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Today's
Stories
December 31,
2007
Alexander Cockburn
Goodbye
2007 and Good Riddance!
December 29
/ 30, 2007
Alexander Cockburn
Options
in America: Kill Yourself or Have a Baby
Tariq Ali
Indignation and Fear Stalk Pakistan
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
My Encounter with Benazir Bhutto
Gary Leupp
The U.S. and Pakistan After 9/11: Blowback from an Unholy Alliance
China Hand
Pakistan Stares Into the Abyss
Jacob Hornberger
Stop Medddling in Pakistan
John Chuckman
Pakistan and the Failure of Quick-Fix Politics
Missy Beattie
Evaluating Bush with the Bhutto Corruption Standard
Ralph Nader
Who Will Take the Next Step?
Fidel Castro
There Hasn't Been a Day in My Life When I Haven't Learned Something
Robert Fantina
The Sham of Homeland Security
Greg Moses
Beauty from the Heart of Texas
Catherine Lutz
What We Can Not See: Art and Bombing
Kristin Van
Tassel
Seeing in the Dark
Kim Nicolini
Redacted: Brian DePalma's Scream of Outrage
Phyllis Pollack
Keith Richards Runs With Rudolph Once More
Poets' Basement
Landau, Gibbons and Davies
Website of
the Weekend
Driving Karachi in Search of the Perfect Naan
December 28,
2007
Farzana Versey
The
Complex Electra
Wajahat Ali
A
Pakistani Requiem
Binoy Kampmark
Death in Rawalpindi: Bhutto and Her Legacy
Ayesha Ijaz
Khan
Not Dead Yet: The Pakistan People's Party Still Survives
Anthony DiMaggio
Turkey's Bombing of Iraq
Ray McGovern
Creeping
Fascism
Jim Goodman
Biofuels, the Biggest Scam Going
Ron Jacobs
Transcending the Colonizer's History: Iran, a People Interrupted
Russell Hoffman
Mini-Nukes by Toshiba
John Murphy
Greens Gone Wild
Website of the Day
Guiliani Campaign Official: "Only Rudy Can Defeat the Muslims"
December 27,
2007
Dilip Hiro
A
Tragedy Foretold: Will Bhutto's Death be a Boost for Her Party?
Murtaza Shibli
Who Killed Bhutto?
Stephen Soldz
Fallujah,
the Information War and U.S. Propaganda
Bill Quigley
Locked
Outside the Gates
Paul Craig Roberts
The Great American Lock-Up
Omer Subhani
Killing Bhutto: What Happens Next in Pakistan?
Marjorie Cohn
The Torture Tape Cover-Up: How High Does It Go?
Allan Nairn
Cataclysm By Money Whim
Jacob G. Hornberger
Smearing Ron Paul: Shame on the NYT
Norman Solomon
Channeling Suze Orman
Patrick Irelan
Rumsfeld Spills the Ink
Ben Tripp
Pass the Razor Blades
Website of the Day
Quagmire, For What It's Worth
December 26, 2007
Charles Tripp
From
One Saddam to Fifty
Paul Armentano
No-Knock, You're Dead
Rannie Amiri
Lebanon in Search of a Government
Stanley Heller
Brzezinski and Charlie Wilson's War
John Walsh
Two Unreasonable Men
Martha Rosenberg
The Strange Career of Scott Gottlieb
Norman Madarasz
Bolivia Amends New Constitution and Faces Mutiny from Within
Website of
the Day
Cockburn at the Battle of Ideas
December 25,
2007
Patrick Cockburn
Conscience
and Empire
December 24,
2007
Andrea Peacock
A
Dark Ride on the Border
Tariq Ali
Thinking of Edward Said
Uri Avnery
Help! A Ceasefire!
Jill Jameson
Burma is Not Back to Normal: A Trip from Rangoon to Mae Sot
Steve Melendez
Russell Means Goes to Washington
Mike Whitney
The Big Fix
Chuck Munson
Not Getting It About New Orleans
John Walsh
Clueless Crusaders
Farzana Versey
Tony Blair and the Hawking of Religion
Richard Neville
Dreaming of a White House Christmas
Website of the Day
Back in the USSR
December 22 / 23, 2007
Alexander Cockburn
Mike
Huckabee's Ascending Chariot
Ralph Nader
Politics
and Profits: How the Oil Cartel Gets Its Way
Andy Worthington
Intelligence Failures, Battlefield Myths and Unaccountable Prisons
in Afghanistan
Ahmad Faruqui
The Comedian of Pakistan
Bill Moyers
Society on Steroids
Rev. William
E. Alberts
Blessed are the Peacemakers
Timothy J. Freeman
From Kant to Lennon: Can War Really be Over?
Anthony DiMaggio
Democrats Continue to Capitulate on Iraq
Fred Gardner
Molecule of the Year, Cannabiodiol
Paul Krassner
Enhanced Hazing Techniques
Seth Sandronsky
17 Years of Meanness: Repealing California's Three Strikes Law
William Loren
Katz
Christmas Eve Freedom Fighters: Recalling the Battle of Lake
Okeechobee
Michael Dickinson
In the Dungeon of the Zabita
Ron Jacobs
Why Leon Russell Still Matters
David Vest
Doyle Bramhall's "Is It News?"
Poets' Basement
Orloski, Davies and Ford
Website of the Weekend
George W. Hates Santa
December 21,
2007
John Ross
New Massacres Loom in Mexico
Jacob Hornberger
Nothing Can Morally Justify the Invasion of Iraq
Dick J. Reavis
A
Way Out of the Newspaper Abyss
Jeff Cohen
and Norman Solomon
The 2007 P.U.-litzer Prizes
Peter Morici
Business as Usual as Recession Looms
Jack McCarthy
Let Us Now Praise Judith Regan (Even If She Did Sleep with Bernie
Kerik)
Raúl Zibechi
Sex and Revolution
Steve Early
How the Presidential Candidates Made Me an Atheist
David Macaray
Union Aftermath
Patrick Bond
Zuma, the Center-Left and the Left-Left in S. Africa
Lakota Freedom Delegation
A Declaration of Independence from the USA
Website of
the Day
Solomon v. Beck: Tale of the Tape
December 20,
2007
David Rosen
Mitt
Romney's Secret Life as a Pornographer
Alan Farago
The
Huckster and the Wreckage: Jeb Bush and the Subprime Mortgage
Crisis
Laura Carlsen
Standing Up to NAFTA
Ashley Dawson
The Return of the Bread Riot
Wayne Smith
and Jennifer Schuett
Cuba Changes, US Policy Stagnates
Website of
the Day
How to Talk to a FoxNews Reporter
December 19,
2007
Saul Landau
Is
the NIE Bush's Watergate?
Paul W. Lovinger
Hillary the Hawk
Norman Solomon
The Mad Corporate World of Glenn Beck
Dave Zirin
George Mitchell's Drugs of Choice
Marjorie Cohn
Bush Still Spinning Iranian Nukes
Sen. Russell
Feingold
The Iraq War is Exhausting Our Nation
Sonja Karkar
A Christmas Reflection on Palestine
Anthony Papa
Open the Drug Gulags
Christopher Ketcham
Pave the Holy Lands with Good Intentions
Davey D
Britney's Little Sister is Pregnant: Should We Blame Hip Hop?
Website of
the Day
When Republicans Use the F-Word on TV
December 18,
2007
R. F. Blader
The
Politics of Teen Pregnancy
George Wuerthner
Gunning for Wolves in Idaho
Steven Higgs
Can the NAFTA Superhighway be Stopped?
Vijay Prashad
Encounters with Ghadar
David Macaray
The Free Rider Problem
Ralph Nader
Nine Books That Make a Difference: a Reading List for the Holidays
Eva Liddell
Privatizing War Abroad, Invading Privacy at Home
Martha Rosenberg
While the Bodies are Still Warm: Drugs, Shrinks and Shooters
Dave Lindorff
When Impeachment is Out of Print
Peter Morici
The Consequences the Trade Deficit
Website of
the Day
Ron Paul: How Fascism Will Come to America
December 17,
2007
Mike Whitney
Staring
Into the Abyss
Tom Barry
Planning
the War on Immigrants
Uri Avnery
A
Gaza Masada?
Greg Moses
Crossing the Line in Texas
Allan Nairn
Terrorism; Counter-
Terrorism: Excuses for Murder
Patrick Bond
South Africa's Fight Between Hostile Brothers
Stephen Lendman
Police State America
Charles Jonkel
Grizzly Right of Way
Laray Polk
An Inside-Out Crisis in Gaza
Stephen Fleischman
Pawns in Their Game
December 15
/ 16, 2007
Peter Linebaugh
A
People's Penny for the Magna Carta
Howard Zinn
Bomb After Bomb
Standard Schaefer
The Greening of Big Tobacco
Raymond J.
Lawrence
Let's Take Christ Out of Christmas
Alan Farago
Down on Desolation Row: the Vultures and the Growth Machine
Saul Landau
Lord Byron and the Bad Tourists
Jenna Orkin
Lying to "Reassure" the Public: Bush's EPA and the
Post-9/11 Toxic Air Cover-Up
Ahmad Samih
Khalidi
Why a Palestinian "State" is a Punitive Construct
Robert Fantina
Politics By Photo-Op
Missy Comley
Beattie
Resistance Amid the Ruins
Ramzy Baroud
Of Mormons and Muslims
James L. Secor
A Vision for China's Future
Elijah Wald
Ike Turner's Music Won't be Forgotten
Website of
the Weekend
The Alliance for the Wild Rockies Needs (and Deserves) Your Support
December 14,
2007
JoAnn Wypijewski
The
Dirty Cad: What Giuliani's Sex Life Tells Us About Him
John Ross
Iraqi
Refugees Return: One Cruel Hoax
Jacob Hornberger
Terror Suspects Belong in Federal Court
Andy Worthington
Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened?
Allan Nairn
"Shoot Them on the Spot": Rewarding War Crimes
Dave Zirin
The Mitchell Report: Absolving the Owners
Dave Lindorff
The First Cut is the Deepest
Misty MacDuffee
Toxic Grizzlies
Ben Terrall
What Happened to Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine?
Dr. Mustafa
Barghouthi
Prerequisites for Peace
Website of the Day
Sen. Kit Bond: "Waterboarding is Like Swimming"
December 13,
2007
Paul Craig
Roberts
Shrinking
the Dollar from the Inside-Out
Mike Whitney
Dershowitz for the Defense--of Waterboarding
Ron Jacobs
Blank Check DemocratsL the Great War Funding Conspiracy
Norman Solomon
The USA's Human Rights Daze
Peter Morici
The Dragon and the Toothless Dog: China Doesn't Flinch
Sandy Mayes
Blocking the Strykers: 13 Days of War Resistance at Port Olympia
Franklin Lamb
The UN in Lebanon: Whose Mission Is It Fulfilling?
Jacob Hornberger
Don't Reform the CIA, Abolish It
Nadim Rouhana
An Interloper in My Own Land
Dave Zirin
On Pigskin and Petrol
Website of the Day
Rachel's Needs (and Deserves) Your Support!
December 12, 2007
Allan
Nairn
US Intelligence is Tapping Indonesian
Phones
Alan
Farago
How Sprawl Eats Its Young
Ray
McGovern
Torture, Lies and Videotape
Winslow
T. Wheeler
The Phony Pentagon Budget Cuts
Evan
Jones
The Raid on Great Western: Why an Australian Bank Might Spell
Doom for the US Farm Belt
James
Petras
An Open Letter to Sarkozy on the Exchange of Political Prisonsers
Joel
Hirschorn
The Horserace Fiction: Clinton, Obama and the Democratic Machine
Joshua
Frank
Why Ron Paul Deserves Our Attention
Sherry
Wolf
Why the Left Should Reject Ron Paul
Dan
Bacher
Survey of a Fish Graveyard
Website
of the Day
Men Eating Bugs
December
11, 2007
Patrick
Cockburn
What's Really Happened During
the Surge?
Diana
Johnstone
The Next Kosovo War
Paul
Craig Roberts
It's Waco All Over Again: Preventive Detention and the Constitution
David
Macaray
Impasse in Hollywood
Ralph
Nader
Gail Collins Versus the Underdogs
Andy
Worthington
Guantánamo Britons to be Released: a Mixed Result
Martha
Rosenberg
No Holiday for High Risk Sex Workers
Steve
Champion /
Anthony Ross
Words for Our Brother, Tookie Williams
Kim
Nicolini
Tangled Up in Dylan
Michael
Dickinson
Say Goodbye to Purgatory: Pope Rat Gets Indulgent
Website
of the Day
A Charming (and Worthy)
Pitch
December 10, 2007
Uri
Avnery
How They Stole the Bomb From Us
Debbie
Nathan
The Perils of Journalism and Child
Porn
JoAnn
Wypijewski
Is There a Left Here Left?
If So, What Can It Do?
Steve
Kelly
Cheap Chips, Counterfeit Wilderness
Donna
J. Volatile
Welcome to the Revolution
December
8 / 9, 2007
Alexander
Cockburn
The Coup Against Bush and Cheney
Brenda
Norrell
Seize the Land, Chain the Peace Activists
Saul
Landau
The Ruins of Empire
R.
F. Blader
A Rape in Every Drink?
Ray
McGovern
Spinning Iran's Centrifuges
Allan
Nairn
Imposed Hunger in Gaza, the Army in
Indonesia
Linn
Washington, Jr
Spotlight on Death Row
Paul
Craig Roberts
When Will Bush Come Clean?
December
7, 2007
Sean
Penn
Piano Wire Puppeteers
Arthur
Versluis
Mining Water in the Desert
M.
G. Piety
Racism and the American Psyche: Some
Thoughts on Race and Intelligence
Pam
Martens
Banksters Gone Wild
Alan
Farago
Will the Free Market Kill Suburbia?
Sprawl and the Credit Crisis
Allan
Nairn
It Takes (Out) a Village
Col.
Dan Smith
Bush, Iran and the Politics of Doomsday
Alice
Slater
The Iran Opening
Robert
Weissman
The Story of Stuff
Website
of the Day
Something
About Mitt
December
5, 2007
Mike
Whitney
Why the CFR Hates Putin
Sharon
Smith
The Anti-War Enablers: Tom Hayden
and the Dead End Democrats
James
Petras
Venezuela in the Aftermath
Ron
Jacobs
The Iran Charade
Dave
Zirin
Kicking a Dead Man: the Sliming of Sean Taylor
John
V. Whitbeck
Two States or One? Time to Choose
Peter
Zinn
Covered in New Orleans
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Impeach Pelosi Instead
Alan
Farago
The Credit Bomb Detonates in Florida
Heather
Gray
US Meddling in Australian Politics
Website
of the Day
A Donner Summit Night Before Xmas
December
4, 2007
Alexander
Cockburn
Jackboot State Stubs Its Toe in
Ann Arbor
Andy
Worthington
Guantánamo and the Supreme
Court
Paul
Craig Roberts
The Lies at the End of the American
Dream
Ray
McGovern
No-Nuke Iran
Winslow
T. Wheeler
Admiral Mullen and the Defense Budget: When White Elephants are
Too Small
Allan
Nairn
The Regime Still Stands in Burma, Where "the People Just
Want Food"
Russell
Mokhiber
The USA v. Al Arian
Nikolas
Kozloff
As Chávez Falters: Raising the Stakes for the South American
Left
John
V. Walsh
Peace Movement Paralyzed
Ghada
Ageel
Will Peace Cost Me My Home?
Stephen
Soldz
The Facts be Damned!: Psychologists' President Defends Psychologist
Involvement in Interrogations
Website
of the Day
Hands Off the People of Iran
December
3, 2007
Tariq
Ali
Venezuela After the Referendum
Bill
Quigley
New Orleans: Bulldozers for the Poor,
Tax Credits for Developers
Eric
Walberg
The Bible and Middle East History
Uri
Avnery
After Annapolis
Marjorie
Cohn
Operation Iraqi Freedom Exposed
Dave
Lindorff
Vengeance Isn't Sweet
Stephen
Fleischman
Homeless in Paradise
Martha
Rosenberg
Perp Walks for the Mink Clad on Chicago's Mag Mile
Website
of the Day
So Just Lead!
December
1 / 2, 2007
Alexander
Cockburn
Emblems of the Bush Age: Adrift
in a Sea of Booze
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Bear Minimum: the Grizzly and
the Future of the Rocky Mountain West
Mike
Whitney
"Iraq Doesn't Exist Anymore": an Interview with Nir
Rosen
Shemon
Salam
A Visit From the FBI
Roger
Burbach
The Battle in Bolivia
Benjamin
Dangl
New Politics in Old Bolivia
Brian
M. Downing
The Quiet on the Middle Eastern Front: How Much Credit Goes to
the Surge?
Greg
Moses
Night of the Living Redneck: a Texas Horror Story
Sonja
Karkar
The "Never-Never" Peace Conference
Saul
Landau
Ethics and Evil in South Boston
Margaret
Kimberley
Black America Left Behind
John
Ross
What are the Prospects for a New Mexican Revolution?
Reza
Fiyouzat
Exit on the Left: When Che's Children Visited Iran
Judith
Scherr
Berkeley Turns Right for the Holidays
Lance
Olsen
Of Forests and Finance: Logging for the Wealthy
Christopher
Brauchli
Mr. Bush and the Despots
Robert
Fantina
Iraq as U.S. Colony
Dan
Bacher
Fish Triage on Prospect Island
Michael
Donnelly
Remembering How to be Human: John Trudell and the Music of Urgency
Website
of the Weekend
Appalachian Voices
November
30, 2007
Peter
Stone Brown
The Re-Packaging of Bob Dylan
Wajahat
Ali
The Volatile Mistress: an Interview with Javed Jabbar, Pakistan's
Former Minister of Information
Allan
Nairn
Cold-Blooded Celebrity: Thomas L. Friedman and the Bali Bombers
Alan
Farago
The Sorrows of Suburbia: Politics, Sprawl and the Housing Crash
John
Ross
The Death of Latin America's First Revolution
Corporate
Crime Reporter
America's Corporate Crime Capitals
Lucia
Alvarez
Diego Gonzalez
Argentina's Political Future
James
Rothenberg
The Iraqi Miracle
Website
of the Day
Bio-Bling?
November
29, 2007
R.
F. Blader
The Most Dangerous Kind of Bribe
Ismael
Hossein-Zadeh
Distorting Fascism to Demonize Iran
Stephen
Soldz
War on the Couch: Fear, Aggression and Empire
Sheldon
Richman
Iraq 3.0
George
Wuerthner
Forest Fires, Lies and Chainsaws
Felice
Pace
Did All Things Considered Self-Censor on Annapolis?
Col.
Dan Smith
The Meaning of Annapolis
Harvey
Wasserman
Terror Target Nukes
Nikolas
Kozloff
Primetime Hate Debate: Lou Dobbs, Immigration and Campaign '08
Paul
Krassner
Huffington Post Bloggers Go On Strike!
Dave
Lindorff
News Not Fit to Print: US Coup Planned for Venezuela?
CP
News Service
The One State Declaration
Website
of the Day
A Native View of Yellowstone Bison Slaughter
November
28, 2007
James
Petras
CIA Destabilization Memo Surfaces
on Venezuela
Jeff
Halper
Annapolis: When the Roadmap is a One
Way Street
Pam
Martens
Crashing Citigroup
Peter
Morici
Economy in Crisis: Avoiding a Recession
Mohammed
Khatib
Separate and Unequal in Palestine
Helen
Redmond
The Horror and the Hope: Health Care in America
William
S. Lind
In the Fox's Lair: Quiet Before a New Iraq Storm?
Ben
Tripp
We, the People: a Trope for All Seasons
Liaquat
Ali Khan
Pakistan: First, Restore the Constitution and Reinstate the Judges
Jeff
Berg
Holbrooke Says Bush Won't Attack Iran
Website
of the Day
The Lies of Joe Klein
November
27, 2007
Joe
DeRaymond
On the Road to the Torture School
Paul
Craig Roberts
Meet the Only Two Candidates Worse Than Bush and Cheney: Hillary
and Rudy
Marjorie
Cohn
Remembering Victor Rabinowitz
Mike
Whitney
A Dollar the Size of a Postage Stamp
Ron
Jacobs
The Myths of Military Progress
Col.
Dan Smith
The Pentagon's "People System" Still Doesn't Work
Ralph
Nader
Family Learning
Karim
Makdisi
Annapolis and the Unholy Alliance: the View from Beirut
Christopher
Ketcham
Memo to Hollywood Writers: Strike Until You Drop
Ronan
Bennett
Martin Amis Does a Coulter
Website
of the Day
Celebrating the Uncensored Media
November
26, 2007
Kathleen
and Bill Christison
Heading for Annapolis
Paul
Craig Roberts
The End of All That
David
Macaray
Enter Mediator
Sameer
Dossani
Pakistan's Wounded Dictator
Roger
Burbach
The Final Battle in Bolivia
Mark
Scaramella
Guns and Greed in the Emerald Empire
Brian
McKinlay
Howard's End
Rick
Kuhn
The Fall of a Racist Union Buster
Binoy
Kampmark
Ruddslide and Dull Alec
Monica
Benderman
What Do You Know of War?
Brenda
Norrell
Return to Alcatraz
Website
of the Day
Ghostworld by DJ Spooky
November
24 / 25, 2007
Alexander
Cockburn
The Ordeal of Catherine Wilkerson,
MD
Robert
Fisk
Darkness Falls on the Middle East
Saul
Landau
Norman Mailer will Not R.I.P.
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Justice Stephen Breyer, Cancer Bonds and the Origins of Neoliberal
Environmentalism
Rannie
Amiri
Beirut's Black Friday
Christopher
Brauchli
Iraq Embassy as Gilded Palace
Daniel
Gross
The Gap and Black Friday
Mike
Whitney
"A Generalized Meltdown of Financial Institutions"
Marjorie
Cohn
Iran and the 2008 Elections
David
Rosen
Senior Sex: the Real Sexual Life of Aging Americans
David
Michael Green
If Conservatism is the Ideology of Freedom ....
Kenneth
Rexroth
When Euripides Played the Hindu Kush: Greeks and Buddhists in
Afghanistan
Muhammad
Iqbal
Trans. Shahid Alam
Ghazal
Website
of the Day
Aerial Footage of Delta Fish Kill
November 23, 2007
Gary
Leupp
Killing the Buddha in Pakistan's Swat
Valley
Laura
Carlsen
Coming to Terms with Diversity in
Bolivia: an Interview with Alvaro Garcia, Bolivia's VP
David
Macaray
Keeping Labor Unions Out
Andy
Worthington
Former Guantánamo Detainee Seeks Asylum in Sweden
Clifton
Ross
Trashing Chavez: Keith Olberman's Toxic Rant
Seth
Sandronsky
Battling Sodexho
Dan
Bacher
Death in the Delta: Thousands of Fish Stranded by Bureau of Reclamation
William
A. Cook
The Myth of Middle East Peace
Website
of the Day
Waiting for the Guards: Stress Techniques as Torture, a Short
Film
November
22, 2007
Alan
Farago
Who Lost America's Everglades?
Greg
Moses
A Thanksgiving Basting
Dave
Lindorff
Impeachment is Back on the Table
Mike
Ely
Native Blood: the Myth pf Thanksgiving
Omar
Azfar
Gore for President of Pakistan?
November
21, 2007
Vijay
Prashad
Our Dictator, Their Democracy
Martha
Rosenberg
Undercover at a Turkey Slaughtering Plant
Manuel
Garcia, Jr.
Epiphany on the Glacier
John
Ross
The Last Days of Mexican Corn
Brian
McKenna
Cancer Terrorists Unmasked
Stephen
Soldz
Isolation Torture Routine at Guatánamo
Monica
Benderman
Needing Peace
Ben
Terrall
Slavery in the Fields: The Real Price of Sugar
Website
of the Day
Mercy for Animals
|
Weekend
Edition
December 31, 2007
Goodbye 2007 and
Good Riddance!
Hello
2008 and You'd Better Shape Up!
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
It was the No! 2007 was never the best
of times. It was a whiny, fretful twelve months, and what should
have been a time of keen enjoyment, poking at the graying ashes
of the Bush era, saw the left and progressive sectors grasping
at phantoms and with less of a significant presence on the national
political scene than at any time in the past thirty years. There's
scant sign that this will change in 2008 unless some unforeseen
earthquake tosses up some exciting Independent candidacies, of
which there is zero evidence at the turn of the year.
January 1, 2007
The world still reels from
the fall of a titan. A week earlier, on December 26, Gerald Ford
entered Valhalla on his golf cart.
These days a hefty slab of
the teenagers alive in America will supposedly live to be 100
(presumably working till they drop to pay for the rest, jobless
and dying from diabetes). Given the reproductive shadow hanging
over America - poor semen quality, cryptorchidism, impaired fecundity
- they won't have that many children, although the sparse litters
will contain people likely to live to be 125, handing down horrible
recipes for turkey giblet gravy to the next generation.
In short, there'll be a lot
of centenarians about, and the name Gerald Ford will mean absolutely
nothing to any of them. You had to have been born in 1960 to
have been 14 in 1974, hence even vaguely conscious of the genial
interregnum between Nixon and Carter, over which Ford presided.
At the start of the first viewing
day, so the wires services reported, only twenty people were
mustered at Capitol Hill to view Ford's casket in the Rotunda.
On that day, George Bush excused himself from the state memorial,
staying home in Crawford, Texas, presumably watching reruns of
Saddam's execution.
Few speak well of Ford. The
neocons think he was weak. The libertarians regard him as a statist.
The liberals and the left can't get over his pardon of Nixon.
Enthusiasts for the man from Grand Rapids seem pretty much confined
to Dick Cheney and me.
On the grounds that he didn't
have the time and maybe not even the inclination to do too much
harm, I've always regarded Ford as America's greatest twentieth-century
president, with the possible exception of Warren Harding, a very
fine man. Ford reached the White House without vote fraud. He
presided over a Keynesian binge. On his benign watch the pork
barrel did its noble duty. Nonmilitary appropriations rose by
7.2 per cent, in contrast to Nixon's 4.3, Carter's 2.2, Reagan's
1.3. On his watch, with funding cut off by congress, the U.S.
quit Vietnam. The arts flourished. Yes, there was the little
matter of the invasion of East Timor. Nobody, certainly no American
president, is perfect. Ford probably thought East Timor was a
putting green. Anyway, what does it take to be America's greatest
President, if it comes down to the height of the mountain of
corpses you leave behind? The bar isn't that high.
Ford belonged to the age of
détente. The neoliberal age and the Second Cold War really
began with Carter. Had Ford beaten back Carter's challenge in
1976, the neocon crusades of the mid- to late 1970s would have
been blunted by the mere fact of a Republican occupying the White
House. Reagan, most likely, would have returned permanently to
his slumbers in California after his abortive challenge to Ford
for the nomination in Kansas in 1976.
January 7
The war in Iraq, one of the
most disastrous military enterprises in the history of the Republic,
has the New York Times' fingerprints all over it. Across
the past sixth months, the Times has been waging an equally disingenuous
campaign to escalate American troop levels in this doomed enterprises,
culminating in an editorial okay for a troop hike the day before
Bush's speech.
The prime journalistic promoter of the escalation--it is time
to retire the adroitly chosen word "surge"--now being
proposed by the White House is Michael Gordon, the Times' military
correspondent, a man of fabled arrogance and self esteem.
A long piece on January 2,
under the byline of Gordon, John Burns and David Sanger, made
these promotion efforts particularly clear. The piece was a prolonged
attack on Gen. George Casey, top military commander in Baghdad,
depicted in harsh terms as espousing a defeatist plan of orderly
withdrawal.
Gordon's "troop surge"
campaign has been politically much more influential than the
mad-dog ravings of the right-wing broadcasters. The Times
helped furnish the 2003 U.S. attack on Iraq. Now it has played
a major role in furnishing a likely escalation. There is blood
on its hands, and grieving mothers like Cindy Sheehan have as
much cause to demonstrate outside its offices as outside Bush's
ranch in Crawford.
January 11
A make-or-break speech by a
beleaguered U.S. President is usually preceded by a demonstration
of American might somewhere on the planet, and the run-up to
Bush's address last night was no exception.
The AC-130 gunship that massacred
a convoy of fleeing Islamists on Somalia's southwestern border,
apparently along with dozens of nomads, their families and livestock,
was deployed on Sunday to make timely newspaper headlines indicative
of Bush's determination to strike at terror wherever it may lurk.
Moral to nomads: when the U.S. president schedules a speech,
don't herd, don't go to wedding parties, head for the nearest
cave.
President Bush stuck to his
expected script last night and said he plans to boost U.S. forces
in Iraq by 4,000 Marines to Anbar province and five combat brigades--17,500
troops--to Baghdad, in a new scheme to regain control of the
city.
Perhaps it was the shift of
setting for his broadcast to the White House library that made
him seem uncomfortable. With the exception of Laura, the former
librarian, the Bush clan is not a bookish lot. The late Brendan
Gill reported after staying at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport,
Maine how he scoured the premises late one night in search of
something to read and could only find The Fart Book.
January 18
Suppose the movers and shakers
in the Israel lobby in the U.S.A.--Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz
and the rest of the crew--had simply decided to leave Jimmy Carter's
Peace Not Apartheid alone. How long before the book and
all its aspersions on Israel's treatment of Palestinians would
have been gathering dust on the remainder shelves?
Suppose even that Dershowitz
had rounded up some interns, and simply sallied forth from the
Harvard Law School to buy up every copy of Carter's book and
toss each one into the Charles River. Would not that have been
a more successful suppressor than the attempted blitzkrieg
strategy they did adopt?
Of course it would. For weeks
now the lobby has hurled its legions into battle against Carter.
The Anti-Defamation League has taken out ads. The lobby's allies
in the press have hurled their rotten tomatoes. The Amazon.com
book site features venomous assaults at unprecedented length.
Carter has been stigmatized
as an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, a patron of former concentration
camp killers, a Christian madman, a pawn of the Arabs, an advocate
of terror.
But the assault on Carter is
all to no avail. With each gust of abuse, Carter's book soars
higher and higher on the bestseller lists, now at number three
on Amazon itself. This doesn't prove the lobby has no power.
It proves the lobby can be dumb. Once a book by a former President
with weighty humanitarian credentials has actually made it into
the bookstores, it's a hard job to shoot it down with volleys
of wild abuse.
January 24
The Bush presidency is finished.
A State of the Union address is always a pitiless register of
where exactly the White House incumbent stands, in terms of political
power. As Bush plodded through a list of doomed political initiatives
the news cameras kept swiveling away from him, like people seeking
escape from a bore at a cocktail party.
They peered over his shoulder
at Nancy Pelosi, America's first female Speaker of the House;
they swiveled up to the balcony at a haggard-looking Laura Bush;
they sought out the Democratic presidential hopefuls, such as
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. A first-timer at this annual
event might have thought Bush was doing well, as the politicians
and judges and generals bobbed up and down with the usual ovations.
But the reactions were dutiful and the mood low-key.
Bush stepped to the rostrum
shackled to polling numbers that put him at the third lowest
presidential ratings on record. He has the approval of only 28
per cent of the people, still hovering above Carter's 26 per
cent in 1979, in the late autumn of his term, and Nixon's 24
per cent shortly before he resigned.
The least enthusiastic people
in the chamber were probably members of Bush's own party, who
see him as an unalloyed political liability.
When a president who came to
maturity making daily obeisance to west Texas starts hailing
biodiesel and mumbling about grass clippings as alternative energy,
you know it's all over; that the President's policy advisers
and speech writers are already sending out their resumes and
wondering when to jump ship.
February 1
Aside from winning, there aren't
that many ways of ending wars. Governments pay attention when
the troops mutiny, when there are riots outside the recruiting
offices, when there's revolution on the home front, when the
money runs out.
So, here we are, in 2007, coming
up on four years of war in Iraq. There's not going to be any
significant mutiny among the troops. These people are volunteers.
The campuses are quiet, filled with people on career track or
downloading music or playing at virtual politics through their
laptops. The churches? They are out there protesting torture,
but the vocations are dying. We need more nuns! The priests are
either on the run or in prison for child abuse.
The respectable old anti-war
"movement" stirs into once in a while for pleasant
outings like last Saturday's in Washington, D.C. The people don't
like the war but this doesn't mean it won't go on so long as
there's money to pay for it.
This brings us to Congress.
There are the powder-puff non-binding resolutions, which mean
nothing. On January 26, even as Senator Joe Biden and the others
were solemnly pontificating on the significance of their sense-of-the
senate resolution against the war, the Senate confirmed, unanimously,
81-0, the nomination of General Petraeus to command U.S. troops
in Iraq. Petraeus has been a leading military advocate of escalation
in troop levels.
In September 2006, Congress
passed the fiscal 2007 defense appropriations act, containing
$70 billion for war. Since Oct. 1, it's what Bush has been using
for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That money will run out
somewhere between March and May. In past years, the DoD has shifted
money around inside the existing budget till a new supplemental
is passed.
So right now Bush has money
he needs to surge. The White House is sending Congress the entire
half trillion defense budget for FY 2008, starting October 1.
Congress could cut Iraq spending from this too. Bush could only
veto the entire bill.
If there is to be a real battle in Congress over denying Bush
money, this is how it will have to take place over the next few
months. I doubt the Resistance in Iraq is betting on it.
February 25
The Clintons have always had
short fuses, and at the best of times, Hillary is taut by disposition,
and already her political prospects for winning the Democratic
nomination are getting somewhat cloudier. This last week has
been a trying one, crowned by the Oscar-night adulation for Al
Gore, no favorite of the Clintons.
On the heels of his $1.3 m.
fundraiser for Hillary's rival, Illinois Senator Barrack Obama,
Hollywood tycoon and Dreamworks co-founder David Geffen planted
a carefully improvised explosive device under HRC's candidacy.
He confided to Maureen Dowd
of the New York Times that Mrs. Clinton was not the candidate
to unify the Democratic Party, nor the nation; also that he would
never forgive her husband for ignoring his own appeals and those
of many other liberals to give a White House pardon to Leonard
Peltier, a native American convicted of killing two FBI agents
back in the 1970s. But while leaving Peltier to rot in prison,
Clinton did pardon financier Marc Rich.
Geffen's aim was true. Even
though they enjoy political candidates tearing each other to
shreds, Americans prefer to have the carnage tricked out with
worthy appeals for "unity" and "bipartisanship."
The word "divisive" is a deadly one to have hung around
one's neck. And for many, Rich's pardon was the quintessential
resume of Clintonian corruption.
This, and the Oscar triumph
for Gore, have left Mrs. Clinton distinctly frayed. But she is
defiant. Asked about her vote for the war at a New Hampshire
town hall, she said: "If the most important thing to any
of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or said
his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from."
Hillary's numbers are not as robust as they were. She had better
learn how to smile under fire, or she'll soon be in real trouble.
March 8
It's wheels-up from George
Bush today as he heads south for a six-day tour of Latin America.
Few Americans study the travel brochures with more zeal than
two-term presidents who face impeachment (Nixon and Clinton)
or popular loathing (Johnson and Bush Jr.) or displeasing suggestions
in the press that they are senile and should be removed from
office (Eisenhower and Reagan).
Washington holds scant appeal
for our current president. Vice President Dick Cheney's senior
aide Scooter Libby has now been convicted. The hoped-for "light
at the end of the tunnel" in Iraq is not yet visible and
the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon have threatened mutiny
if Bush orders them to bomb Tehran.
His poll ratings are in the
basement. So, it was time to call up Lame Duck Tours and accept
the bargain offer of a six-day special to Latin America, meals
and hotels included with a trip to Mayan ruins on Tuesday.
Back in his 2000 campaign,
Bush pledged "a fundamental commitment" to Latin America.
But on Bush's inept watch the subcontinent has swerved left,
and now the dominant leader on the continent is Venezuela's Hugo
Chavez. The boom in oil prices has allowed Chavez to subsidize
energy prices through Latin America, Central America and the
Caribbean, and he has cemented important trade and investment
agreements with Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia.
The deeper problem is that
the U.S. model--free trade pacts, neoliberal onslaughts on public
ownership and rule by the International Monetary Fund--simply
ran out of steam at the end of the Nineties, leaving Latin America
scarred by poverty, unemployment, slums and kleptocracies.
March 12
Until recently, the U.S. people
were thinking mainly about the circumstances of Anna Nicole Smith's
demise and the likely inheritor of the former Playmate's millions.
Now Anna has been swept off the front pages, along with the beleaguered
Alberto Gonzales, by the pet food crisis.
An ever-lengthening list of
proprietary brands of dog and cat food all come from the same
Canadian pet food processor, Menu Foods, into whose vats at some
point went wheat gluten from China contaminated by melamine,
a fertilizer used in Asia where--not to put too fine a point
on it--pet life is cheap.
Only a few animals have died,
and America's cats and dogs are at greater risk from lightning
strikes, but most Americans are fearfully eyeing Towser and Mittens
for signs of renal failure.
Into this firestorm of national
anguish now has been tossed the news that Mrs. Judi Giuliani
was once in the dog-killing business. This disclosure came on
the heels of the news that Judi had not been entirely forthcoming
about the number of her legal unions. Like Rudy himself, it turns
out she's on her third.
The hitherto undisclosed numero
uno, whom she married at age 19, was a salesman at U.S. Surgical,
a company selling surgical staples. Young Judi's job was allegedly
to demonstrate their efficacy on cuts made on drugged dogs.
According to Patricia Feral,
president of the Connecticut-based Friends of Animals, quoted
on the New York Post online, which broke the story, earlier
this week, U.S. Surgical's reps did sales-demonstration stapling
on hundreds of dogs through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Feral
says the dogs were "either put to death following the sales
demonstrations because they can't recover from them, or they
die during them." The stapling had to be done on live dogs
because, as one U.S. Surgical CEO put it back in the 1980s, "A
dead dog doesn't bleed. You need real blood-flow conditions,
or you get a false sense of security."
Americans like their First
Family to have a dog. Nixon used to put sesame seeds in the turn-ups
of his trousers so his spaniel, King Timahoe, would nuzzle him
in public. "Any man who does not like dogs and not want
them about does not deserve to be in the White House," said
President Calvin Coolidge.
April 14
Like many of the heehaw racists
strewn across the cable dial and AM frequencies, Don Imus must
be wondering why this time he got his tongue caught in the wringer.
It was suddenly news that Imus shored up his ratings with racist
cracks at blacks and Hispanics? Only at the start of April he
went too far by insulting the women athletes of Rutgers? Is that
when he crossed the Rubicon of racism and the shout went up,
At long last, have you left no sense of decency? It's like announcing
Bluebeard veered into unforgivable moral excess when he knocked
off wife number five.
When he realized he was in
serious trouble, Imus went full steam into contrition mode. America,
far more than other cultures, adores full-bore apologies, leading
to a full, low-interest-rate moral re-fi. Not believing in redemption,
and schooled by Spinoza and Nietzsche, Europeans tend to take
the position that remorse adds to the crime.
Imus's trip to Canossa on the
Reverend Al Sharpton's radio program was a particularly rich
session, with Imus sniveling that at bottom he is "a good
man" and Reverend Al ushering on his daughter as a symbol
of black womanhood defiled by Imus's "ho" talk. Imus
could have probed the Rev. about his explicit statement on CNN
a couple of years ago, amid his campaign to get rappers using
physical violence to promote records banned from the airwaves
for 90-day punitive periods, that these rappers had a perfect
(First amendment) right to rap about violence and presumably
hos. But Imus passed up the chance, preferring to dwell on his
war on sickle cell anemia, a disease he appeared to think he
had the courage and moral stamina to confront in his ranch in
New Mexico. This culminated in another wonderful exchange, this
one between Imus and Brian Monroe of Ebony:
MONROE: All right. Let me be
clear. My magazine, Ebony magazine, has been writing and
covering sickle cell anemia for decades now. Back when you were
still doing radio spots for used cars. I cannot let you....
A used car salesman! Amidst
his abasement, the worm turned.
IMUS: I'm not going to sit
here and let you insult me. Don't talk about me doing used car
commercials Let me tell you what--I will bet you I have slept
in a house with more black children who were not related to me
than you have.
In the end it was all to no
avail. The execs at MSNBC and at CBS, saw the big advertisers
peel away, and instantly threw in the towel. Imus was history--at
least until he gets a show on Sirius.
And in the larger context of
things--of Anne Coulter, of O'Reilly the Loofah King, of Limbaugh,
of Howard Stern, of Cynthia Tucker and Juan Williams; of blacks
paid by whites to dump on other blacks like Cynthia McKinney,
of Chris Rock chanting the F word, of women-dissing rapper? One
listens to the fuss about Imus and thinks, okay -- but this is
only one tiny square in our dirty national quilt. We live in
a racist, profit-driven culture that is getting more degraded
by the hour. War is at the apex of that degradation, and indeed
these ceremonies of degradation are an integral part of the war
machine, which drives the whole show along. Back in February
Imus snarled into his mike, "It might be good to start with
somebody who is willing to take three big ones and drop one on
Mecca, one on Jeddah and one on Saudi-one on Riyadh." No
one asked him to apologize for that one. Take that, you towel
heads.
April 19
Since there undoubtedly will
be a next time, after these latest campus killings at Virginia
Tech, what useful counsel on preventative measures can we offer
faculties across America?
Arm teachers and students. There have been the usual howls from
the anti-gun lobby, but it's all hot air. America is not about
to dump the Second Amendment giving people the right to bear
arms.
A better idea would be for
appropriately screened teachers and maybe student monitors to
carry weapons. This is not as bizarre as it may sound to European
ears. A quarter of a century ago students doing military ROTC
training regularly carried rifles around campus.
Five years ago Peter Odighizuwa,
a 43-year-old Nigerian student, killed three faculty members
at Appalachian Law School with a handgun, but before he could
wreak further carnage two students fetched weapons from their
cars, challenged the murderer with guns leveled, and disarmed
him.
Ban anti-depressants. What should be banned from campuses
are not weapons but prescriptions for anti-depressants. Cho Seung-hui
was on a prescription drug. The likelihood of it being an anti-depressant
is high, since campus doctors dispense prescriptions for them
like confetti.
Replace campus police with
student volunteers.
The stupidity of the campus cops at Virginia Tech will undoubtedly
cost the college hefty damages.
There was plenty of evidence
that Cho Seung-hui was a time bomb waiting to explode. Students
talked about him as a possible shooter and refused to take classes
with him. His essays so disturbed one of his teachers with their
violent ravings that she arranged a secret signal in case she
needed security during her tutorials.
When the mass murder session
began in the engineering building the police cowered behind their
cruisers until Cho Seung-hui finished off the last batch of his
32 victims, then killed himself. Then the police bravely rushed
in and started sticking their guns in the faces of the traumatised
students, screaming at them to freeze or be shot.
Make laxity in supervision
grounds for termination.
More than one teacher felt Cho was scarily nuts. They recommended
counseling, then didn't bother to review the conclusions. And
it has emerged that Cho was actually institutionalized as a psychotic
and suicide risk in 2005. Yet when he returned to campus the
administrators didn't even tip off his roommate.
College administrators live
in constant fear of declining students' enrollment. At the first
sign of trouble they cover up. So, there's a double killing in
a Virginia Tech dorm at 7.15am, after which Cho has time to go
home, make his final home video, walk to the post office, mail
his package to NBC and then head off to the engineering building
with his guns.
The college's first email to
students goes out more than two hours after the first killings
were discovered. The ineffable Warren Steger, college president,
says later: "You can only make decisions based on the information
you have on the time. You don't have hours to reflect on it."
Two dead bodies, a killer somewhere on campus, and Steger makes
his big decision to do nothing.
May 3
By far the best performance
at the recent Democratic candidates' debate organized by MSNBC
was by a very distant outsider, Mike Gravel, a 77-year-old former
U.S. senator from Alaska, well known nearly 40 years ago for
his opposition to the war in Vietnam. In some electrifying tirades,
he flayed Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and the others as two-faced
on the absolute imperative of getting out of the war in Iraq
and not getting into one in Iran. "They frighten me",
Gravel shouted, gesturing at his rivals. "You know what's
worse than one U.S. soldier dying in vain in Iraq. It's two soldiers
dying in vain. In Vietnam they all died in vain."
May 15
Enter the world of Paul Krugman,
a world either dark (the eras of Bush One and Bush Two), or bathed
in light (when Bill was king). Across the past three years, Krugman
has become the Democrats' Clark Kent. A couple of times each
week he bursts onto the New York Times op-ed in his blue
jumpsuit, shoulders aside the Geneva Conventions and whacks the
bad guys. For an economist, he writes pretty good basic English.
He lays about him with simple words like "liar," as
applied to the Bush crowd, from the president on down. He makes
liberals feel good, the way William Safire returned right-wingers
their sense of self-esteem after Watergate.
Krugman paints himself as a
homely Will Rogers type, speakin' truth to the power elite from
his virtuous perch far outside the Beltway: "Why did I see
what others failed to see?" he asks, apropos his swiftness
in pinning the Liars label on the Bush administration. "I'm
not part of the gang," he answers. "I work from central
New Jersey, and continue to live the life of a college professor--so
I never bought into the shared assumptions I don't need to be
in the good graces of top officials, so I also have no need to
display the deference that characterizes many journalists."
All of which is self-serving
hooey. The homely perch is Princeton. Krugman shares, with no
serious demur, all the central assumptions of the neoliberal
creed that has governed the prime institutions of the world capitalist
system for the past generation and driven much of the world deeper,
ever deeper into extreme distress. The unseemly deference he
shows Clinton's top officials could be simply, if maliciously
explained by his probable hope that one day, perhaps not to long
delayed in the event of a Democratic administration taking over
in 2005, he may be driving his buggy south down the New Jersey
turnpike towards a powerful position of the sort he has certainly
entertained hopes of in the past.
June 1
America right now is "anti-war,"
in the sense that about two-thirds of the people think the war
in Iraq is a bad business and the troops should come home. Anti-war
sentiment was a major factor in the success of the Democrats
in last November's elections, when they recaptured Congress.
The irony is that this sharp disillusion of the voters with America's
occupation of Iraq owes almost nothing to any anti-war movement.
To say the anti-war movement is dead would be an overstatement.
But in comparison to kindred movements in the 1960s and early
1970s, or to the struggles against Reagan's wars in Central America
in the late 1980s, it is certainly inert.
The anti-war movement proved
itself incapable of pressuring House Democrats to hold out. After
the Bush veto, the Democratic resistance has crumbled. The Democrats'
reward for this shameful collapse? Perceived now as fraudulent
in their claims to oppose the war, their standing in the polls
is as low as Bush's. Latest news is that the American military
presence in Iraq will double by the end of the year.
Do anti-war "movements"
end wars? The Vietnam War ended primarily because the Vietnamese
defeated the Americans, and because a huge number of U.S. troops
were in open mutiny. At home, a large sector of the society was
in mutiny too. Anti-war movements are often most significant
in their afterlife--schooling a new generation in attitudes and
tactics of resistance. What's happened here in the U.S.A. across
the intervening years since Vietnam is a steady, unsurprising
decline in the left's overall political confidence and ambition
and, as in the 1990s, a disastrous failure to attack the Democratic
Party and Democratic administration led by Clinton and Gore for
the onslaught on Yugoslavia and the inhumane sanctions against
Iraq.
In the Bush years, we've seen
a further decline in any independent left with any unified theoretical
and practical strategy or even political theory; also a rise
in unconstructive and indeed demobilizing paranoia, as in the
orgy of 9/11 conspiracism. The campuses are sedate. The labor
movement is reeling. To describe the anti-war movement in its
effective form is really to mention a few good efforts such as
the anti-recruitment campaigns, the tours by those who have lost
children in Iraq, or three or four brave souls like Cindy Sheehan,
who single-handedly reanimated the anti-war movement last year,
commencing with her vigil outside Bush's Texas ranch, or the
radical Catholic Kathy Kelly.
June 3
Put together Murdoch's Fox
News, a mid-May debate between Republican presidential candidates
and the state of South Carolina and you have a hotbed of stupidity.
But to the fury of the Republican
organizers there was an intrusion of rational thought, in the
person of Ron Paul, a U.S. congressman from Texas, classed as
a rank outsider in the nomination race.
Texas used to send true individualists
to Washington, D.C. One of the brightest moments of my early
years, visiting the nation's capital, was watching Rep Wright
Patman, head of the House Banking Committee, tell the red-faced
Chairman of the Federal Reserve that he deserved to be locked
up in the penitentiary.
Paul is the last of the breed.
As a small-government, tight-money Republican, this gynecologist-obstetrician
(4,000 babies claimed as a career total) regularly votes 'No'
on pork barrel projects that would put money into his own district.
But as a Republican in the
isolationist, libertarian tradition he also votes 'No', sometimes
alone among the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, on war funding,
on laws allowing presidents to order arbitrary imprisonment,
"coercive interrogation" and suspension of freedoms
guaranteed by the Constitution.
The throng in Columbia, South
Carolina, cheered Giuliani, Romney and others as they roared
their support for torture and rule by emergency decree. In the
'war on terror' anything goes. Only Paul told the crowd and the
TV cameras that No, torture is wrong and the Constitution is
paramount.
Paul was asked if 9/11 changed
anything. U.S. foreign policy, he answered, was a "major
contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked
us? They attacked us because we've been over there; we've been
bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East. So
right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than
the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we
say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf
of Mexico? We would be objecting."
A majority of Americans--65
per cent and up--hate the war in Iraq and think the U.S. troops
should leave. But the leading candidates from both parties fence-straddle
at best, and also parrot Giuliani on the "war on terror."
Hence the popularity of Ron Paul, as soon as he gets a national
venue.
June 10
These are troubling times for
evangelical Christians. The born-again president they helped
elect is in the autumn of his tenure, the bold promises of Christian
revival now tarnished or cast aside. Mitt Romney, the front-running
Republican contender to be Bush's successor is a Mormon, and
although leading evangelical Christians have given him the nod,
many foot soldiers in the service of Christ entertain doubts.
"The world needs Jesus, the REAL JESUS, not Jesus the half-brother
of Lucifer," cries Kevin Stilley on his Christian site.
Then there's the never-ending
struggle with the Evil One. Still fresh in the ears of the righteous
are the chortles of unbelievers over the tribulations of Pastor
Ted Haggard, leader of the New Life Church, outed last year in
Colorado by a former male prostitute declaring that Haggard had
enjoyed sex with him, their monthly interactions enhanced by
crystal meth. In February of this year Haggard had crash counseling
across three weeks, overseen by four ministers, to give, as one
put it, "Ted the tools to help embrace his heterosexual
side". But there have been doubts, even among evangelicals,
as to whether Satan and his demons have in this instance been
decisively routed after so brief an engagement.
And now, evangelicals face
fresh evidence that the Dark Forces miss no opportunity to make
further ravages among the righteous. Earlier this week ChristiaNet.com,
"the world's most visited Christian website", disclosed
the results of a survey it has just concluded, asking site visitors
questions about their personal sexual conduct.
"The poll results indicate
that 50 per cent of all Christian men and 20 per cent of all
Christian women are addicted to pornography," Jones reports
bleakly. It seems that 60 per cent of the women who answered
the survey admitted to having "significant struggles with
lust", 40 per cent admitted to "being involved in sexual
sin in the past year", and 20 per cent of the church-going
female participants struggle with looking at pornography on an
ongoing basis.
Given the sexual apathy, reported
by the Chicago study, maybe abstinence is winning after all.
A survey this month claims that each day more than 1million condoms
are sold in the United States, this being only 0.4 per cent of
the population. There's no evidence, in the form of a population
explosion, for the other possible deduction.
June 21
Summer's hot breath draws closer
and the psychoanalysts of New York and Boston prepare their patients
for the difficult two or three weeks of holiday separation. Undoubtedly,
beach chat among both analysts and analysands will focus on the
end of the Soprano series which, across the past eight
years, courtesy of Lorraine Bracco's Jennifer Melfi--Tony Soprano's
analyst--has been the biggest boost to the shrink business since
Lee J. Cobb starred in the Three Faces of Eve.
Truly comical has been the
solemnity with which psychoanalysts across the United States
have been deploring the "breach of professional ethics"
at a shrinks' dinner party in one of the concluding Soprano episodes
in which the identity of Dr. Melfi's patient as Mobster Tony
was disclosed. The rare moments when shrinks aren't seducing
their female patients (70 per cent, in an informal New York survey
some years ago) are usually consumed by such indiscretions, a
tradition stretching all the way back to the notoriety of the
patients trotting up the stairs of Bergasse 19, Freud's chambers
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