Generalissimo El Busho: Essays and Cartoons on the Bush Years

Rating:
Summary: SO PRESCIENT, IT'S SCARY!
Review: A blend of caustic humor and well-written razor-sharp prose that's hard to put down. I spent many a sleepless night reading and re-reading this highly stimulating book and scanning and e-mailing the author's clever, pointed, and merciless cartoons to pro and anti-Bushies alike. Ted Rall was one of the few Americans who weren't fooled by the Bush administration's claim that Saddam Hussein was armed with horrible weapons, in cahoots with al-Qaeda, and an imminent threat which required immediate military intervention. This collection of articles from Rall's incisive weekly column during the Bush years, peppered with more than 120 of his pull-no-punches cartoons, is a spellbinding read.

The introduction by fellow political cartoonist, Tom Tomorrow, sardonically defends Rall against those who accuse him of hating America; "...he hates America so much, he thinks the guy who wins the election should be the guy who actually becomes president."

In the preface that follows, Ted Rall describes the incredible events that took place during and shortly after Election Day, November 7, 2000. On November 9th, more than a month before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Bush v. Gore, the Bush campaign sent James Baker to proclaim Bush the winner on PBS' The News With Jim Lehrer. "...as the recount continued, Baker returned to Lehrer's show to threaten a military coup d'état should Bush be denied the presidency. Bush's people sent young goons to beat up and intimidate Miami-Dade County election workers."
These events heralded Rall's creation of "Generalissimo El Busho".

"Bush was a bully. Like all bullies-like all tin-pot third world autocrats-he wasn't going to take no for an answer. The first man in American history to illegally seize power was appointed president by a party-line vote of the Supreme Court on December 20, 2000." The first thing that popped into Rall's mind "...upon watching Bush's simian countenance...was that of former dictator Augusto Pinochet." Examining a state portrait of the Chilean general, "I was struck by the contrast between the grandeur of his costume and the dimness of his eyes. The parallel with Bush was readily apparent. Like Pinochet, he would soon assume all of the trappings of high office...but they wouldn't change his essential inferiority and incompetence."

"I promised myself that I would never utter the phrase `President George W. Bush', but that wasn't enough...I drew the empty-eyed, bat-eared Bush in General Pinochet's uniform, festooned with medals, a sash and a great big hat. Eureka! Generalissimo El Busho was born."

The first column presented in the book is dated October 10, 2000, lamenting that both Bush and Gore "...consistently ignore America's massive, pressing structural issues in favor of trivial micro-mini issuettes."

Ted Rall's subsequent essays are so prescient that I had to look back several times to make sure of the date they were published...some of them could have been written in the last couple of months, rather than two and three years ago. Before the end of 2001, he published much of what the 9/11 commission concluded more than two years later. He also gleaned a prodigious amount of information during his weeks in Afghanistan during the initial U.S. incursion into that country. In 2001, Rall arrives at the same conclusion for the Afghan invasion as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, released in 2004, did; that Bush wanted to make that country safe for an oil and gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Pakistani ports (the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline) by driving out the Taliban and installing a puppet government. He also makes the astonishing, damning accusation that the Taliban offered to turn Osama bin Laden over to American authorities in exchange for being allowed to keep their jobs, an offer ignored by an administration whose real objectives were other than to bring the al-Qaeda leader to justice.

In October 2002 Ted Rall reported his observation that the failure of the Bush administration to follow up with dollars its promise to rebuild Afghanistan after pushing out the Taliban was forcing Afghan farmers to return to opium cultivation and the heroin trade. Nearly 22 months later, in its August 9th, 2004 issue, Newsweek reported that "Drugs have become the dominating feature of Afghanistan's economy, and corruption has infected every aspect of Afghan political life", and the Time issue of the same date had an article by Tim McGirk titled "Terrorism's Harvest" describing how heroin trafficking is now "a principal source of funding for the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists."

Rall again foretells the future 195 days before the invasion of Iraq in his column, dated November 5, 2002, titled "After Saddam, The Deluge". He says, about U.N. arms inspections, that Bush doesn't want them "He wants Iraq. Nothing Saddam does or offers to do will make any difference. War was likely before Election Day, but now the Republican sweep makes it inevitable...we're about to take over Iraq without having clue one about what type of government to install and who will be in charge of it". And, in the same vein, "Would Iraq be better off without Saddam? Probably, but if we're smart we wont be the ones to blow over this particular house of cards. We have too much to lose and too little to gain in the mess that will eventually ensue".

We've yet to see whether Ted Rall's Christmas Eve 2002 column included a prediction of the outcome of the 2004 presidential election; Rall cites a December 15th 2002 L.A. Times poll in which 90% of respondents did not doubt the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, but 72% felt that Bush had not yet provided enough evidence to justify starting a war against Iraq. "Unless he coughs up definitive proof of Iraqi wrong-doing or calls off the whole thing, this latest oil-driven military misadventure could become Bush's political Waterloo." The Bush claims of Saddam's nuclear weapons program implied in his 2003 State of the Union Address and Colin Powell's diagrams of satellite photos showing Iraq's purported mobile bio-weapons labs have both fallen by the wayside, no WMD's have been found in Iraq, and the U.S. has all but abandoned the search for the phantom weapons. Does this portend a Bush defeat in November?

Rating:
Summary: Rall scores with this funny collection on "el presidente"
Review: Generalissimo El Busho: Essays & Cartoons on the Bush Years by Ted Rall is a scathing, funny, and poignant collection on the George W. Bush Presidency. Starting out with the 2000 election and exploring topics like 9/11, the Iraq War etc., Rall presents some legitimate, tough, and in some cases eye opening criticism on W. and his administration. I was specifically entertained endlessly by his cartoons of "el presidente". They are crude drawings, but delibertly so. They are so funny and the criticism is so dead on I would recommend it to anyone who has legitimate questions about this administration. The facts are Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, there was no link between Iraq and Al-Queda, and we were mislead into a war that has distracted from what should be the real focus fighting Al-Queda and terrorism and finding the "evil-doer" Osama Bin-Laden. Rall presents the mistakes of W. in a fun and entertaining fashion. A must read!

Rating:
Summary: Lessons in mass distraction
Review: In our society of competing popularity contests, in which the prevalence of countervailing insults seems to be of more importance than democratic ideals in maintaining political social ties, Ted Rall draws the cartoons which demonstrate how much freedom of speech editors are willing to allow in an America that is so clearly divided that journalists ought to feel obligated to maintain some sympathy for readers who are more likely to agree with Rall than with unsubstantiated assertions from anonymous sources. With the current controversies about secret provisions inserted in late-night conference committee drafts of important end-of-session appropriations legislation, it is not surprising that most people are capable of believing that the United States has reached a level of secrecy which makes the scenes shown in Ted Rall's cartoon possible, if not probable. Most of us don't actually know where Jimmy Hoffa's body ended up, and it is a shame that this book does not have an index to allow curious readers to look up Hoffa and see if Rall has a new theory on that, but we are sure to have a few ideas about events between October 10, 2000 ("Never has that been clearer than during this sad, pathetic, duller than death election year." p. 17) and the Last Word on March 2, 2004 (p. 207) and the essays in GENERALISSIMO EL BUSH allow news junkies to see how much more or less than Rall we knew then or know now. When it comes to predictions, Rall made some good ones, and I am unaware of any that were so far off he had to leave them out of this book in 2004, when, like the Worst-Case Scenarios cartoon on page 21, "The Jerk stops here" sign looks like it is on the desk in the Oval Office.

I find the humor great, but I should be emphasizing how much the book shows an interest in technology and economics, two subjects which are not often prevalent in comic looks at the world situation. On February 17, 2002, Rall and I both took an interest in the Afghan Tall Man Khan, who was 5-feet-eleven but was attacked by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone because he was mistaken for Osama bin Laden, who is 6-feet-4. (p. 68). Rall reprints information from the New York Times article by John F. Burns without further comment, except about "thousands of indiscriminately dropped bombs" in Afghanistan where Rall went to report on the war in November 2001. But the idea shows up in a `Beyond the West Wing' cartoon on page 112: `All I have to do is declare you an "enemy combatant" and WHAM!! Hellfire missile!" That article is about a November 3, 2002 "Central Intelligence Agency rub-out of alleged al-Qaeda operatives riding in a car in Yemen. Langley fired a Hellfire missile from a remote-controlled Predator drone into the vehicle, blowing up several men. The CIA later discovered that an American citizen, Kamel Derwish, had inadvertently been killed in the resulting inferno." (pp. 111-112). Costs are revealed in the "You Can Sponsor the War Against Iraq" cartoon on page 118: "PREDATOR DRONE Sponsor for $40,000,000 (Just ONE big Lotto win!) Fires HELLFIRE MISSILE Sponsor for $58,000 (Same as your WORTHLESS KID'S COLLEGE TUITION)." Rall's first column in this book after Bush 43 actually became president complained that Congress doubled his pay in 1999 by a vote of 276-147 in the House. "Clinton earned $200,000 each year; Bush will get $400,000 doing the same job." (p. 35). The accounting scandal panic is discussed on pages 89-93, with a look at the big change in corporate compensation in our lifetimes:

"Accounting fraud is closely tied to CEO greed. Corporate executives skim obscene salaries off the revenues, getting paid tens of millions of dollars while driving venerable companies out of business and hard-working employees out of work. Companies argue that these payouts are necessary to find and retain the very best managers, but history disproves that canard. Plenty of talented executives work for significantly less, and plenty of overpaid greedheads do a lousy job. CEO pay ought to be capped, as the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed a decade ago, at twenty times the income of the lowest paid employee. Such a measure would insure that all boats are lifted by a rising tide and protect shareholders from rapacious executives." (pp. 92-93). Rall has a proposal to make employees totally uncapitalistic: "To truly prevent insider double-dealing, CEOs must be banned from owning shares of their own or related corporations." (p. 93).

Ted Rall is unlikely to make millions on his books, which will never be as popular as the `Peanuts' comics, but he seems to have a wage-slave labor value of wages view that is directly contrary to the roller-coaster and gambling mentality that makes capitalism a game in which wages are just one plaything among many for maximizing the total take of those who can see how it is occasionally possible to grab all the money before anyone else will realize what is going on. As far as people are concerned, the essay "A Government of Gangsters" captures the current administration's policy most clearly on January 29, 2002: "During the last several months, at least six thousand people have vanished off the streets of the United States. Kidnapped by government agents, they have no idea when--or if--they will be released from prison. . . . Since the disappeared haven't been granted access to lawyers or allowed to call their families, no one can talk to them. Bush says they have no rights because they're not American citizens-but we don't even know if that's true." (p. 63). Rall is expecting more surprises, rather than less, because the "sovereignty-busting gangsterism" (p. 94) ties in well with the doctrine of "permanent revolution" developed by Leon Trotsky in 1915 and used already for mass distraction by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung.

Rating:
Summary: Presents some eye-opening arguments
Review: Just in time for the November elections arrives Ted Rall's satire/graphic novel Generalissimo El Busho, providing a 'tragicomic chronicle' of the administration's follies and crimes by an editorial cartoonist with a long history of Bush criticism. Rall has been a longtime critic of the President and is the author of two other alternative cartooning titles: Generalissimo El Busho presents some eye-opening arguments and impassioned statements.



Rating:
Summary: Ted's an idiot
Review: The humor is typical of Ted Rall -- extremely lame -- and his politics borders on the purely irrational. Ted would do well living in Havana with Castro.

Plus, the artwork is AWFUL. I've seen better drawings in CAVES.



Rating:
Summary: Sharp, funny, takes no prisoners!
Review: This is the first book i've read by Rall, after seeing his comics for years in the Village Voice. Here, he skewers members of the current administration and their bogus "war" on terror, with special attention paid to our "(P)resident-in-Chief", El Busho. if you need to hear someone tell it like it is, without all the wishy-washy popcorn crap from the major media news outlets, this is the book for you. But be forewarned: Rall's commando style may be hurtful to those with their heads stuck in the sand, contented with what they believe to be "facts".