A few days after Rene Gonzalez's disgusting rant, cartoonist Ted Rall has published a despicable comic strip suggesting American hero Pat Tillman is an "idiot." Tillman, you will remember, exercised his rights as a free agent to sign with the U.S. Army rather than the Arizona Cardinals. He was killed ten days ago in Afghanistan fighting the war on terrorism.

Rall depicts Tillman as "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." (The war is in Afghanistan, not Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. What "gas and oil resources"?)

"Never mind the fine print," the cartoon Tillman asks his military recruiter. "Will I get to kill Arabs?" Based on nothing, Rall portrays Tillman as a homocidal racist. Similarly, Rene Gonzalez decided of Pat Tillman: "I could tell he was that type of macho guy, from his scowling, beefy face on the CNN pictures."

Both Rall and Gonzalez live in a delusional world where their own fantasies rather than the facts dictate how they view people. Pat Tillman volunteered to fight the war on terrorism, their thinking goes, therefore he must fit the racist, macho, killer stereotype that my imagination believes my ideological opponents to be. By all accounts, Tillman was anything but that. Rall and Gonzalez's hateful and ignorant expressions reveal far more about them than they do about Pat Tillman.