Lib on lib violence: an investigation

Awwww... Liberal media outlets won't run cartoons of liberal, repulsive and totally unfunny Ted Rall. Apparently, however, this isn't the first time this has happened to poor Ted.

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.

Surge in patriotism = income plunge. Telling.

So what's Ted's latest bitch? Everyone thinks he's too hard on their guy, Obama.

What's weird is that these cultish attitudes come from editors and publishers whose politics line up neatly with mine. They oppose the bailouts. They want us out of Afghanistan and Iraq. They disapprove of Obama's new war against Libya. They want Obama to renounce torture and Guantánamo.

Obama is the one they ought to be blackballing. He has been a terrible disappointment to the American left. He has forsaken liberals at every turn. Yet they continue to stand by him. Which means that, in effect, they are not liberals at all. They are militant Democrats. They are Obamabots.

(italics, ours)

Neatly! Isn't that neat?

And to think that they were all in this together. What a bummer.

We're not sure about "militant Democrats" - we prefer the term "abject hypocrits". But, no matter, perhaps as David Harsanyi suggests, everyone just caught on to the fact that Rall's work sucks.

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.

Highly plausible but we still lean towards the "abject hypocrits" rationale. Whaddya all think?