Last week it was revealed that Left-Wing cartoonist Ted Rall had been on a police surveillance list prior to the 2004 Republican convention in New York City. Ralls talks more about it here.

Government agencies began spying on me shortly after 9/11. I have repeatedly suffered service interruptions–loud static, whispered voices, even outages–at the hands of a government whose laughably inept phone-tapping skills match its inability to respond to a hurricane or tornado. Finally, a security official at Verizon confirmed that my telephone had been tapped. “That’s already more than I should have told you,” he explained, requesting anonymity. “Under the Patriot Act we’re not allowed to inform our customers about intercepts.”

Eventually I was seeing my local Verizon repair guy, who was repeatedly being summoned to my home to restore service, more often than my best friend. So I was naturally suspicious when I caught an unfamiliar man, no uniform or badge, fiddling with the posts in my building’s phone box. “Who are you and what are you doing?” I demanded. The dude knocked me down and bolted out a door into an alley. Giving chase, I watched him drive off an unmarked white van with U.S. government plates.


Wonder what kind of intel are they getting? Future plotlines in Diesel Sweeties? (Rall signed the strip to a deal at United Media.)

6 COMMENTS

  1. What an amazing work of fiction. C’mon, if anything like that took place Rall would be all too happy to scream about it from the highest mountain 12 seconds after it happened, he’s never made mention of it until now.

    From every description in the times article it seems none of the investigations into him went further then reading his website and writing a summation of it. If there is evidence to prove more I’d like to see it.

    His point about them not being intelligent is also seen through rose colored glasses, the evidence leans more to them believing that he just wasn’t that important. But y’know, any opportunity for Rall to slander a cop is fine by him. The guy’s a poseur hack, an inept lefty-Ann Coulter prick whose irrelevance grows day by day.

  2. An interestingly ironic headline. Enemy of the state? Rall _loves_ the state, in the abstract, anyway. Can’t get enough of it.

    In fact, he loves the state so much that in the aftermath of Katrina he told people to withhold donations to the Red Cross so that the Bush Administration would feel pressured to spending more tax money on relief.

    For Ted Rall, increasing state spending and power is good, private initiatives are bad, bad, bad. And he is just as willing as those nasty neo-cons to promote human suffering in pursuit of his political goals.

  3. I must confess, I’m not buying it.

    The style of the story has the same tenor of your typical breathless e-mail hoax.

    And sure: the Feds send out an undercover agent to fool with Rall’s phone box, but they send him in a car with government plates.

    And who knew that frequent visits from the repair man was an indication of government surveillance! Here I thought I had all those visits from Charter Cable over my internet connection because their service sucked.

  4. “The dude knocked me down and bolted out a door into an alley. Giving chase, I watched him drive off an unmarked white van with U.S. government plates.”

    There’s a door in his building that leads to an alley?

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