Once it was the women who lost their husbands and the fathers of their children in the horror of September 11, 2001. Then it was Marianne Pearl, whose husband, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was decapitated in Pakistan for the crime of being Jewish. Whatever is heartrending to the rest of America, it’s stuff for laughs for Ted Rall, the nation’s nastiest left-wing cartoonist.
Rall’s latest target, that of many of the embittered left, is Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals safety who turned down a $3.6 million contract to fight for his country after 9/ll. Tillman died in combat last Thursday in Afghanistan, headquarters of the Al Qaeda terrorists who plotted the mass murders of that day. Rall’s May 3 cartoon, in which he accuses Tillman (and the rest of U.S. servicemen) of being nothing more than murderers themselves, has been pulled from most of the websites that carried it, but you can look at the most offending panel here (scroll down till you find it) on the A Small Victory blog.
Andrew Sullivan, who (along with a great many members of the principled left) has been blogging in protest of this latest example of Rall vileness, calls for a boycott of the Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes Rall’s strips: Writes Andrew:
“It’s not censorship or ‘McCarthyism’ for people to complain about any syndicate that peddles the poison that Rall lives off. Today’s disgusting diatribe against Pat Tillman is so vile, so utterly devoid of any motive or argument but personal malice and hatred, some form of protest is surely merited. Email the vice-president for print syndication, Lee Salem, and tell him what you think of Rall’s cartoon. Please, please, be civil. His email is [email protected]. He needs to hear from you.”
But my favorite blogger James Lileks insists that just being Ted Rall, with a heart brimming with cynicism and contempt for the things that ordinary people hold dear, is punishment enough. Lileks writes:
“II have no idea if Mr. Rall is personally happy, although the one time I met him he didn’t strike me as a jolly old soul. But it has to be hard to be happy when one carries around so much bile and rage. It’s tiring. Anger wears you down, especially when your anger doesn’t seem to accomplish anything. Ted Rall’s cartoons could have run in every paper every day since 9/11 and there will still be kids who saw Tillman’s choice as a remarkable act. (Tillman’s Choice: there’s a phrase that sums up quite a lot, doesn’t it?) People like Rall are sitting on the curb, feet in the gutter, watching the parade go past, smirking at the guy with the baton, sneering at the cheerleaders. Everyone else watching the parade thinks I wonder if there will be elephants! And when they do appear, he rolls his eyes. Elephants. How obvious.
“You want to live like that? I don’t want to live like that. Because when you see red all the time you miss things.”
Update: Here is Rall’s Tillman strip in its entirety. It’s even worse than you can imagine.
