Chupacabra Report

News that gets my goat:

I saw this cartoon from Mike Ramirez today, and sighed. Editorial cartoonists are supposed to question authority, but Ramirez is little more than a cheerleader for the right wing. He works for the conservative Investors Business Daily, and that Rupert Murdoch rag, The New York Post. (Aside: Murdoch once asked the chairman of Bloomingdales why he didn’t run any ads in The Post. He was told that it was “because your readers are my shoplifters.”)

What do you think he’s trying to do here, besides beating the war drum against anybody wearing a burnoose? I suppose that many of the folks that enjoy his cartoons remember Pan Am flight 103, bombed out of the sky over Lockerbie Scotland in 1990, killing all 259 onboard plus 11 people on the ground. How many of them know that the US shot down Iranian Air flight 655 over the strait of Hormuz in 1988, killing 290 men women and children? Or that CIA director William Casey arranged a car bombing in Beirut Lebanon in 1985 that killed 62 people? (but missing the Shiite cleric he was trying to assassinate) These facts may be little known in this country, but you can be sure that they’re well known in every Egyptian prison and Saudi madrasah.

Ramirez’s jingoism does nothing to enlighten us; rather, he promotes acts and attitudes that perpetuate a cycle of violence nearly a century old already.