Ted Rall for July 24, 2020

Enough said.

W. Bush, the second dumbest president (next to the Rump) cooked up “fake news” to convince many of those in the senate and house to vote for the war. But you, Rall, fail to mention that..

I guess the difference between the War Pig Orange Buffoon and all the preceding War Pig presidents is that Psycho Orange Buffoon is a little less obedient to the puppet masters of the Military Industrial Complex. While I’m making tortured 1 AM puppet comparisons I’ll point out that it’s good his nose is not like Pinocchio’s. He’d never be able to golf.

You’re not voting for Trump.

Except you are.

If you’ve ever wondered what you’d have done in 1930s Germany, you’re doing it now.

Ted is getting autobiographical today.

so, he won’t vote for tRump, but he won’t vote against him either.

“How can you not vote for someone who’s slightly better than Trump?”

Rall…………….the a bit off-conscience of ’Mericuh

Mr. Rall has no problem with children being ripped from their parents and locked in cages.

I really can’t figure out if this is pro self destructive purity tests, or mocking them. Oh wait, it Ted Rall. Never mind.

Ok, we know who Ted Rall is against. Has he said who he’s FOR? Being against and complaining is so easy.

Actually, between Coronavirus, various bombings, the Yemen debacle, and endorsing N. Korea’s abuse and murder odf it’s people, Trump may have killed a million.

“The best is the enemy of the good enough.”

Biden is good enough, this time.

fusilier

James 2:24

The point is, Mr. Rall is better than us. Better than Biden. He was probably better than Clinton and Obama. So he showed us then and he is showing us again—none of this and none of us is good enough for him. So just write in his name and play Gotterdammerung in the background and look forward to his offering on the day after the election, because he will tell us again how much better than us he really, really is.

No, that’s not what happened.

Biden was told we were about to be attacked, and voted to defend our nation. Then a million Iraqi’s died. But his vote was NOT to kill them.

Yes, Bush lied. But so does your comic, today.

Rall apparently wants Trump to choose Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s successor.

Oh, right. What flawless logic (not) to vote for Trump who still won’t “lead his country” .

“For all have sinned and fall short of the Glory of Rall”. tRump super PACs need look no further for anti-Biden disinformation. Ted, please save your polemics for after Biden’s inauguration.

Exactly! and that number is simply not high enough. Rall must work to make sure even more foreign wars happen and that thousands of Americans die too. Plus, by helping to defeat Trump, Rall will empower the white supremists and expand the secret police. See, Rall, and his followers, are very high minded people whose values cannot be compromised. He cares deeply for the homeless and unemployed. That is why he must work to see that they are stripped of what little support the receive now. Rall cares about minorities. So he is working to ensure that they will be treated even worse than they have it now. And don’t even start him on the environment. An issue that dear to his values demands that every last environmental protection eliminated. We must understand that Rall is an uncompromising stalwart. As such, it is necessary that others pay the price while he stays unscathed and pure.

Then you are as complicit as all those who stayed home in 2016 and handed the presidency to Trump. We are free because we get a choice, not always a good one, but we still get a choice. We get you don’t like Biden. But This time it is between freedom and tyranny. Priorities, man, priorities.

The most dogmatic application of Nirvana (Perfect Solution) Fallacy I have ever seen. And it is based on a Furtive Fallacy. A fallacy with a fallacy as it’s foundation. There is no way to argue or convince someone who is devoted to that kind of thinking.

Best to just click “unfollow” and move on. So I shall.

Let Trump keep going along this path and he will put in place laws to murder 1,000,000 Americans.

An example of why it’s dangerous to believe that, e.g., Biden won the primaries:

A congressman caught in the 1970s Abscam sting is now at the heart of a Philly election fraud probe, sources sayElection fraud case sparks renewed accusations about ballot security in PhiladelphiaSouth Philly judge of elections admits he took bribes to stuff the ballot box for Democratic candidates

The eight-count indictment details thousands of dollars he paid Election Judge Domenick DeMuro during the 2015 Democratic primary to pad vote counts for three candidates for Common Pleas Court, who did not know about the scheme.

Prosecutors did not identify the candidates, say whether they won election, or indicate whether the fraudulent votes were decisive. Still, the 40 fake ballots added by DeMuro accounted for 15% of the votes certified from the ward he oversaw.

Without Repulsican lies and propaganda, there would have been no Iraqi War. How many lives have been lost so far because Saddam disrespected George W’s daddy?

I always knew Ted was having an occasional bowl of stupid for breakfast, but now he’s having dingleberries on top.

Hey I can play this game too! Biden was in charge of the Anita Hill hearings and basically steamrollered her. Trump never did anything like that! And man, I really need to pay more attention to the news. I completely missed the Senate vote on the House bill to murder 1,000,000 Iraqis! I like how he threw in the “I’m not voting for Trump” bit. Yes, let’s all stay home and when Trump gets his second term and finishes shredding the Constitution we can always say, “well, I didn’t vote for him!”

No mention of Fat Donny still wanting to execute the Central Park Five, simply because he believes “they must have been up to something.”

Also, no mention of not voting for all those Republicans who voted for killing 1,000,000 Iraqis as well.

If murderously stupid republicans continue to do everything wrong about covid, 2.2 million Americans may day. We gained a million new cases in the last 2 weeks, virus spreads exponentially.

Oh FFS. Do you really think that was the Bill on the floor at the time of the vote? Shall we kill 1,000,000 Iraqis, yay or nay?

In otherwords, all those Congressmen, Republican and Democrat, that had voted for the invasion had no business running to be president in the 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 primaries and general election. Had we used that standard, maybe we would’ve had less moronic options on the ballots. I can agree with that.

FOUR anti-Biden cartoons in a row. Ted, when #45 gets re-elected and the only way to get him out is to burn the country down, will you be happy then? For God’s sake, #45 is LITERALLY sending out stormtroopers (apparently hired mercenaries) to attack anyone protesting him, including MOTHERS. Are you seriously going to continue to equate these two?

NO Ted. Biden did not vote to murder a million Iraqis. Assuming Bush’s lies were true Biden’s vote was proper. The blame for the Iraq war sits ENTIRELY at Cheney’s feet.

Nikki Haley: ‘If Biden comes in, all of the progress we made goes away’

https://www.jpost.com/american-politics/nikki-haley-if-biden-comes-in-all-of-the-progress-we-made-goes-away-635636

.

You mean Dems will begin to put the country back together and begin to eradicate the virus? How dare they!

The mistake here is to base a vote for a candidate solely on one of the votes of that candidate. I use several criteria for a decision and prioritize them. Fortunately one of the parties makes it easy. I have yet to have the candidate I prefer to win the nomination since I began voting in 1978, but I still supported the winner. In this case, it was Schrub who killed the million Iraqis. It was foolish for the Congress to give him that power. Didn’t the Congress learn anything from the Tonkin Gulf Resolution?

Keep it up, Ted. Drive ‘em crazy. In their hearts they know you’re right.

Motive counts even in the court of public opinion and history, so one must draw a distinction between why the executive branch wanted the war and why Congress went along.

First point:

Regardless of their political affiliation, nobody in Congress liked or trusted Saddam Hussein. Likewise the Executive branch.

Second Point:

It is clear that senior members of the executive branch wanted very much to go after Saddam. Paul O’Neill has claimed that the matter was discussed in January and February 2001. However, I don’t know if there is any documented evidence for this. Nevertheless, Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward, which was based on interviews with 75 participants, including George W. Bush, shows that after 9/11 there were definitely those who wanted to take down Saddam.

Third Point:

Congress does not possess an intelligence agency, but must rely on the CIA, etc. In other words, Congress must rely on what the Executive Branch chooses to tell it. The main document that seems pertinent is a National Intelligence Estimate from the CIA dated October 2002. This document was made available to Congress.


One of the key “fear factors” in the NIE that Congress reacted to was the claim (in a briefing directly to members of Congress) that Saddam had UAVs that could deliver CBW to the US. (He did not and objective analysts should have been able to determine that easily.) Here is a quote from the document:

The Director, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaisance, US Air Force, does not agree that Iraq is developing UAVs primarily intended to be delivery platforms for chemical and biological warfare (CBW) agents. The small size of Iraq’s new UAV strongly suggests a primary role of reconnaisance, although CBW delivery is an inherent capability.

Sure, and large passenger jets loaded with jet fuel have an inherent capability to be bombs. But that doesn’t mean they were built for that purpose.

continued…

Here is a link to a Wired magazine article about the Iraqi drone “threat.” It also contains a link to a pdf file of the national intelligence estimate.

http://www.wired.com/2013/03/drone-bioweapons/

Unfortunately, it looks like lots of good stuff is redacted from the NIE. But it mentions the 550 tons of Yellowcake that Iraq already had, and mentions that this is inspected annually by the IAEA. So the manure that the fright-wing was spreading when the US was removing that yellowcake kind of loses it’s alleged potency, doesn’t it?It then goes on to mention the NIger Yellowcake, which former ambassador Wilson debunked, and reported. And for which his wife was outed as CIA.

Most of the rest is of a highly speculative nature.

“Saddam might use CBW…”
“He probably would use CBW..” (when he lost control of the military. Obviously, the speculation was not correct.)

etc, etc.

Fourth Point:

Because the Executive branch controlled the information available to Congress, they could choose to omit information which would have been helpful to Congress making a better informed decision.
It was Curveball, the CIA’s pet liar who provided much misinformation about the then current status of WMDs. Did Congress get any warning that this guy might be a flake as some non-US agencies thought? Umm, evidently not.

From Wikipedia:

Committee Chairman Pat Roberts told NBC’s Tim Russert that “Curveball really provided 98 percent of the assessment as to whether or not the Iraqis had a biological weapon.” This was in despite the fact that “nobody inside the U.S. government had ever actually spoken to the informant—except [for a single] Pentagon analyst, who concluded the man was an alcoholic and utterly useless as a source.”

continued…

After learning the intelligence provided by Curveball was going to be used as the “backbone” of the case for war, the Pentagon analyst wrote a letter to the CIA expressing his concerns. The Deputy of the CIA Counter Proliferation Unit quickly responded by saying:

“Let’s keep in mind the fact that this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn’t say. The Powers That Be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he’s talking about.”

The Powers that Be being the pro-war crowd in the Bush administration. Did they know Curveball was a useless source? Hard to tell, but it is certain that some of them would not have cared one bit.

Other intelligence failures? Probably, but it is important to note that underlings are sensitive to what the big bosses want to hear and can tailor the answers to make the bosses happy. And who is to blame for that? The bosses.

Doesn’t matter whether it happens in industry or government, it is the bosses duty to make sure that their attitudes don’t encourage the “Just give them what they want to hear.” mindset. The blame for this unnecessary invasion lays squarely on an executive branch group that wanted the war and made sure that Congress heard what would convince most of them to vote for the war.

I found this after writing the above, so it had no impact on what I wrote.Here is a article that deals with many of the claims about Saddam’s WMDs, etc etc.http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2012/09/08/the-lies-that-led-to-the-iraq-war-and-the-persistent-myth-of-intelligence-failure/

(originally posted in 2014)