Ted Rall used to be an unfunny cartoonist. Now he's just an unhinged radical leftist who has lost all perception of reality and obviously should be put away before he hurts someone - or himself.

From Rall's new book:

Christian fundamentalists, the millennial end-of-theworlders obsessed with the Left Behind series about the End Times, neo-Nazi racists, rural black-helicopter Michigan Militia types cut from the same inbred cloth as Timothy McVeigh, allied with "mainstream" gun nuts and right-wing Republicans, have been planning, preparing, and praying for the destruction of the "Godless," "secular" United States for decades. In the past, they formed groups like the John Birch Society and the Aryan Nations. Now the hard Right has a postmodern, decentralized non-organization organization called the Tea Party.

Right-wing organizational names change, but they amount to the same thing: the reactionary sociopolitical force-the sole force-poised to fill the vacuum when collapse occurs. The scenario outlined by Margaret Atwood's prescient novel The Handmaid's Tale-rednecks in the trenches, hard military men running things, minorities and liberals taken away and massacred, setting the stage for an even more extreme form of laissez-faire corporate capitalism than we're suffering under today-is a fair guess of how a post-U.S. scenario will play out unless we prepare to turn it in another direction...

A war is coming. At stake: our lives, the planet, freedom, living. The government, the corporations, and the extreme right are prepared to coalesce into an Axis of Evil. Are you going to fight back? Will you do whatever it takes, including taking up arms?...

(HT: Verum Serum )

No, I'm not going to bother to analyze or rebut anything here. How could that be possible? It's enough just to read and be amazed that this guy has the respect and admiration of many on the left.

Not to be outdone, Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC (Natch!) had Rall on his show where he openly wondered whether the conditions were ripe for violent revolution.

From Raw Story, Rall and Ratigan:

"We don't really have time to wait. We've got a real unemployment rate of almost 20 percent. The economy is in deep trouble. People are getting thrown of their homes, over 10 million of them. The planet's in trouble. This is unsustainable. The system is really in deep trouble," Rall continued.

"We know that the unemployment rate is going to keep going up. Not one attempt at a jobs program from this president, so what are we going to do? It's up to the people. John Locke said the people have an obligation to revolt when their governments fail."

"Do you believe that is even in the DNA of Americans?" Ratigan wondered.

"I think it's going to be in the DNA," Rall replied "Nothing will radicalize an American citizen more than getting thrown of their home by a bank that just paid a CEO a bigger raise this year than the year before, not being able to feed your kids and knowing that one percent of the country has all the money tied up in it."