Now
Available!
Dime's
Worth of Difference:
Beyond the
Lesser of Two Evils
Order Here!
Today's
Stories
September 1,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part Two: Mark His Words
August 31,
2004
Joseph Nevins
Escapism
and Global Apartheid: The Dominican Republic & the NYTs
Matt Vidal
Beyond
Bush's Rhetoric on the Economy
Neve Gordon
Kerry and the Middle East
Dave Lindorff
Bush
the Peace Candidate?
Mike Whitney
NPR Leads the Charge for War Against Iran
Jack Random
Opening Night: Playing the War Card
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: the Life and Crimes of George W. Bush (Part One)
CounterPunch Photo of the Day
Pete Seeger in NYC
August 30,
2004
Justin Podhur
The
Disappeared Mayor
Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites at TheNaderbasher.com
Mike Whitney
Israeli Moles in the Pentagon: What More Could They Possibly
Want?
Ron Jacobs
Live, From New York: the Majority of Protesters Claimed No Candidate
David Lindorff
Sunday in Manhattan: the Sound of Marchin', Chargin' Feet, Boy
Dave Zirin
USA Basketball: The Team White America Loved to Hate
Sam Husseini
Israeli Spying on the US: a Long History
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
August 28 /
29, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
William S. Lind
The Desert Fox
Paul D'Amato
The Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
Joshua Frank
Greens at the Crossroads
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Justin E.H.
Smith
The New Age Racket and the Left
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
Ali Tonak
Help the NYPD?
Mark Engler
New York Says "No"
Justin Felux
Haiti: the Attica of the Americas
Poets' Basement
Gelman, Albert, Ford and Hamod
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
September
1, 2004
Kerry's
Slippage
The
Stench of Doom
By
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Even the people who tell me they will
vote for Kerry take pains to stress that they don't like him.
CounterPuncher JoAnn Wsypijewski, who marched against Bush in
New York Sunday phoned me to say that though she didn't like
Kerry but would vote for the man ," I know now he's definitely
going to lose."
"How do you know that?"
"There were maybe 450,000
people on the streets of Manhattan, all of them hating Bush and
I saw maybe ten people with Kerry/Edwards signs. Maybe two with
Nader/Camejo signs. People don't connect hating Bush with voting
for Kerry."
You can blame that partly on
the whole Bush-as-Monster frenzy that has every book store piled
with hysterical tracts making the President out as a cross between
Caligula and Nero, without even the latter's fiddle playing as
a redeeming quality.
The trouble with this is that
Bush, albeit a somewhat weird and limited fellow, isn't Caligula
or Nero though he does have some resemblance to the repellent
Domitian and furthermore, unlike the Roman emperors, has an attractive
wife whom, as yet at least, he hasn't poisoned, Nor has she,
so far as we know, tried to poison him, though she is a killer
as her erstwhile boyfriend discovered to his terminal cost at
that lonely Texas crossroads on the edge of Midland. To many
people habituated to the character profiles of the people in
mortgage commercials Bush comes across as a straightforward fellow
offering them a 4 percent loan with no balloon payments. My bet
is that he'll probably win the debates with Kerry, not just on
style and bearing but because Kerry has made life so easy for
him, as was attested by the recent polls that showed Bush inching
ahead, even before the Republican convention.
Some of these polls were being
taken even as the headlines were telling us that on Bush's watch
more people had slipped into poverty, more kids were hungry and
now 45 million are without health insurance. Meat and drink for
Kerry, you'd suppose, but No.
The prime reason can only be
the awful decision of Kerry and his advisers to give his war
record in Vietnam the starring role in the Democratic convention
in Boston, followed closely by his utterly mad and unnecessary
resolve in mid-August to announce via Jamie Rubin, his foreign
policy spokesman, that he would have gone to war against Saddam
Hussein even knowing the WMD threat was spurious.
The insufferable Jamie Rubin,
top State Department flack in the Clinton years, told the Washington
Post that 'knowing then what he knows today' about the lack
of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq, Kerry still
would have voted to authorize the war and, 'in all probability',
would have launched a military attack to oust Hussein by now
if he were president. (Previously, Kerry had only said, with
typical forthrightness, that he 'might' have still gone to war.)
In August, with US forces engaged
in heavy fighting in Najaf, and American casualties edging inexorably
towards 1,000, Rubin apologized to the Washington Post
for his 'in all probability' phrase. In more philosophical mode,
he now explained that it was 'unknowable whether Kerry would
have waged the war. "Bush went to war the wrong way,"
Rubin said. "What we don't know is what would have happened
if a president had gone about it the right way".'
How stupid do you have to be
to throw away the Non-Existent WMDs as a stick to beat Bush with?
At this point I reckon a lot
of people who don't like the war lost interest in Kerry, as Kerry
and his advisers must have realized since they sent out James
Rubin to say that he had misspoken, which only enhanced Kerry's
rep as a flip-flopper.
Does Kerry's bid carry the
stench of doom? You'd have thought just the economic news would
carry him to victory but doom is what it's beginning to smell
like. Maybe only the CIA, an agency fighting for its life, can
save him, with some sort of October surprise.
Alexander Cockburn is the co-editor of Dime's
Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
Keep
CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home
/ subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|