Not My Father's Son
So, coming home Wednesday night, my Dad and I were talking about the news and how the nightly national news is a dinosaur and that all the cool kids get their news online, when my dad was talking about columnists he liked and disliked. One of the names he mentioned of columnists that he liked would have caused a spit take from me, had I been drinking anything at that particular moment.
My family has always been of a liberal bent, and it only makes sense that my political philosophy started from there. But, I guess it illustrates how far right I've drifted over the years when my Dad holds up Ted Rall as a paragon of truth and patriotic dissent.
Hardly.
Ted Rall is a fifth columnist who cloaks his Anti-Americanism in the guise of hackneyed political cartoons. Don't believe me? Check out Andrew Sullivan's post last year on Rall's column inciting Iraqi insurgents and terrorists. Or his posts about Rall's Pat Tillman cartoon this past May. (You'll want to start at the bottom with Monday , May 3rd and work your way up to Thursday.)
It seems to me that everyone is quick to defend as dissent any criticism of the government, regardless of whether it is sound or not. Any critique of the government that starts from the premise that the US is a totalitarian and fascist empire is clearly delusional and empirically false. It's the kind of thing that no matter how eloquently put, is tantamount to saying that space aliens are controlling everybody through radio waves. I just can't take it, and by extension Ted Rall, seriously, and really neither should anyone else.
So, you can see why I thought my Dad thinking that Ted Rall is the only one speaking the truth about Afghanistan among other things shocked me a bit. But, then again, I suppose its always a shock when people you respect and admire turn out to be human like the rest of us.
On the bright side, he recognizes that Ann Coulter is a arch-conservative wacko, but now I need to get him to recognize that Ted Rall = Ann Coulter. Ah, parents. Though, it really could have been worse, he could have said Noam Chomsky instead.
My family has always been of a liberal bent, and it only makes sense that my political philosophy started from there. But, I guess it illustrates how far right I've drifted over the years when my Dad holds up Ted Rall as a paragon of truth and patriotic dissent.
Hardly.
Ted Rall is a fifth columnist who cloaks his Anti-Americanism in the guise of hackneyed political cartoons. Don't believe me? Check out Andrew Sullivan's post last year on Rall's column inciting Iraqi insurgents and terrorists. Or his posts about Rall's Pat Tillman cartoon this past May. (You'll want to start at the bottom with Monday , May 3rd and work your way up to Thursday.)
It seems to me that everyone is quick to defend as dissent any criticism of the government, regardless of whether it is sound or not. Any critique of the government that starts from the premise that the US is a totalitarian and fascist empire is clearly delusional and empirically false. It's the kind of thing that no matter how eloquently put, is tantamount to saying that space aliens are controlling everybody through radio waves. I just can't take it, and by extension Ted Rall, seriously, and really neither should anyone else.
So, you can see why I thought my Dad thinking that Ted Rall is the only one speaking the truth about Afghanistan among other things shocked me a bit. But, then again, I suppose its always a shock when people you respect and admire turn out to be human like the rest of us.
On the bright side, he recognizes that Ann Coulter is a arch-conservative wacko, but now I need to get him to recognize that Ted Rall = Ann Coulter. Ah, parents. Though, it really could have been worse, he could have said Noam Chomsky instead.
posted by Serge at 11/26/2004 02:22:00 PM
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