Today, Howard Dean's website responds enthusiastically to an endorsement from Ted Rall. You would think they'd know better. This is like Bush accepting an endosement from Michael Savage's nastier brother. I fully expect saner heads to prevail and disavow, as this will be death with the center come the general election.
You don't have to be Roger Ailes to write the attack ad:
Scene: African-American soldier's widow being handed flag at military funeral. Taps is played and salute is fired. Over this is read choice sections of Ted Rall's call for Iraqis to kill Americans.
Tag line: "Shamefully, Governor Dean accepted this man's endorsement. Vote for America on November 2nd. Vote for George Bush."
See also Volokh
Kevin, this is garbage and you know it. I read that column and could easily tell that Rall's column is a mental exercise of imagining how the fightgers in this resistance, which came as a surprise to the neocons who predicted flower-petal parades for us, could be recruited. That's why the column is entitled "The View from the OTHER SIDE."
For you to call it "Rall's call to kill Americans", is utter bullshit.
Posted by: PMI at November 24, 2003 12:25 PMNice try, PMI, but to anyone who had heard of TEd Rall before last week, it is quite clear that this "other side" account is a romanticized version of what Rall himself thinks, not what "the other side" thinks. Rall is part of that other side, and has been for a long time. That idiot didn't just support Iraq; he even opposed the war in Afghanistan, where the casus belli was so obvious that even anti-Americans as Gerhard Schroeder, Howard Dean, and Jacques Chirac conceded it was justified. Not Rall.
Posted by: Xrlq at November 24, 2003 06:55 PMYeah, and Pat Buchanan's anti-Semitic rants are just "rhetoric", too. You know what they mean from what they've done. Given past comments, Ted Rall is quite capable of wanting what he said he wants. No one who thought otherwise would consider writing such a thing. There wasn't even a disclaimer.
Personally I think that Ted's reaction to an H-bomb on New York would depend solely whether he thought it helped or hurt Bush.
Posted by: Kevin Murphy at November 24, 2003 09:56 PMXrlq--
I don't think Rall is an idiot ... he's just on the other side. Think of him as a Nazi bundist in 1942 -- or a CPUSA member in 1952.