Brace Yourself For the New McCarthyism

By: Ted Rall

According to The Wall Street Journal I'm "probably the most bitterly anti-American commentator in America". The National Review calls me "a big fat zero, an ignorant, talentless hack with a flair for recycling leftist pieties into snarky cartoons that inspired breakfast-table chuckles among the leftist literati and the granola-munching types". It's not just conservatives who have taken a bead on me: The New Republic has cited my work in its regular "Idiocy Watch" section.

What have I done to merit such bipartisan vitriol, much of it in publications that have always ignored me? Since Sept. 11, I've written eight columns and drawn 24 editorial cartoons examining various aspects of that fateful morning and its aftermath.

Some of my pieces expressed pain and anger at the murder of thousands of innocent people. Others sought, sometimes humorously and sometimes not, to answer the widely asked question "why do they hate us so much?".

I've taken the Bush administration to task for what I consider the cynical manipulation of a national crisis to promote partisan political agenda items such as drilling in the Arctic, fast-track authority on free trade and eliminating the alternative-minimum tax.

And I've also pointed out to Americans that the administration's war against the Taliban may have something to do with the potential profitability of a Caspian Sea-Arabian Sea oil pipeline.

Like all New Yorkers, I grieve for the dead and remain shocked by the magnitude of our loss. But I have the same job to do as I did back in August: express my ideas and opinions. And my opinions still include the firmly held belief that President George W. Bush was illegally installed via a judicial coup d'état. I honestly think that our bombing of Afghanistan is misguided and hypocritical. And I still believe in a freedom-loving America where opposing opinions don't vanish in the glare of a 93 percent popularity rating.

Although some of my fellow political cartoonists have taken to mocking all things Arab, towing the official Pentagon line, and cranking out what I consider to be propaganda, I've continued to skewer the president and his policies. I consider it my patriotic duty to do so.

Insulting American politicians and American policies doesn't make one anti-American. It makes one an integral part of the American process.

War brings out the best and worst in us, a truism that is just as apt here at home as it is on the battlefield. I've always received hate mail - such is the price one pays for publicly expressing any strong opinion - but in recent weeks the level of hate has escalated to include frighteningly credible death threats.

People who, prior to Sept. 11, might have advised me to engage in self-coitus now urge me to commit suicide, using the most disturbing language imaginable. Those who once threatened to cancel their newspaper subscription because of something I wrote or drew now promise to contact advertisers in a concerted effort to, as one e-mailer put it, "make sure that you never work again and die homeless in the gutter".

My mother, living in a bellwether county in Ohio and perhaps more in touch with mainstream America than I, is worried. "I'm afraid that you'll lose your job", she warns, urging me to be less critical of Republicans.

She's never said anything like that before.

Oh, and my phone is tapped. It began a few weeks ago. Whoever is responsible did a crummy job; even when my computer is off, the modem emits a loud dial tone. You can hear someone whispering. I hope that the government's efforts to locate Osama bin Laden are being carried out with more finesse than this absurd assault on my civil rights. The feds, I assume, are merely following up White House spokesman Ari Fleischer's chilling warning that Americans ought to watch what they say and what they do. I've done neither.

The war on terrorism, it seems, requires us not only to zip our nail clippers and Swiss Army knives into check-in luggage but also to zip our lips.

There's a new atmosphere of hyperconformity, and nothing less than total alignment with the White House is currently acceptable. Bill Maher, the conservative host of "Politically Incorrect", has enthusiastically supported the Bush administration's war against Afghanistan. Nonetheless, a politically incorrect remark about the semantics of cowardice nearly caused ABC to cancel his show.

We're living in dangerous times, and this neo-McCarthyist trend toward blacklists, the silencing of dissent, and government attacks on personal freedom represents an even greater threat to our country than terrorism. Nothing, after all, is more fundamentally un-American than keeping your mouth shut.