published a cartoon essentially calling Pat Tillman an idiot and murderer. It outraged a lot of people. Rall said he received a lot of email saying he was a traitor, he was no good, he was garbage etc.
Rall may, indeed, be some of these things. However, more than those things, Rall is merely a fool. All you have to do to learn this is to read some things he wrote.
Tikrit Teddy wrote an article about Afghanistan for the Village Voice in December 2001. The prescient Tikrit Teddy wrote, “ that if the Bushalopes and the Annanites are to be believed, a New Democratic Afghanistan will be cobbled together from the Hekmatyars and Dostums and Rabbanis, all united under the banner of an 87-year-old king who owes more to Fellini than to Shah Mohammed. And get this: After the Afghan parliament gets together, the burkas will come off, the Fairway will open up next to the main gate of the Kabul bazaar, and that Internet-famous Unocal pipeline project, dormant for far too long, will begin sucking Kazakh crude out from under the Caspian and into the Pakistani port of Karachi. Next mission: bombing Iraq into capitalism.”
It is 2004; None of Tikrit Teddy’s predictions came true. There is no pipeline from Unocal to the Caspian Sea. There is democracy in Afghanistan. Women do have more rights.
Rall also wrote that the victims of the Columbine High School shootings were Nazis. He once Said Paul Wellstone was assassinated said wrote a “satirical” - for lack of a better word - piece, which was a recruitment advertisement for Iraqi resistance forces. He actually wants Iraqis to kill American soldiers.
This liberal icon has also said that Americans committed genocide in Afghan and vehemently opposed the Taliban War. Yet, he wanted troops sent to Haiti to preserve the Marxist dictatorship of Aristide. Amazingly, Rall has never complained about American intervention in Bosnia.
After reading his cartoon about Tillman, I developed an idea for a cartoon about Rall. I am going to call it The Adventures of Tikrit Teddy.
The first edition will be four panels. The first panel will show Rall telling his boss that he has to go meet with Saddam Hussein and his boss says, “Saddam Hussein?”
The second panel shows Rall replying, “ You got it!” and walking out the door. His boss just has this quizzical look.
The third panel portrays Rall and Hussein greeting each other with a hug.
In the fourth panel Hussein asks Rall, “ Have you he received all those oil vouchers I sent?” Rall replies, “ Saddam, you were $2 million short.”
Given the funds flow from the corrupt UN oil-for-food program to “peace” activists, which I wrote about, one can only wonder how valid this cartoon may be.
Rall’s cartoon about Tillman was remarkably similar to a rather vacuous essay written for the University of Massachusetts student newspaper, The Daily Collegian. Graduate student Renee Gonzalez wrote this essay claiming many of the same things Rall claimed - Tillman was an idiot, he was a killer, etc.
Gonzalez tried to rationalize her essay. So did Rall. He explained his cartoon by saying that people who volunteered to go to Afghanistan and Iraq were used and were in some cases malevolent. It is a lie that they died for the country, Rall said.
The most amazing thing about Rall is that his fatuous material is syndicated. If Rall is a fool – and clearly he is – what does that say about Universal Syndicate the service that syndicates his silly stuff. What does that say about the newspapers that pay for his soporific schtick.
Is Ted Rall syndicated and published because he is popular? Is Rall really more popular than the Mallard Fillmore cartoon, which is a conservative version of Doonesbury. Fillmore is not as circulated, yet his cartoon is infinitely more sophisticated.
Liberal bias in the mainstream media is a proven fact. There are studies, empirical data and anecdotal evidence that confirm this. However, someone like Rall is not even representative of a liberal media. Rall represents the commie, lunatic liberal ideology of MoveOn. Org and the like. He is the black helicopter liberal.
If Rall’s cartoon is popular, more popular than say the Mallard Fillmore cartoon, then that is a sad commentary about the American public. If Rall is not very popular, yet syndicated by Universal and purchased by major news publications anyway, then that is a sad commentary about the management of Universal Syndicate, and the management and editorial staffs of the mainstream media.
Somehow it seems the latter is more likely true than the former.
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