Ted Rall for October 08, 2009

Rall rules!!! I’ll get to laughing as soon as I get over being sick to my stomach. Brilliant cartoon.

To cry or to laugh: that is the question.

Hey Scott, there are many confirmed cases of innocent Gitmo prisoners (“it’s happened more than once”), even though you are happy to assume everyone there is a “slimeball”.

And pointing out the injustice of indefinitely imprisoning and torturing innocent people without a trial does NOT mean that one wants to free guilty or dangerous people. You seem incapable of imagining that one can support imprisoning guilty dangerous people while at the same time being opposed to imprisoning innocent people.

If an innocent personal friend of yours was in prison, would you be so quick to dismiss concerns about innocent people in prison and pretend it’s not a problem because, after all, anyone in prison is obviously just a “slimeball”?

Or do you actually believe that everyone in prison is guilty and dangerous?

Excellent cartoon….I support our president but this is one of the things he was elected to do and has not kept his word on yet. It’s a shame how people can’t see how Guantanamo damages us. How can we really be seen as the leader of the free world when we do things like that?

Rall hits the nail right on the head, like earlier this week.

All Obama had to do was ‘Not Be Bush’. He was elected to ‘Not Be Bush’. And yet, all he has been for 9 months is ‘a Little Bit More Bush’.

If I had 2 months transition to be President, I would end up with a Banker’s Box full of Stop-Loss Memos and Executive Orders that would at reverse stuff at least temporarily (showing that the world will not collapse around us, and allowing Congress to work to permanently reverse everything).

Obama is a singularly ineffective leader- esp when you consider all the stuff he campaigned on has not even been touched..

I think he’s trying on Gitmo, but our congresspeople won’t let any of those prisoners come into the US. Maybe we need a “sponsor” program like they had during the Viet Nam war where families and churches would sponsor a Vietnamese family. Can you see “Christian” churches doing that now with these innocent people? Not.

This is all opinion, what everyone’s saying here, so I’ll add mine. Obama is not as effective as many would have hoped – as I would have hoped. But he’s about as effective as I expected. The forces around him are strong and complex, and I don’t think anyone could so easily find a solution to Gitmo. Having said that, Rall is correct. Though many there were guilty - perhaps - many were innocent and are now in a no-man’s land.

Re: Nobel Prize: I suspect Obama would have preferred for them to pick someone else. It makes his job all the more difficult and, of course, only sends wingnuts into spasms.

I don’t know….I think Obama was humbled and grateful to receive the award and it might just make his job easier. Every once in a while even the president needs for someone to say “you’re on the right track, guy” to give him the incentive and motivation to keep going in the face of all the opposition he gets daily.