Hero, Idiot, or Sap?

Pat Tillman once was paid to try to kill NFL quarterbacks for the Arizona Cardinals. He left it to go to kill alleged terrorists in Afghanistan, but got killed himself.

Sports Illustrated put him on the cover. Writer Gary Smith called him a “quiet, intense boy governed by a personal code of honor, a machismo that he defined and no one else, a Hemingway character out of the 1920s in Spain transplanted seven decades later to California soil.” Smith also mentions that Tillman had been charged with felony assault after beating up a man in a fight outside a pizza parlor (he served 30 days in a juvenile detention center).

According to the writer, Tillman lost several relatives at Pearl Harbor, and he felt guilty that he hadn't gotten a chance to fight for his country, as did others in his family. So he became a Ranger – not the Texas kind, but the Army kind – was shipped out to Afghanistan and got blown up. To SI and many Americans, that makes him a hero.

Not to Ted Rall. A cartoonist and illustrator, and a finalist for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize, Rall is a pragmatic progressive in the Howard Dean mode. In fact, he just wrote an essay on his blog calling for Democrats to abandon a call for national gun control because it's a supercharged red flag for centrists who believe in hunting, target shooting, self-defense and the Second Amendment (Dean staked out this position as well).

But Rall's latest cartoon did not call Pat Tillman a hero. In fact, as Rall told Dave Astor of Editor and Publisher, the trade magazine of the newspaper industry, Tillman was a “cog in a low-rent occupation Army that shot more innocent civilians than terrorists to prop up puppet rulers and exploit gas and oil resources.” In the cartoon, which was pulled from MSNBC, newspaper editors are bandying about what to call him. “Idiot?” says one. “Sap?” says another. The final determination? “Hero!”

Look, there isn't anyone, Ted Rall included, who doesn't believe that American military men and women are being asked to do an impossible job that carries with it extreme personal sacrifice and great risk. There isn't anyone who doesn't want our servicepeople to come home in a condition where the Pentagon will let them be photographed.

On the other hand, this “support for the troops” has nothing to do with the legitimate criticism the Bushcheney administration deserves for sending well-meaning, dedicated but misinformed, men and women into combat in the first place. We will not “aid and abet the terrorists” if we question why the anointed president is feeding patriotic Americans such as Pat Tillman a line about defending the country from terrorism when he and we know it involves nothing of the sort. We will not give “aid and comfort to the enemy” if we demand the real answers as to why America invaded and occupied a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. And we will not be committing treason by raising these objections over and over again, until they are no longer necessary.

Contact Ira Lacher here.