Rall's Reality (What they Really think)

The first congressional Medal of Honor in the War on Terror, Lt. Michael Murphy of Long Island, New York, a Navy SEAL who was killed in a fierce gun battle in Afghanistan in June of 2005, was honored in a ceremony at the White House on Monday that the media mostly ignored.

Just being ignored might be considered a good thing once you've become acquanted with mainstream liberal pundit Ted Rall, who recently said he cheers the deaths of American soldiers because that improves America’s average IQ.

I didn’t know much about Rall until I heard his name mentioned the other day and did a little research. Hardly a marginalized freak, it seems he’s a very popular, well regarded and well paid freak.

Rall won the 1995 and 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards and the Society of Professional Journalists Deadline Club Award. He won the 2002 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Graphics. His Orwell parody "2024" was named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon.com, and his graphic travelogue To Afghanistan and Back was named as one of the American Library Association's Best Books of the Year. Rall was a 1996 Pulitzer Prize finalist. His cartoons appear in approximately 100 newspapers.

Rall attended Columbia University in engineering, but failed, returning later to graduate with a history BA.

Here’s Rall, just a few days ago, “...I flip the page past the same old '2 Dead, 7 Wounded in IED Blast' headline. But hey, soldier, you volunteered. If not for you, there wouldn't be a war in the first place.

“...It's bad enough that a majority of soldiers voted for Bush in 2004. Over and over since the war began, American troops have been seen on television applauding Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice and others whose cynical recklessness have sent their buddies to their graves.

“Even after soldiers get killed, their parents promote the war so their dead kids won't be lonely in heaven,” says Rall.

Writing about the president’s frequent meetings with relatives of American troops who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, Rall observes that, “Few Gold Star mothers tell him off. Those who do are polite to the man who murdered their children as surely and as viciously as if he'd shot them himself. Why don't they spit at him?”

Rall’s suggestion? “Soldiers who want antiwar Americans to march to demand that they be brought home should take a cue from Vietnam veterans. They marched with peace protesters and threw their medals at the Capitol. Soldiers serving on the front refused orders.

“Some fragged their officers,” he tells us, obviously impressed with such a principled act.

His comparison of wars is in every way specious, but then he was barely out of diapers when I first landed at Than Son Nut. Apparently his history degree studies didn't included Southeast Asia.

You want to know what he really thinks of those of you who serve in the United States armed forces? Read this column, titled An Army of Scum.

Here’s a taste:

"Now it's official: American troops occupying Iraq have become virtually indistinguishable from the SS. Like the Germans during World War II, they cordon off and bomb civilian villages to retaliate for guerilla attacks on their convoys. Like the blackshirts who terrorized Europe, America's victims disappear into hellish prisons ruled by sadists and murderers. The U.S. military is short just one item to achieve moral parity with the Nazis: gas chambers."

Lest you want to dismiss Rall as a kook, remember that he’s a Pulitzer Prize finalist, syndicated kook.

I learned during another war long ago and far away that the Ralls of this world very much speak for their more “respectable” fellow travelers. You know, the ones running for president who won’t disavow the “Patreaus, Betray Us” ad. Oh, they and others who smirk at you behind their hands will claim he doesn't speak for them, but just who is it that gives him that list of awards? Yeah, right.