Saint Ted Rall on the Whine

Political cartoonist Ted Rall hasn’t been getting much work lately, so naturally he claims there's a chilling of speech in the air, a stifling of dissent, a concerted effort to blackball his singular truth-to-power cartooning. Some conservatives reflexively embrace this charge because “Rise of the Obamabots" verifies what right-wing nuts have been saying for a while.

And this isn't the first time a plot has been hatched to pick Rall’s pocket:

In the late 1990s my cartoons ran in Time, Fortune and Bloomberg Personal magazines and over 100 daily and alternative weekly newspapers. I was a staff writer for two major magazines.

Then Bush came in. And 9/11 happened.

The media gorged on an orgy of psychotic right-wing rhetoric. Flags everywhere. Torture suddenly OK. In a nation where mainstream political discourse was redefined between Dick Cheney on the right and libertarian Bill Maher on the not-as-right, there wasn't any room in the paper for a left-of-center cartoonist. My business was savaged. Income plunged.

Flags everywhere! His business savaged.

To begin with, how can anyone who claims that Bill Maher is a “libertarian” on the “not-as-right” of Cheney be taken seriously in any discussion? This is the same intellectual powerhouse who ponders violent revolution, depicted Pat Tillman as a mindless would-be murderer, made moral equivalency of suicide bombers and American soldiers, and so on and so forth. Let’s face it, Rall, like Michael Moore, is the left-wing equivalent of a raving birther. A similarly absurd voice on the right wouldn’t see his work featured in a weekly local, much less a slew of (once) prestigious publications.

I have no doubt mainstream outlets have a higher standard when it comes to critical cartoons aimed at Obama. Lefty magazine editors, no doubt, also have some reservations about publishing critical pieces about Obama. (Though even a cursory look at those websites undermines Rall’s claims. Opening the Nation site while writing this post, and I the top story is “Obama's Speech: Nice, But No Cigar.”) Who knows? Maybe some liberals believe a person who says Obama “has forsaken liberals at every turn” is a bit bonkers. That would make them sane, not anti-Rallian.

Or perhaps, and this is just a theory, once Rall’s work was denied all its excruciatingly obvious and uninteresting Bushhate, editors suddenly realized how untalented, cruel and silly his work had become. That is a far more comforting thought. And far more likely.

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