By the way, I am not offended by this cartoon. I try not to let such blatant ignorance bother me.
Excuse me, what have I “retreated” from? I said that Tillman was possibly naive, but that I didn’t know what his motives were. He did go to Iraq, didn’t he? There’s no question at all that a lot of the troops who bought into Bush’s bullshit were naive kids, susceptable to “patriotic” rhetoric and they went like lambs to the slaughter into an unnecessary war. {i]This* is a valid point for political satire. Bush abused his privelege as CiC and betrayed the good faith of spldiers who thought their president wouldn’t lie about national security. They were wrong. Bush did lie, and 600+ people have died for nothing in Iraq. They had good intentions maybe, but they still died for nothing.
No. He specifically refused to give any interviews or make any public statements, because he didn’t want any special treatment. Since his death, his parents have continued his silence because they don’t feel that his death is any more important than the death of any other soldier over there.
It’s the media that’s gone nuts over this.
Tillman died in Afghanistan. Get a fucking clue, could you? You’re worse than this Rall scumbag.
Oh yeah - and Tillman is the one who is “naive”. :rolleyes:
As far as the cartoon goes -
The first panel takes a kid who Rall does not know, and accuses him of being a racist and murderer. Because he joined the military.
The second panel contains a direct lie. Rall avers that al-Queda was not in Afghanistan.
The third panel contains the usual left-wing paranoid rant about oil.
And the fourth panel calls a fallen soldier, who sacrificed fame and fortune to do something he felt to be more significant, an “idiot”.
Gee, who could find that offensive?
Or just what manhattan said.
My nephew is currently in Afghanistan, and recently won his second Bronze Star there. I hope nobody slaps this Rall ass upside the head with a rifle for implying that my nephew is a racist, murderer, and fool.
I just don’t hope it very hard.
Regards,
Shodan
Post #1: I think it makes some defensible points about Bush and the exploitation of patriotism and US soldiers. I’m not sure that it was appropriate to call Tillman an “idiot,” though. Naive, maybe, but “idiot” is over the top and really derails his other points which I am sympathetic too.
Post #2: *I think Rall could have made his points better by holding up Tillman as an example of someone with good (and perhaps naive) intentions who was exploited for political reasons.
Of course, even that would have more impact if Pat Tillman had been killed in Iraq instead of Afghanistan.
Insulting those soldiers who have been KIA just pisses people off and detracts from any greater point.*
Post #3: I am probably one of the dozen or so most anti-war/anti-Bush posters on this board and I started this thread in order to denounce it.
Looks like a retreat to me.
Post #4 There’s no question at all that a lot of the troops who bought into Bush’s bullshit were naive kids, susceptable to “patriotic” rhetoric and they went like lambs to the slaughter into an unnecessary war. {i]This is a valid point for political satire. Bush abused his privelege as CiC and betrayed the good faith of spldiers who thought their president wouldn’t lie about national security. They were wrong.*
This is so highly qualified and loaded with your assumptions that it is meaningless.
I remember a Ted Rall cartoon in the year before 9/11 when he was insulting the C.I.A. of the previous administration for trying to blame all the world’s ills on some nobody named Osama Bin Laden.
I tried looking it up in the archives and gave up.
I wonder how he felt on 9/12?
Just another vote for the “Let’s make an exception to the ‘tolerant liberal’ stereotype and shove Ted Rall into a closet somewhere” option.
I always preferred Tom Tomorrow’s stuff, anyway.
I said he died in Afghanistan. Learn to fucking read. But he also served in Iraq. And if you’re going to flame me, do it in the pit so I can respond in kind.
Look again because it’s totally consistent. No “retreat” in sight. I stand by what I said in the OP. Rall made some defensible points but shot himself in the foot by insulting Tillman. How have I backed away from that?
Is English your first language? The portion you quoted contains neither qualifications nor assumptions. Are you sure you know what those words mean?
I’m a bleeding heart liberal, confirmed GFO (Get the F*cker Out) and I was offended by the cartoon. I understand what Rall was trying to do but he’s being an asshole. Pat Tillman was a really interesting, thoughtful guy who deserves better and I hope Rall makes up for it.
From SFGate:
Pat’s younger brother:
From the article:
Y’know, it looks to me that the constant grind of this insane unfinished war…oops, two unfinished wars…is finally starting to get to him. I mean, look how long he’s been covering this, all the bad decisions, all the PR nightmares, all the deaths. Lord knows I’ve cracked under much less duress.
I think he should be reprimanded for this, but I’m extremely leery about putting him out of work or ostracizing him, mainly because he brings up issues that absoltutely no one else does. Remember “Terror Widows”? Yeah, that was a completely baseless hunk of slander, wasn’t it? Well, it wasn’t. Many of these widows had become millionaires (far more than what they needed to get back on their feet, at any rate), and there were a lot of people seriously cheesed off about this, including those who contributed to 9/11 relief. And Tillman was a damn fool* for passing up a lucrative contract to enter a hopeless situation that had nothing to do with “defending our country” where hundreds of Americans have already gotten killed. Whatever his motives for serving were, I just can’t believe anyone who says he made the right decision. (And for that matter, why didn’t he just read the paper?)
I’m sorry, but although I’m a little put off by this, I can’t muster any outrage. The people who got us into this insane quagmire and inspired Tillman to sign up are far more deserving of it.
- Not an “idiot”, though. An idiot has the facts, but can’t process them. A fool can interpret the facts, but doesn’t bother to get them. Go pick up the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook for further details.
Not that this discussion needs any help from me, but for the record, though I’m as anti-Bush and anti-Iraq-war as they come, I think this cartoon is indefensible and outrageously inflammatory.
That being said, I understand the frustration. Rall is making the mistake of escalating the flamboyance of his rhetoric in an attempt to attract the attention the antiwar side hasn’t been able to draw by using more rational arguments. We’ve been saying for well over a year that this whole adventure was going to be a disaster, that quickly swatting a very weak “official” state military was going to be a totally different effort from winning the hearts and minds of the public after the fact. We knew that Bush’s headlong sprint into military action as a solution for an extremely complicated problem was about as predictably stupid as reaching into the garbage disposal to retrieve a piece of beloved jewelry, and we said so, to no effect. Now the nation’s arm is being carved up by the blades of realpolitik, and still we must continue pressing our bloody stump into the grinder for the foreseeable future because we haven’t got the wedding ring back yet, even though we no longer have fingers to grasp it.
We’ve been saying this since before the beginning, and now that everything we said has been turning out to be true, it’s horribly frustrating to get no acknowledgement that maybe we knew what we were talking about when we said Bush and his team were justifying our graceful swan dive into a no-win quagmire using a dangerous mixture of self-delusion and deliberate mendacity. Worse yet, the more obvious it becomes that we stupidly set into motion an avoidable catastrophe, the more the administration’s defenders put up their hoodies and pull the strings tight to hide from the world that isn’t turning out at all to be like their rosy predictions said it would be. (As “The Daily Show” put it so brilliantly last night, the facts themselves have an anti-Bush bias. Heh.)
It is thus a natural, if ultimately self-defeating, response to scream even more loudly in an attempt to penetrade the Hood of Silence and Denial, to jump up and down and wave our arms and squeal in hysteria just to be heard over the repetitive drumbeats of soothing propaganda being produced by the establishment machine. And that’s what Rall has been doing, ever since Afghanistan: the more he’s ignored, the shriller he gets. This cartoon is not a sudden escalation on his part; if you’ve been paying attention to his material, this is a natural next step, and the only reason people find it so outrageous now is because they haven’t seen the rest of his work and think this arrived without preamble or precedent.
Some of us don’t want to play that game. We know we aren’t being heard in the short term; we know the odds are in favor of Bush’s re-election, a quite depressing prospect indeed, because the mainstream has a vested emotional interest in avoiding admitting to themselves just how badly they were led down the garden path. Some, like Rall, react by flying off the handle and producing irresponsible and defamatory work just to get on the nation’s radar. But some of us know that’s counterproductive, and we continue focusing on the verifiable facts, unsexy as they might be and unheard as they are in the short term, because we know the long view of history will validate us. It isn’t as fulfilling on an immediate basis; it’s not much fun to see so many important events and facts and people vanishing down the memory hole of a cherished national delusion. But in the long run, we do the nation a disservice if we resort to the same sleazy tactics being used by those who didn’t care what drum they were beating as long as it got enough people marching.
Rall, in short, does the nation a disservice. I don’t know what position he’s arguing, but it certainly isn’t mine.
I’m a huge fan of Ted Rall, and I actually laughed out loud at the “Idiot? Sap? Hero!” bit. That hysterical, “Oh god” laughter. Ted Rall’s an example of why America is not a lost cause–He was printing El Generalissmo cartoons after 9-11, offending everyone, openly attacking the president, and no one shot him. I was not offended by this cartoon. I have been offended by some of his cartoons in the past, but not agreeing with someone 100% doesn’t make them hopelessly evil.
Parody is supposed to cut to the quick, it’s supposed to sting, and in the numbing post-9-11, new Vietnam reality I feel trapped in, it sometimes feels good to hurt. The Tillman cartoon hurts. Upon preview, DKW, thanks for reminding me of “Terror Widows.” Another “oh god” moment.
I also find it disgusting that Tillman’s memory is being exploited for cheap rhetoric in any sense. tremorviolet’s post is eye-opening, and makes me sad.
Ah, maybe I assumed that you didn’t actually know all the soldiers personally, what they thought of the president, and whether they were right or wrong. Apparantly you do, since you state you made no assumptions.
I also wasn’t aware that soldiers go to war because of their faith in the President. I thought they got ordered to go.
Their faith is implicit in their enlistment. When you sign on the dotted line (as I did 21 years ago) you are entrusting the CiC with your life. You are trusting that your POTUS will only put put you in harm’s way when absolutely necessary, and that he won’t send you to die under false pretenses. Everyone who enlists understands this, or at least they should understand it. The specifics of Iraq are beside the point. They signed the papers. That act in itself is an expression of faith in the CiC- a faith which was betrayed by Bush’s actions in Iraq.
On this point, Marley, you’re wrong. Ted Rall went to Afghanistan and reported extensively on the fighting and its civilian casualties (Specifically, how they were much higher than reported, and how the casualty numbers were often removed or changed when they later showed up in the press.) He also wrote a book about his
trip there.
That bit aside, you can add me to the “Hate the war / GTFO / but think the cartoon was way, way, way over the line” camp. It’s so baseless and bile-filled, I almost have to think it is a parody, or more likely, simply meant to inflame the people of Fox News and AM radio into screaming at Rall for a few more news cycles (and booking him on their shows. [+$$], [+attention])
Has Rall’s data held up? I’m curious now, since some of the other civilian casualty reports from Afghanistan came under a lot of doubt.
I was not in favor of invading Afghanistan or Iraq.
That being said, I think a political cartoon that belittles and insults someone who died in the service of his country is tasteless at best, and vicious at worst.
Regardless of what Rall thinks about Tillman, the guy had a family, and gleefully, publicly crapping on Tillman’s coffin simply because the guy was a public figure in a situation Rall opposes is way out of line.
I will rant and rave about G.W. Bush until the toads come home, sure, and I will say far worse things about Bush than anyone has about Tillman… but, then, Bush is ostensibly in control of what’s going on. The Buck Stops Here. Our current international situation is largely of Bush’s making.
The last time Tillman was in control of much of anything was when he picked up the pen and signed the enlistment papers. After that, someone else was making his decisions.
I’m not sure why Tillman deserves lionizing any more than any other American casualty overseas. It’s not like he couldn’t have picked up his NFL career when he got back. But now he’s dead, and I regret his death, sure, the same as I regret every life that Bush has thrown away in the search for WMDs or Iraqi freedom or to get the Taliban out of power, or whatever this week’s excuse is.
But if I think you’re a fool for lionizing Tillman, then I will call you a fool. I personally didn’t know Tillman well enough to call him much of anything. And neither did Ted Rall.
This is one of those incidents that kind of makes you wish Rall was playing for the Bush team… :wally
Actually, if someone associates me with Rall simply because i oppose the war, the only embarrassment i would feel would be for that person, because they would have demonstrated their lack of intelligence by assuming that all opponents of the war think the same way.
Of course, no-one on these message boards would be stupid enough to make such ridiculous associations, would they?
Would they?
Well, maybe some people would be.
I’m not offended. At the end of the day Pat Tillman will still be somebody people can admire, while Tom Rail will still be… Tom Rail. That’s punishment enough, dontcha think? 
So let me get this straight–Ted Rall characterizes Tillman’s death as voluntary. That, by virtue of enlisting, you automatically have a death wish similar to suicide bombers?
Boy, there definitely is an idiot afoot, but it’s certainly not Tillman.