Today's Stories

March 13 / 15, 2009

Peter Lee
What the Chas Freeman Fight Was Really About

Diana Johnstone
NATO's Global Mission Creep

March 12 , 2009

Sharon Smith
Bottom Feeders at the Trough

Christopher Ketcham
Full Spectrum Penetration: Israeli Spying in the United States

Mike Whitney
Haircut Time for Bondholders

Ray McGovern
Obama Caves to the Lobby

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
The Doublespeak of a Discredited IMF

John Ross
The War is Not Over

M. Reza Pirbhai
Men in Black: Another View of Pakistan

Chris Floyd
Lost Liberty Blues: Prisons, Profits and the Banality of Evil

Steve Early
Why Labor Doesn't Need a "House of Lords"

Quentin Gee
Hiding the Costs of Coal

Website of the Day
Amadee Coral Reef: a Spherical Panorama

March 11 , 2009

Mike Roselle
From Birmingham to Coal River: Why is the Environmental Movement So Timid?

Paul Craig Roberts
The Criminal Injustice System

Henry A. Giroux
Academic Labor in Dark Times

Nikolas Kozloff
The Death Cries of the Salvadoran Right

Norm Kent
I am Patient Number 380206011

Mitu Sengupta
Reforming the World Bank: Different Image, Same Tune?

Ludwig Watzal
The Structure of Israel's Occupation

David Macaray
The Battle Over EFCA Has Begun

William S. Lind
Rounding Up the Usual Suspects

Martha Rosenberg
A Merger From the Folks Who Brought You Vytorin

Website of the Day
American Indicator: One in Fifty Kids are Homeless

March 10 , 2009

Franklin Spinney
What Israeli Peace Process?

Vijay Prashad
What Did Hillary Clinton Do?

Stan Cox
There's No Free Lunch on Your Browser: the Internet's Energy Drain

Zoltan Grossman
Coffee Strong: Listening to the G.I. Voice at Fort Lewis

Reuven Kaminer
Pure and Unadulterated Racism

Jonathan Cook
Memoricide in the West Bank

Dave Lindorff
Business Rules

Brian McKenna
How Anthropology Disparages Journalism

Harvey Wasserman
Is This the End of the Age of the Automobile?

Corey Pein
He Told You So

Website of the Day
AIG and Systemic Failure: $1.6 Trillion in Insured Deriviatives

March 9 , 2009

Pam Martens
Madoff and the Sorkin Affair

Ralph Nader
Too Big...Period

Peter Lee
Meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: the US's Worst/Best Hope for Afghanistan?

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Charade

Peter Morici
Fixing the Banks: Treasury's Doomed Strategy

Dean Baker
Why Do We Need a Private Health Insurance Industry, Anyway?

Steve Ault
Kiss Thailand's Tolerance for Gays Goodbye

Stephen Lendman
Guantánamo Under Obama

Farooq Sulehria
Tennis Without Spectators

Belén Fernández
Chávez, a Cockfight and the Caracazo

Website of the Day
How Lincoln Learned to Read

March 6-8 , 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Harlots High and Low

Chris Floyd
Tangled Up in Karl

Uri Avnery
Remember Ophira?

Dave Lindorff
Kiss the Banks Goodbye

Mark Weisbrot
The Crisis vs. the Dogma

David Ker Thomson
Against Work

Phil Aliff
Soldier Suicides

Rebekah Ward
Georgia Injustice: Another Young Life Wrecked

Tracey Briggs
How Capitalism Feels in the Head

Dean Baker
Depression Nostalgia?

Daniel P. Wirt, M.D.
Remove the Handle From the Health Insurance Misery and Death Pump

Carl Finamore
The Recovery Plan: Save Us From Those Who Would Save Us

Wajahat Ali
The Pakistani Monster

David Michael Green
Smart is the New Stupid

David Macaray
The Minimum Wage Revisited

Michael Dickinson
On Financial Fools Day

Susie Day
Line in the Sand

Bob Sommer
Echoes of the Townhouse Explosion

Ben Sonnenberg
No Forgiveness for the Bourgeoisie: Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel"

David Yearsley
Sonic Fakery in "Slumdog" From the Mozart of Chennai

DC Larson
They're Writing Those Depression Songs, Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Live Truth: Music Sans Headphones

Poets' Basement
Dominquez, MacNeil and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Environment & Obama: a Conversation with Jeffrey St. Clair

March 5 , 2009

James G. Abourezk
This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn

Kathleen and Bill Christison
U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Robert Weissman
Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Public Policy

Patrick Cockburn
My Day at the Terror "Charity"

William Blum
Being Serious About Torture...Or Not

Robert Fantina
From Iraq to Afghanistan: Augmentation All Over Again

Saul Landau
The Unseen Crisis

Benjamin Dangl
Striking a Blow Against the Beer Cartel: a Grassroots Victory in Utah

Christopher Brauchli
The New Leaders of the GOP

Website of the Day
The Angola 3: 36 Years of Solitude

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

Mike Whitney
Blowing Up the Economy: How Securitization Lit the Fuse

Ron Jacobs
The Banality of Occupation: the Rand Papers

Ashley Smith
War by Another Name

Joanne Mariner
Obama's War on Terror

Dan Bacher
The California Water Wars: Why It's Not a Conflict Between Fish and People

Mark Engler
Will the Winds of Change Reach El Salvador?

Franklin Lamb
"What's Hezbollah Done for Us Lately?"

Cal Winslow
Slugging It Out in California

David Mandelzys
Apartheid Week

Website of the Day
Guantánamo: the Definitive Prisoner List

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Is Nancy Pelosi Really Against War Crimes?

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

Anthony DiMaggio
From Bush to Obama: Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Dennis Ross and Iran: the Fox and the Chicken Coop

Mischa Gaus
The Banks' War on Workers

Felice Pace
The Economy and the Big Picture

Mike Whitney
Is Free Market Capitalism Possible Without Accountability?

Lee Sustar
Blaming the Autoworkers

Peter Lee
The Other Side of the Coin in Afghanistan

Nicole Colson
Ruining Young Lives for Profit

Roger Burbach
Et Tu, Daniel? The Betrayal of the Sandinista Revolution

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah Has No Robes

Missy Beattie
Owning Disaster

Dave Lindorff
America's Stupid Health Care Debate

Robert David Steele Vivas
Intelligence for the President--and Everyone Else

John Ross
Teotihuacan Gets Mickey-Moused

Ralph Nader
Civic Heroism Awards

Yves Engler
Haiti's Harsh Realities

Alan Farago
The Story of Leonard Abess, Banker

Zulfikar Majid
Understanding Kashmir

David Yearsley
Don't Stay Up Too Late, Johan!

Charles R. Larson
Sleeping with Dogs

Kim Nicolini
Spitting at Dark Times: Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Wanna Be a Garage Rock Star

Poets' Basement
Puthoff, Payne, Gaffney and Gray

Website of the Weekend
Sleep Now in the Fire

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

March 13 / 15, 2009

The Party of Hoover

The Perils of Being Right and Wrong

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

If I wasn’t quite so busy thoroughly enjoying it, the prospect of one of the two major political parties of the world’s only superpower self-destructing so buffoonishly might otherwise give me pause.

As it is, however, few things could delight me more, and one of my major disappointments in life remains that I live in country where crackers like those in the GOP aren’t considered absolutely certifiable, and sent off to some Abu Ghraib for the ideologically criminal insane, right next to the rapists, child molesters and treasonous conspirators.

I like to have some fun with this stuff, you know, but only some of my words are meant for entertainment purposes.  If you think ‘crackers’ and ‘certifiable’ are unfair potshots, have a gander at Alexandra Pelosi’s new film, “Right America:  Feeling Wronged”, charting the discontents of McCain-Palin supporters from last year’s campaign.  I defy anyone to make a meaningful distinction between these people and the ones at Jonestown.

Heck, for that matter, just take a look at the crazies who are supposed to be the responsible leaders of the conservative movement, and at its marionettes in the GOP.  They’ve been putting on quite a show lately, and the timing is especially bad from their perspective.  Not only is the country in no mood for such tomfoolery now, but the current contrast to regressive idiocy is no longer the adamant insistence of insisting on nothing, courtesy of Harry Reid’s and Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic Party.  Now there’s a guy in the White House who’s confident, articulate, popular and sometimes even bold.

I couldn’t help thinking of that contrast watching Rush Limbaugh perform at the CPAC religious revival the other week.  He is the antithesis to Obama, and I don’t just mean in terms of body-type.  So much bluster (not to mention blubber) covering so much transparent insecurity and neediness.  The guy is the ultimate Napoleon or Hitler who got shoved around on the grade school playground and is now seeking revenge on a global scale.  But, of course, there will always be clowns like that.  The real question is what sickness pervades the mind of those who empower such mountebanks by giving them positions of power, even if only giant soapboxes?  More frightening than Limbaugh was the room full of Moonie-like acolytes hanging on his every word, most of them quite young in age.  No one should follow anybody quite so religiously, let alone a sick crank, but these folks sure did.  Limbaugh told a little ha-ha joke toward the beginning of his speech, in which he half-kiddingly referred to this being his maiden address to the nation, given that Fox Lies was carrying the entire rant (I’m sure they’ll pay equal attention to Noam Chomsky’s next speech as well).  Everybody laughed.  Okay, no problem – it was slightly humorous if you discount the delusions of grandeur he was pretending to self-mock.  What blew me away, though, was how he repeated the same line – I’m not exaggerating here – another ten times over the next hour, and how all the disciples laughed each time, right on cue.

Scary, but in some ways not as much as watching the nominal leaders of the GOP prostrate themselves at the feet of this Jabba the Hut of the airwaves.  Prodded into doing so by a politically adroit White House, four or five of them have gotten their backs up and said a ridiculously truthful unkind word or two about Mount Rushmore lately.  No sooner did that happen then that he was giving them just the on-air whipping errant sons should get from the angry and disappointed paterfamilias, and no sooner did that happen then that they were crawling back to him – also sometimes on air – begging his forgiveness.  The issue was whether Limbaugh was the de facto leader of the Republican Party.  The nominal leaders of the party, their manhood insulted and their masculinity in question, sought to show who was the real boss.  They did, too, but it turned out, um, shall we say, a bit different than the way they intended.

That seems like bad news over on that side of the aisle, but in fact, cavemen everywhere should be reassured.  I mean, do they want Bobby Jindal instead, doing his impression of Herbert Hoover, complete with the rigor mortis stage presence and embalming fluid circulatory system?  Or how about Newt Gingrich, the guy who once impeached a president for marital infidelities, even while he was off having a bacchanal of his own?  No worries, though.  Newtie’s now apologized for how he dumped Wife #2 on her post-cancer surgery hospital bed to run off with the babe who would become Wife #3.  Besides, he’s full of ideas!  The only problem is that they literally involve stuff like space flight and reorganization of the military command structure.  Ah, the man of the hour in America’s time of need!  What voter couldn’t be smitten by that?  Or do you prefer Mitch McConnell, instead?  He may not be as slimy as Newt, but he is slimier than a newt, and less appealing than a three-toed tree sloth.

That’s the GOP A-Team, folks.  Newt, Mitch, Bobby and Sarah, all taking direction from Rush. It’s like some kind of emetic factory, or something.

Not to worry, though.  They’ve brought in the big guns to save the day.  Michael Steele is the new chairman of the GOP.  One month into his new job, and most members of the party are already trying to figure out how to get rid of him (don’t be surprised if he has a tragic ‘accident’ soon).  Like they really needed this freakin’ headache now, just as every imaginable disaster is already imploding on them at every imaginable turn.

It’s kinda hard to imagine why Steele is having so much trouble, though.  I mean he seems so top notch.

True, he does have a record of massive failure.  He couldn’t cut it as a priest, so he went into law, where he failed the Maryland bar exam.  He passed the Pennsylvania one instead (Yo, PA:  time to up your standards, fellas), and then proceeded to launch a consulting firm so successful that he nearly lost his home.  He’s never won an election for public office, though he did manage to produce an ongoing federal corruption investigation into his 2006 smashing defeat in running for the Senate, because of a $40,000 payment he made to his sister’s company.  For what, is still unclear.  While running, he not only hid from being a Republican, but his campaign workers passed out sample ballots on election day that listed him as a Democrat.  Just the kinda guy who should be the top Republican, eh?

But, you know, success can really be overrated.  I guess that’s what Steele had in mind when he recently said “I always found it interesting that people would cast aspersions on failure, as if it were a bad thing”.

Um, ‘scuse me?  Good god, is there a way to clone this man?  Let’s get all his cousins and put them on the GOP payroll.  Hey, that’s what he’s probably actually gonna do!  You know, along with his sis.

Some people think that Steele is merely the most crass and buffoonish opportunist in the Glorified Opportunist Party, but it’s hard to see why.  I mean, yes, he is a black man who was recruited to the GOP by Lee Atwater, the same guy who apologized on his deathbed for having run the racist Willie Horton ads back in 1988.  But, so what?  You know, Condoleeza Rice and Clarence Thomas are black Republicans!  Uh, well, never mind about that...

Anyhow, the GOP decided, as the roof was falling in on them, that they really had to go with their varsity squad.  True, Steele was elected on the sixth ballot.  True, that was only after one candidate dropped out because he was a member of a racially exclusive country club.  And, true, another guy also quit the race after the party actually debated whether it was okay for him to have distributed CDs to committee leaders complete with the happy tune, “Barack, The Magic Negro”, on them.  (Remember that moment in “Spinal Tap” when the hapless metal band is told that the record label won’t let them have the S&M misogynist album cover they want for their new release, “Smell The Glove”, because it’s sexist?  And they respond, “So what?  Wot’s wrong with being sexy?”  I think you get the idea here.  Rob Reiner, time for “Neanderthal Tap”, wouldn’t you say?)

But, you know, the Democrats elected Barack Obama president, so I guess the GOP decided they were gonna go after the young, black, contemporary vote as well, and hence they picked Rapmaster Steele to carry their standard.  And so The Notorious M.I.K.E. has promised to give the Republican Party a “hip-hop makeover”.  You think I’m makin’ this shit up, don’t you?  I wish I was capable of such malicious creativity.

And you gotta hand it to the White House – they’ve played these fools like fiddles.  Calling Limbaugh the “de facto head of the Republican Party” was as sure a bait as imaginable for getting the de jure head of the party to worry about his manhood and thus lash out at the Rustic One by calling him “ugly”, among other epithets.  Until the next day, that is, when Macho Mike, Man of Steele, was on the phone apologizing profusely to the actual de facto, de facto head of Republican Party and his big fat radio audience, begging to keep his job.  He did, so far, but Republican National Committee staff have not been quite so lucky, as around seventy of them have either quit or been fired under the new Steele Curtain regime, and the RNC house is empty these days.
But if it seems like this is all some cartoonish clown show, instead of the leadership of one of the two major parties of the world’s most powerful country, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.  Ol’ “What’s Wrong With Failure” Mike is just getting started.  As he recently explained to the New York Times:  “‘I’m very spontaneous,’ comparing working with him to riding a roller coaster without knowing when the next dip or curve might come.  ‘Be prepared; you have no idea,’ he said. ‘Just buckle up and get ready to go.’”

Ooooooohhh!  Baby!  Gangsta!  What a manly man!  What an appealing swashbuckler!  Boy, is he ever gonna peel away the black vote from Barack Obama!  Boy, is the GOP ever gonna be getting its act together under Michael Steele’s stewardship!

I give the dude about one more month, after which I expect the Republicans will decide that abortion’s not such a bad thing after all.

Not that it matters a whit, anyhow.  Steele’s pompously inflated exercises in idiocy are to the implosion of the GOP what a gnat is to a drowning elephant.  Even if the gnat swims real, real hard, the big beast is still goin’ down.  With the possible exception of Howard Dean, nobody knows who party chairs are anyhow, and for good reason.  Does anyone think Mitch McConnell or John McCain are going to take direction from some staff flunky who’s never even won an election on his own?  Does anyone think that a chairman could significantly change the fortunes of a party from where its real leaders are taking it anyhow?  This guy could have all the leadership chops and strategic smarts of Alexander The Great and it wouldn’t matter a bit.

The GOP’s problem is its ideology, plain and simple.  Their toxic brew of regressive policies, sold through hate-driven marketing techniques, all backed by the engine of kleptocratic thievery, just isn’t getting traction anymore.  Just as it was inevitable that Bristol Palin and her nineteen year-old boyfriend, Levi Johnston, won’t be getting married after all (golly, didn’t see that one coming at all!) – Republican family values notwithstanding! – so was it clear that the GOP would end up being its own worst enemy.  Americans show an amazing capacity for stupidity, to be sure, but just the same they will usually figure out in the end that what’s bad for them is bad for them.

The GOP is toast today, not because of the pathetic idiots at the helm, any one of whom could have become the Fourth Stooge, but because it has nowhere it can go, regardless of who leads it.

It has basically three choices, ideologically speaking.

It can stay where it is.  But even the anvil-heads within the party can see that that’s a prescription for (more) disaster.  Getting your clock cleaned in two elections running has a way of getting one’s attention.  Near-death experiences tend to motivate change.

But, of course, that leaves the rather large question of what kind of change.  You can see the party struggling with this every day, but I personally don’t see a viable solution anywhere on the horizon.  Option Two is to turn to the right, and there are quite a few dingbats in the party who are making that argument right now.  Evidently suicide by election is neither rapid nor violent enough for this lot.  Of course, having governed with a hard-right agenda for eight years now, it becomes a bit awkward to make the claim that they haven’t been conservative enough.  That’s why you’re now seeing the astonishing visage of party flacks trying to recreate George W. Bush as a non-conservative.  Here’s John Bolton, for example: “Too many people identified Bush as being conservative, and we know that's not the case”.  Or Mike Huckabee:  “Lenin and Stalin both would have loved Bush and Paulsen's bailout plan”.  Wow.  Lenin and Stalin.  Like, THE Lenin and Stalin?  Gosh, imagine how bubble-headed Huckabee would have sounded if he had given in to the temptation to exaggerate here!

It’s quite amazing, not to mention absurdly improbable, this astonishing Bush-the-left-winger rap (who knew?).  As such, the only thing they really talk about is spending (no war policy, no stem-cell stuff, no Terri Schiavo, no foreign policy issues), and since money is all that it’s really about for them, that’s not such a surprise.  Nor is it a surprise that they didn’t object to W back when he was President Bush, rather than now that he’s former President Bush.  Nor is it shocking that they don’t also criticize regressive demi-god Ronald Reagan, who presided over a tripling of the national debt in his voodoo economics spending spree.  I guess you can only cover so much, you know?

But, golly, even if this made the slightest bit of sense, think of how rigorously batty you’d have to be to believe that if the Republicans only become more regressive, they’ll start winning elections.  You know, like, if only they started more wars based on lies!  If only they slashed Social Security and Medicare, in order to balance the budget!  If only they let more cities drown!  If only they intervened into every family’s personal medical crisis with congressional legislation!  If only they deregulated Wall Street, so that we could have more frequent and far deeper recessions!  If only they could give us further tax cuts to enrich the wealthy even more, and impoverish our children even further!  If only they could make sure more of us die by blocking additional scientific research!  If only they could make sure more of us die painfully by criminalizing not just medical marijuana, but all remedies!  If only they could alienate more young voters with their homophobia, more Hispanics with their xenophobia, more women with their Palin pandering, and more blacks with their Magic Negro routines!  If only they could replicate John Yoo, so that even the remaining shreds of the Constitution could themselves be shredded!

What a winning platform, eh?!?!  Hard to imagine nobody else has thought of this before!

Of course, the only remotely plausible thing the GOP could actually do to ever hope for subsequent success would be to move toward the center, which is Door Number Three.  Even that won’t work for quite some time, if it ever does.  People are not soon going to forget the Rushpublican brand, and my guess is that Obama is going to continue to be popular for a long time to come, even if his policies don’t solve the economic crisis he’s been handed.  But one could imagine, much as with Labour and the Tories in the UK, that a decade or two from now the Democrats will get lazy and corrupt and stupid enough to lose to a deradicalized Republican Party that runs on a non-ideological appeal purely focused on competence, as an alternative to the messed-up incumbents.

The problem for Republicans is that they can never get there.  Perhaps after a third trouncing in 2010, but not now.  And I’m even skeptical that that would be enough.  This party is owned by the radical right – especially the social conservative base.  These freaks are not going to let go, and they are going to punish horrifically any defectors from their ideological purity.  John McCain is a real object lesson here.  Having secured the nomination only by accident when two other candidates split the true-believer vote in a series of winner-take-all primaries, he was never embraced by his own party, who saw him as suspiciously liberal.  John McCain!  These are people who think – and will continue to think – that Sarah Palin is a really inspired choice who could make a great president.  They even secretly still think that about Lil’ Bushie, though they’re at least sentient enough to realize that it’s impolitic to say it.

Progressives should count their blessings, after decades in the wilderness.

The new president and Congress show some signs of having moderately good politics, to start with.

But, as importantly, the Republicans are fielding their very best team, and it consists of transparent buffoons telling transparent lies.  With lousy delivery, no less.

Best of all, though, is that they simply have nothing credible to say right now.

When the best you can offer to a frightened and submerged American public is some cheap and disingenuous rap about earmarks, along with a government that would do nothing to help, your party is going to go the same way as Herbert Hoover.

Because you are Herbert Hoover.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.  He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond.  More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

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