Now
Available!
Dime's
Worth of Difference:
Beyond the
Lesser of Two Evils
Order Here!
Today's
Stories
September 11
/ 12, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Swatting
at Flies
September 10,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
Disappointment
at Samarrah?
Michael Donnelly
Democrats v. Democracy
Alan Farago
Mosquitoes in a Hurricane
Doug Giebel
Karl Rove's Terror Playbook
Mike Whitney
Bob Graham's Political Tsunami
David Domke
God's
Will, According to the Bush Administration
September 9,
2004
Joe Bageant
Karaoke
Night in Bush's America
Ed Kinane
Abducted in Baghdad
Peter Bohmer
The Cuban Revolution: Present and Future
Todd May
The Emerging Case for a Single-State Solution
Jeremy Scahill
The New York Model: Indymedia and the Text Message Jihad
Joshua Frank
Green House Party Gasses
Fran Shor
The Crisis in Public Dissent: When Protest is Considered a Terrorist
Act
Patrick Cockburn
Welcome
to the Dirtiest City in the World: Despair in Baghdad
Website of
the Day
Liberty Street Protest: No to War at Ground Zero
September 8,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
This
Doesn't Smell Like Victory: A War on Two Fronts in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush Confuses; Kerry Mute: Spinning 1000 Dead
Bulent Gokay
Russian and Chechnia After Beslan
Lisa Viscidi
Land Reform and Conflict in Guatemala
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Byrd's Eye View
Mike Whitney
Afghanistan: American's Drug Colony
Stan Goff
Body
Count: 1001
Website of
the Day
Bush and the Love Doctors
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
September 7,
2004
Diane Christian
Hostage Tactics: a Game of Mortal Poker
Joshua Frank
Greens
Unravel from Within
Patrick Cockburn
Fallujah
Erupts Again: US Death Toll in Iraq Nears 1000
Ron Jacobs
Bush and Putin: "We're Not Girlie Men"
Chris Floyd
Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Dr. Carol Wolman
No Blood for Oil at Paul Bunyan Day Parade
John Ross
The
Politics of Darkness North / South
September 6,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
An
Anti-Labor Day That Lives in Infamy: How Many Democrats Voted
For Taft-Hartley?
Ralph Nader
The
Cruel Legacy of Taft-Hartley: a Labor Day Call for Rights for
Working People
Lee Sustar
What's Driving the Attack on Pensions?
Kathleen and
Bill Christison
Dual
Loyalties: the Bush Necons and Israel
September 4-5,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Elephants
and Gramsci
Ted Honderich
The
Way Things Are
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The
Holy Empire: Who We Are and What We Do
Douglas Valentine
What the World Should Know About Guantanamo
Patrick Cockburn
New Iraqi Police State Flexes Its Muscles
Gary Leupp
Neo Cons Under Fire
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: the Hempstead T-Shirt
William A.
Cook
The
Day of the Lemming
Dave Zirin
Kobe Bryant and the Price of Freedom
John Chuckman
The Day the World Ended
Karyn Strickler
God Save the Endangered Species Act
Vanessa Jones
Bad Day with an Ikea Cup
Mike Whitney
Kerry: the "Better" War Candidate
Mark Donham
Dear John (Kerry): Start Explaining and Fast
Mickey Z.
McBypass Nation: Feeling Clinton's Pain
Alan Farago
Can the Everglades be Fixed?
Poets' Basement
Landau and Albert
September 3,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Jesus Told Him Where to Bomb
Rahul Mahajan
Bush's RNC Speech: an Annotated Response
Carl Estabrook
The
Book of Slaughter and Forgetting
Joshua Frank
The Florida of the Northwest: Oregon Dems Sabotage Nader Again
Gary Leupp
Music to My Ears: Sunday's March
James Hollander
Deja Vu in Manhattan: Assisted Political Suicide?
Mark Engler
Republicans
Among Us: a Week at the RNC, Inside and Out
Jesse Sharkey
Making Students and Teachers Pay for the Crisis in Education
Jane Stillwater
Calling the Cops on Your Own Kid
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: the Bush Neo-Cons and Israel
September 2,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part 3: More Pricks Than Kicks
Max Gimble
Et Tu, Menchu? Extrajudicial Killings and Clandestine Graves
in Guatemala
James Petras
President Chavez and the Referendum: Myths and Realities
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush and the Afghan Electoral Model: "If They Want to Vote
Twice, Let Them"
Todd Chretien & Jessie
Muldoon
Will the Democrats Expel Zell Miller?
Jack Random
Spite and Venom Day: the Turncoat and the Profiteer
Alan Maass
The Real Vietnam
Christa Allen
Contre Bush
Website of
the Day
[Redacted]
September 1,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
The
Stench of Doom
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Poor Larry Franklin
Dave Lindorff
Kerry's Litmus Test
Josh Frank
Protest in White: Not All of New York Rises Up
John L. Hess
Moles, Scoops and Flip Flops
Mike Whitney
Deconstructing Arnold
Jack Random
Kindergarten Night at the RNC
Andrew Wilson
War on the Pachyderms: Why Do Elephants Hate Us?
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
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.
|
Weekend Edition
September 11 / 12, 2004
In This Election
Reality is Off the Table
Swatting
at Flies
By
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Who would you rather have in your corner,
Sasso or Baker? In its hour of need the Kerry campaign brings
on board James Sasso, breathlessly described in one news story
as "canny and ruthless", but mostly known to the world
as one of the men who ran the Dukakis campaign in 1988, which
was about as far from "canny and ruthless" as you can
go without leaving the earth's gravitational field. Right behind
Sasso comes Stan Greenberg, fresh from his disastrous stint advising
the Venezuelan right how to recall Hugo Chavez. Meanwhile the
Bush crowd brings on former secretary of state James Baker to
handle negotiations for the presidential debates. Yes, Baker,
the man who negotiated the theft of the election in Florida in
2002. If you hunted for words that best describe Baker "canny
and ruthless" would do nicely.
When historians come to dissect
the Kerry campaign they will surely marvel at the rich platter
of issues handed the Democratic candidate which he has thrust
from him with shudders of distaste and instead turned back, like
Mencken's Bryan, to swat at flies.
Read the report of the 9/11
Commission, as Kerry and his "strategists" (a hold-all
word these days, meaning anyone on a political campaign a reporter
has been able to raise on the phone) have surely done and there
are mounds of fragrant dung to hurl at Bush and Cheney: the warnings
from the FBI and CIA ignored by the White House; the obvious
lies about Cheney getting Bush's go-ahead to issue the shoot-down
orders that never reached the Air Force pilots.
You'd think that the Kerry
campaign would have put together a group of 9/11 widows and,
along the lines of the swift boat vets, had them trail Bush,
denouncing him as the man who slept through the warnings of imminent
attack by Al Qaeda. It's all there on the plate, but Kerry has
spurned it. 9/11 is off the table.
Read the US Senate report on
the manipulation of intelligence to concoct the bogus WMD, used
as the rationale for invasion. The report is replete with detailed
stories of Cheney's eight visits to the CIA hq at Langley to
browbeat the analysts, plus scores of kindred jimmying of the
data. Kerry could have said he'd voted war-making powers to the
president, because he and his colleagues were served up lies.
But no, Kerry hops around on
the issue all summer and then, after all the war-whoops in Boston,
he loses it at the Grand Canyon, saying that 'knowing then what
he knows today' about the lack of chemical, biological and nuclear
weapons in Iraq, he still would have voted to authorize the war.
This was after he sent out Jamie Rubin, former spokesman at the
State Department, to tell the Washington Post that 'in
all probability', Kerry would have launched a military attack
to oust Hussein by now if he were president.
As a piece of tactical stupidity
it's hard to beat, particularly when there was absolutely no
pressure on Kerry to say, or have Rubin say, any such thing.
There on the plate in front of Kerry was probably the best documented
account of White House deceptions in living memory and he thrust
it away. Fake WMDs are off the table.
In fact the whole war is off
the table, vanishing into velleities as Kerry refines and redefines,
shifts from foot to foot and says he would have done it all different,
As the WMD issue vanished back into the kitchen and Kerry began
to plummet in the polls Rubin was redeployed. He apologized
to the Washington Post for his 'in all probability' phrase
and ventured that it was 'unknowable' whether Kerry would have
waged the war. How about that for a rallying cry to those millions
of antiwar voters out there! From No to Unknowable.
Spygate? The nation's secrets
being filched by Bush's neo-Cons, passed to Israel and to Teheran?
The only surprise here is that Kerry hasn't already called for
charges to be dropped against any and all suspects, and urged
the dismissal of FBI investigators on grounds of anti-Semitism.
In Afghanistan America's man
Karzai can drive around bits of Kabul in relative safety, same
way that America's man Allawi can display himself in a couple
of acres of downtown Baghdad. Elsewhere the Taliban rules and
Osama takes his noonday hikes in the Hindu Kush. But for Kerry
Afghanistan is off the table.
Pretty much everything's off
the table except for some Kerry rhetoric which no one believes
about a health plan and taxing people who make more than $200,000.
As Bush told the crowds in Ohio, the Kerry plan will never fly
because everyone knows the rich don't pay taxes anyway. The
US Supreme Court? Kerry said in mid-summer he wouldn't hesitate
to nominate an anti-choice justice. On the heels of this crafty
rallying cry to his core supporters he sent the Rubin-like disclaimer
that he wouldn't want to have a Supreme Court that reversed Roe
v Wade..
At a quick count, off the agenda
of debate this year are the role of the Federal Reserve; trade
policy; economic redistribution; nuclear disarmament; reduction
of the military budget and the allocation of military procurement;
the role of the World Bank, IMF, WTO; crime, punishment and the
prison explosion; the war on drugs; corporate welfare; forest
policy; the destruction of small farmers and ranchers; Israel;
Cuba; the corruption of the political system. The CIA is on the
table but not in encouraging way since Kerry touts the recommendations
of the 9/11 Commission which wants to back to the era before
the Church hearings of the mid-70s. The Senate and House Democrats
are now backing off opposition to Bush's nominee as CIA director,
Rep Porter Goss, seemingly on a signal from the Kerry Campaign.
So what have Kerry supporters
and prospective supporters got to hang their hat on? Not much,
which is why most of the ones I meet seem wan and out of sorts,
reduced to mutterings about fascism's march. It may indeed be
on the march but there are no spirited vows from Kerry that he'll
stand in its path. Just the other day, in a debate on NPR one
of his "strategists" boasted he'd drafted some of the
Patriot Act's language.
Once there was a vibrant antiwar
movement, outside the Democratic Party, and therefore with some
purchase on the candidates. Howard Dean took care of that, and
the Democratic National Committee took care of Dean. Now there's
pro-war Kerry, with no aggressive antiwar movement to push him
to the left. All's quiet on the western front. The left is in
a funk, spouting nonsensical scenarios about 9/11, abandoning
all long-term issues. Meanwhile the Empire is out of money, the
housing bubble due to burst in the not too distant future. Why
talk about that? In this election reality is off the table. As
someone said, back in 1995, "Political campaigns are the
graveyard of real ideas and the birthplace of empty promises."
Who said that? Teresa Heinz in the Utne Reader, just before
she married Kerry. My bet is on a very low turnout.
I wrote a shorter version
of this column for The Nation, which went to press on Wednesday.
Since then the Kerry cmapaign has plunged deeper into blunder,
earning a bitter rebuke from none other than Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Last weekend Jackson was hosting a rally in West Virginia with
Willie Nelson that drew 30,000 of the sort of core Democratic
base that John Kerry has to activate in order to have a chance
at defeating Bush. It so happens that Kerry was in West Virginia
at the time and Jackson emplored him to attend. Kerry, showing
his matchless sense of tactical misjudgement, declined. Whether
this was Kerry's usual instinct for steering clear of anyone
with hint of a progressive spirit or stemmed from advice by his
campaign consultant Bob Shrum, whose own career of misjudgement
stretches back to George McGovern is unclear at this time. At
present, Kerry is faltering in the crucial states of Missouri,
Ohio, West Virginia and Florida. Kerrycrats are so shellshocked
by the news of their candidates poor performance that they had
nearly given up attacking Ralph Naderuntil an Oregon judge (Democrat)
rebuked the slimey tactics the Oregon secretary of state (Democrat)
had used to arbitrarily keep Nader off the ballot. Nader's back;
Kerry may be over.
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's must-have
new book on the 2004 elections, Dime's
Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils, is just
out from CounterPunch / AK Press.
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 /
|