Today's Stories

May 1 - 3, 2009

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

April 17-19, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Thin Ice From Here to the Horizon

Saul Landau
Infiltrating Alpha 66: a Conversation with Gerardo Hernandez, Leader of the Cuba Five

Franklin Lamb
Persia Rising

Ralph Nader
The Greedsters Are Back!

Fred Gardner
Obama's Chimerical Marijuana Policy: a Guide for the Perplexed

Dean Baker
A Win-Win Solution: Tax the Rich!

Rannie Amiri
The Curious Case of Benjamin Netanyahu

George Wuerthner
The War on Predators

Dave Lindorff
No Amnesty for Torturers

David Swanson
Personal Torture Laws

Jim Goodman
The Control of Food

Kathy Sanborn
Economic Fallout Hits Families Hard

Don Monkerud
Economic Recovery for Whom?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The People's Money

David Michael Green
Home of the Barricaded, Land of the 'Fraid

Nelson P Valdés
The OAS Charter, Cuba and the United States

Manuel Gomez
From the Bay of Pigs to Trinadad and Tobago

Dr. Susan Block
On Sex Addiction: the Deadliest Sin?

Ramzy Baroud
Non-Violence in Palestine?

Christopher Brauchli
Banning Barbie

Stephen Martin
Statelessness: the Final Frontier

Ron Jacobs
Tearing the Whole Building Down: the Dead in Greensboro

David Yearsley
Monkey Music

Lorenzo Wolff
A Song for the End of the World

Poets' Basement
Moser, McTeer and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
New England Journal of Medicine Report on Civilian Deaths in Iraq

April 16, 2009

Mike Whitney
A Bulletin From the Captain of the Titantic

Russell Mokhiber
The Top 10 Enemies of Single-Payer

Ronald Teska
From Iraq to Appalachia

Gareth Porter
Predator Blowback

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Thinking Like an Afghan

Benjamin Dangl
Latin America Changes

Kevin Pina
Haiti: Obama's First Foreign Policy Disaster?

Robert Bryce
Another Ethanol Producer Goes Bust

George Wuerthner
See the Forest: the Value of Dead Trees

Paul Garon, David Roediger and Kate Khatib The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont

Website of the Day
Socialism and the Facebook Generation

April 15, 2009

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Solving Palestine While Israel Destroys It

Ray McGovern
W, the Torture Decider

Robert Sandels
Is There a Latin American Policy?

Heather Williams /
Paul Baker
Carbon Cap and Trade: How Wall Street will Game the Regs and Trash the Planet

Jack Willoughby
The Lessons of the S & L Crisis

David Swanson
Habeas at Bagram?

Paul Craig Roberts
94 Years of Serfdom

Sara Mann
Norman Rockwell and the Perils of Nostalgia

Kenneth Couesbouc
John Maynard's Martingale: How Keynes Got Rich

Binoy Kampmark
Tax Haven Hypocrisies

Kekuni Blaisdell, Lynette Hi'llani Cruz, George Kahumoku Flores, et al.: An Urgent Letter to Obama on the Rights of Native Hawaiians

Website of the Day
Taxa: the Paintings of Isabella Kirkland

April 14, 2009

Conn Hallinan
The Afghan Rubik's Cube

Mike Whitney
Why is Goldman Sachs So Scared of Mike Morgan?

Peter Morici
Taxing Grandma to Subsidize Goldman Sachs

Greg Moses
Economic Curveballs: the Laffer Posse

Fidel Castro
Obama's Cuba Policy: Not a Word About the Blockade

Robert Weissman
No Blank Check for the IMF

Rebecca Macaux /
Philip Primeau
Somali Piracy and American Foreign Policy

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
The Dubious Revoution: Biofuels, the Next Generation

Dave Lindorff
Snatch-and-Jail Justice: the Ugly War on Immigrants

Walter Brasch
The Resurrection of Intolerance

Benjamin Day
Why Has the Press Failed Us in Reporting on Health Care Reform?

Website of the Day
The Appraisal Bubble

April 13, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi Militia Fear Reprisals After US Exit

Uri Avnery
Our Dissonance

Jeremy Scahill
A Test Case for Habeas Corpus: Will Obama Prosecute the Somali Pirate in a US Court?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide Syndrome: Are VA Protocols Behind Iraq Vet Suicides?

Karl Grossman
A Radioactive Extension for Aging Nuclear Plants

Nadia Hijab
Still Waiting: Obama and American Muslims

Sam Smith
America's Cultural Bear Market

James McEnteer
Peru's Shining Example

Sean McMahon
Globalizing Politicide: Israel's Strikes on Sudan

Namihei Odaira
Makota's "Campaign Against Poverty"

John V. Walsh
Bossnapping

Website of the Day
Declining IRS Audits for Big Financial Houses

April 10 / 12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Resurrection and Revenge

Chris Floyd
Hope Abandoned: Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

Mike Whitney
"Liquidate the Banks; Fire the Executives!" Warren's Devastating Report to Congress

Saul Landau
How the Media Bought the Surge

M. Reza Pirbhai
Obama's Afghanistan Plan and India-Pakistan Relations

Franklin Spinney
The Art of the Scam: Wall Street and the Pentagon

Rannie Amiri
Iran's Elections: Why Arab Leaders Want Ahmadinejad to Win

William Blum
The Ideology of Barack Obama

Matt Vidal
Why Card Check Would Help the Economy

Jeff Howison
Death of the Square Deal

Jeff Leys
Resisting the Af-Pak War: the Creech Air Base Arrests

Dave Lindorff
America's Imperial Wars: Why We Need to See the Horrors

Ramzy Baroud
Israel Investigated: But Will It Repent?

Missy Beattie
The Grateful Dead, Wounded and Displaced

Fred Gardner
Fakes Left, Goes Right: Obama's Crossover Dribble on Marijuana Policy

Harvey Wasserman Another $50 Billion for Rust Bucket Nukes?

Suzan Mazur
A Revolution in Biology: an Interview with Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse

Bernard Umbrecht
German Capitalists Take Fire

David Macaray
A Word Clooney, Hanks and Baldwin Should Learn: Solidarity

Janet Kauffman
How to Starve (or Feed) a River

Ron Jacobs
Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win

Norman Solomon
Getting a Death Grip on Memory

Michael Winship
Let the Railsplitter Awake!

Richard Rhames
Empire, Ennui and Extra Cheese

Wanda Fucha
Brother, Can You Spare a Million Bucks?

David Yearsley
My Journey to the Heart of Rahman

Lorenzo Wolff
Getting Beyond the Black-and-White: Jason Isbell's Challenging New Album

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini's Louis XIV: "Neither the Sun Nor Death Can be Gazed Upon Fixedly"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Corzett

Website of the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help!

April 9, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Decade of Darkness

Patrick Cockburn
What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam

Stephen Soldz
Caught on Tape: Diagnostic Abuse of Veterans

P. Sainath
The Rise of the Shoe-cide Bomber

Ellen Cantarow
Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

Gareth Porter /
Jim Lobe
Obama and Israel's Threat to Strike Iran

Jeremy Scahill
How Many Democrats Will Stand Up Against Obama's Bloated Military Budget?

Jerry Kroth
Saving GM From Bankruptcy--With the Stroke of a Pen

Binoy Kampmark
Fujimori Convicted: A Measure of Justice in Latin America

Fidel Castro
My Meeting with the Black Caucus

Website of the Day
Bird Song Radio

April 8, 2009

John Prados
The Af-Pak Paradox

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Changing the Rules of the Blame Game

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Tooth Fairy and the Defense Budget

Russell Mokhiber
PBS Lashes Back

Kathy Sanborn
Depression Fury

Rev. William E. Alberts
If the Shoe Fits: Bush and Al-Zaidi

James McEnteer Rashomon and the Binghamton Shooter: the Rush to Interpret Jiverly Wong's "Statement"

Nadia Hijab
Olmert's Nightmare

Adam Turl
Card Check on the Ropes

Kevin Zeese
Escaping the Drug War Quagmire

Website of the Day
Walk Score Your Neighborhood

April 7, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency's Free Ride

Uri Avnery
Who's the Boss?

Chris Floyd
Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan

Winslow T. Wheeler Defense Cuts: Gates and the System

Marjorie Cohn
Prosecuting the Bush Torture Team: Spain Leads the Way

Dean Baker
Hands Off Social Security

Diana Johnstone
NATO, Strasbourg and the Black Block

Dave Lindorff
Politicizing Accounting

Martha Rosenberg
Life on HBO's Factory Hog Farm

Evelyn Pringle
Motherhood and the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex

Website of the Day
Gaza: Closed Zone

April 6, 2009

Michael Hudson
The IMF Rules the World

Andy Worthington Bagram: Guantánamo's Dark Mirror

Ray McGovern
Profiles in Cowardice: Eric Holder and Colin Powell

Deepak Tripathi
The Pakistan Enigma

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Financial Rescue Plan: a Glide-Path to Destitution

Norman Solomon
Meet the New Escalators: the Democrats and the Afghan War

Jonathan Cook
Israel Railways Accused of Racism in Firing of Arab Workers

Judith Bello
Justice for the Developmentally Disabled

Deena Metzger Blackwater in Liberia

Dr. M. Kamiar
"There's No 'Eye' in Iran:" Obama's Pronunciation Problem

Website of the Day
Prison Talk

April 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

Sue Sturgis
Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety

Peter Morici
Girding for a Depression

Kathy Sanborn
Homeless in Tent City, USA

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?

Rob Larson
Subprime Supreme Court: The Roberts Court Has Become a Powerful New Tool for Business

Saul Landau
Biden and Nixon: a Tale of Two Latin American Experiences

Steve Early
An Evening with Andy Stern

John Goekler
Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo?

Rannie Amiri
Arab League Reconciliation Summit a Bust

Dave Lindorff
Hooray for Juries! A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Free Speech

Lee Ballinger
Sound Garden: Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum

Ron Jacobs
Artifacts for Survival

David Macaray
AIG Plays the Sympathy Card

John Wight
G20: Capital's New World Symphony

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Race in the Obama Era

Mychal Bell
Surviving Jena Six

Missy Beattie
Hoop Hopes, War and Peace

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iran/US Rapproachment Dance

Michael Boldin
The War on Drugs is a War on You

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Batting 50-50

Charles R. Larson
Too Much Stuff

Susie Day
Bernie Breakout Shocker!!

Stephen Martin
Gordon Brown's Chicken Run at the G20

Kim Nicolini
"Last House on the Left:" Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

David Yearsley
Homage to Moog and Mallards

Phyllis Pollack
An Interview with Legendary Rock Producer Chris Kimsey on Working with the Stones, Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Saint Jude

Poets' Basement
Foley, Valentine and Kozak

Website of the Day
The Corner Store

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

May Day Weekend Edition
May 1 - 3, 2009

End Times for the GOP?

The Party's Over

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

Poor Troy Senik.

He's a Republican, so everyone knows he’s stupid.

He used to write speeches for George Bush and Newt Gingrich, so everyone avoids him at social gatherings.

And now all his clients are getting handed their pink slips, so he’s gonna have to start earning his living the honest way for once.

But that’s not even the worst part of it.

The worst part is that just he published a piece entitled “Republicans Agonistes”, which ended with this paragraph:  “The time for the Republican Party's existential crisis is coming to a close.  Now is the hour for a new generation of innovative, optimistic, and principled leaders to see this moment for what it is – an opportunity to renew a proud movement and lead it towards future victories.”

Then, the very next day, Arlen Specter showed us precisely where the party’s existential crisis really is at, after all.  (Hint:  It’s not exactly “coming to a close”.)

Indeed, not only is this meltdown not ending now, it is only just beginning.  But I will give Senik credit for one thing.  He has correctly labeled this as an existential crisis.  He’s right about that.  This is no garden variety rough patch in the road.  This could well spell the end of an institution in American politics that has been around since Lincoln, and this country’s national party structure of the same vintage.

Mockingly, Senik opens his essay with a wee taste of right-wing sarcasm:  “The Republican Party is dead.  Haven't you heard?  Despite winning seven of the past 11 presidential elections and controlling at least one house of Congress for 13 of the past 15 years, our salad days are over.  The ascendancy of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama has shipwrecked the GOP in perpetuity.  Those of us who fought the good fight will now have to go back to country clubbing, Bible thumping, and war mongering in the private sector.  To add insult to injury, we're the only major institution that has failed in the last year without receiving a generous taxpayer bailout.”

Heh-heh.  Those regressive cats sure are good at comedy, eh?  Now if only they could do it on purpose, maybe they’d be getting somewhere with their show business careers.

Senik goes from there to chronicle all the previous near-death experiences of the Party – 1964, 1974, etc. – that turned out to be greatly exaggerated reports of the GOP’s demise.  The point being, of course, that this kind of thing happens all the time.  He therefore argues that, “The question for Republicans, then, is not if they can come back, but rather when and how.”

That’s actually quite wrong, though.  The real question for Republicans is, instead, whether they will survive as a rump regional party of maniacal Troglodytes, or not at all.

Everything is going against the Party right now, ranging from demographic shifts to leadership vacuums to loss of control of every institution of American government to the massive popularity of the new president from the other party.  But these are small potatoes compared to the two real problems that are rapidly dragging the party toward the precipice of oblivion.

The first monstrous problem for the GOP is that they’re so good at winning elections.  Or at least they were.  They’d have been great if only they hadn’t actually governed.  Had they just stayed over there in the weeds, carping incessantly about taxes, weakness abroad, taxes, homos, taxes, spending and – did I mention taxes? – they could have gone on forever getting enough votes to continue on as America’s Perpetual Pain in the Ass Party.  Unfortunately, though, they made the mistake of actually winning.  They got so good at sliming their opponents and stealing elections and employing fear to get votes that, the next thing you knew, they were actually in charge.

Big, big mistake.  Americans have seen what Republican government looks like.  It’s seriously ugly, and that’s even when it doesn’t produce a crisis.  All the more so when it does produce one, and far more yet when it’s six or seven, simultaneously.

I know, I know, it’s weird.  But, just the same, Americans just don’t seem to want economies plummeting, debts exploding, cities attacked by terrorists, other cities drowning, endless wars based on lies, cronyism, nepotism, looting, environmental disasters, alienated allies, wrecked national reputations, or snarling vice presidents on their television sets.  Nor do they want congressional legislation, enacted by a president flying across the country to sign the bill, that tells Americans how to handle their individual family medical tragedies.  Like I said, it’s weird.  I guess Americans are just quirky that way.

Well, okay.  Then it would seem like the logical thing for the GOP to do would be to move away from the baggage of its radical albatross and return to the days of Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller, back when the right wing of the party was considered scarier than a 3-D Hollywood horror movie even by the other members of the same party.  Well, it would seem.  But, you see, that’s the GOP’s second gigantic problem.  It cannot do the one thing that could possibly save it.

Indeed, not only can it not, but it doesn’t want to.  And not only doesn’t it want to, but it doesn’t even get that it must, or even should, if wants to have any hope of surviving.  It’s truly amazing.  I’ve talked to, and read pieces written by, regressives who seriously argue that the GOP’s problem is that it hasn’t been conservative enough.  Indeed, I saw one young lady from the Heritage Foundation make the argument that neither George W.  Bush nor William F.  Buckley were real conservatives.  That’s pretty hysterical if you think about it (something regressives never want you to actually do).  But consider the main programmatic commitments of the Bush administration:  wars overseas, huge military expenditures, lopsided bias in favor of Israel, arrogant unilateralism towards the UN and all other countries, massive tax cuts, anti-gay legislation, Social Security privatization, deregulation, anti-abortion policies, blocking of stem-cell research, environmental degradation, massive expansion of the wealth gap, erosion of the separation of church and state, and so on.

Which of these, I’m curious, don’t come right out of the contemporary conservative (pardon the obscene oxymoron there) play book?  Sure, you could say that regressives are upset because Bush expanded Medicare (although the more accurate way to put it would be that he expanded the profits of insurance and pharmaceutical companies through the vehicle of Medicare), and that he doubled the national debt (which is kinda inevitable if you massively increase expenditures whilst slashing tax revenues;  See Reagan, Ronald W., and the Tripling of the Debt).  But let’s be serious, shall we?  No one can credibly argue that George W.  Bush was not a conservative.  No one, that is, except the certifiably insane freaks on the right, who, mercifully, are finally becoming again the laughingstocks they once were in American society, and for precisely this reason.

Nevertheless, they continue their relentless march to the Land of the Ludicrous.  I mean, just how amazingly silly is it to claim that George W. Bush wasn’t a real conservative?  How insane do you have to have become to argue that this is why the party is losing elections?  How completely bonkers do you have to have gone to prescribe a turn further to the right in order to do better from this point forward?

The Specter purge - and make no mistake, though it was his decision, it was no more 'voluntary' than the choice to exit a burning building – would represent the leading edge of a departure trend that would rock the Republican Party, except for one small problem:  There is really hardly anything left of a moderate wing of the party anymore.  Specter would be leading the disaffected droves out of the party, but there are none left to speak of, at least at the national level.  It is not unfair to say the Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, both senators from Maine, are the only remaining moderate Republicans in Congress today. 

At least one of them is really unhappy, too.  Snowe penned an article in the New York Times this week, entitled "We Didn't Have To Lose Arlen Specter", in which she vents a bit of her anger at the radical right for driving Specter and, a decade ago Jim Jeffords, out of the party.  Specter's own announcement speech was even more hostile, and remarkably candid for a politician.  He spoke clearly about how the Club For Growth and other orthodox elements of the radical right have made it almost impossible for center-right Republicans to survive in office.  Even if they can survive the threat of a far-right challenger in the primary, or the indifference of the party base such as greeted John McCain last year until he brought on the Palin abomination, they are then too wounded to win in the general election. 

Snowe takes aim at social conservatives for purifying the party right down to its unwinnable essence.  But what is most remarkable is that she – an angry moderate – gets her party's crisis almost as wrong as the looney fringe.  Reacting to the capture of the party by the social conservatives, she writes: 

"It is for this reason that we should heed the words of President Ronald Reagan, who urged, 'We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only 'litmus test' of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty.'  He continued, 'As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement.'" 

Quite laughable stuff, really.  It’s as if the only sin of the right has been its insistence on emphasizing abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research as key Republican issues.  Imagine how far gone these people are when even their moderate champion, writing in anger about the far right, doesn't begin to address their core dilemma.  Yo, Olympia, I have some really awful news to give you, to go along with the bad news you've already received.  Here it is:  You guys have been wrong on EVERYTHING!!

Do you really think, Senator, that if you just let up on abortion but continued to manufacture millions of unemployed homeless people out of the former middle class that you would start winning elections again?  And do you really think that you would be allowed to let up on abortion by your party’s base – the same nice folks who were getting ready to purge Arlen Specter – even if you could make that deal?

Do you really think, Senator, that if your party could somehow drunkenly stumble its way into a humane and science-based position on stem cell research at home, while continuing to lie its way into disastrous wars abroad, that the American public would rally to your cause?  And do you really think your base of reactionary voters would let you do it, anyhow?

Is it really your belief, Senator Snowe, that if only the GOP would let the queers have their freakin’ marriage certificates that the party could then continue to win elections on a platform of planetary destruction via environmental catastrophe?  And do you think your lovely base of nice Christian conservatives would allow you to do this, anyhow?

What Olympia Snowe doesn’t get is how far gone it all is now.  And what she also doesn’t get is how desperate the party is when it continues turning to Ronald Reagan to solve their problems, as if he were Jesus’s kid brother.

More and more Americans – especially the young, tolerant, left-leaning ones – don’t know Reagan from James K. Polk, and the GOP’s constant appeal to worship at the shrine of Saint Ron strikes them as exactly what it is – living in the past.

And it’s a mythological past, anyhow.  Reagan raised taxes after he slashed them.  He had a huge recession.  He tripled the national debt.  He signed a very liberal abortion bill in California.  He sold missiles to Iran.  He shredded the Constitution.  He didn’t defeat the Soviets and end the Cold War, though I must admit, he did kick ass on Grenada (right after the hundreds of Marines he had stuck in Lebanon for no reason got wiped out, of course).

What Reagan did best, if you’re of the sort who falls for this kind of crap, is to talk happy talk about how good and right and powerful and moral we all are.  But he didn’t live that life himself, he didn’t improve the country or the world with his policies, and nobody gives a shit anymore, anyhow.  The degree to which the party faithful keep trotting this guy out like some deity is a perfect measurement of how little they actually have to offer.  It’s pathetic beyond belief, and it’s no wonder those pesky elections keep going into the ‘L’ column, one after another, with no end in sight whatsoever.

Of course, there is a silver-lining to having ‘irrelevented’ yourself to such an extent that you now not only don’t control any institution of government, but you are about to not even be able to muster the bare minority you need in the Senate to filibuster a bill and block its consideration.  That’s a pretty impressive trick, and the GOP is hardly done, I would say.  To wit, they just lost a by-election in upstate New York where a Democratic candidate coming from outside the district, which leans heavily Republican, and having little help from either the president or the Democratic Party, nevertheless managed to beat the well-known Republican candidate who was fully backed by the national GOP and its clown chairman, Michael Steele.  At this rate, my guess is that 2010 is going to be another blood-letting for the GOP, just like the last two.

But the silver-lining to these very stormy clouds is this:  If actually winning elections and having to govern is the kiss of death for your party, then the GOP has at least been rendered to a place where it can sit on the sidelines and not continue destroying itself by actually making policy decisions.

Or, at least, not destroy itself quite so much.  Its new job is little more than to criticize the other guys now in government.  Whatever else you can say about Obama and the Democrats, they seem to be trying a bit to clean up the mess they’ve inherited, and they seem to be doing it rather gracefully, if half-heartedly, all things considered.

So what has the loyal opposition been saying?  The president uses Teleprompters!  He gave the Queen an iPod!  He bowed to the Saudi king!  He accepted a book from Hugo Chavez!  Worse, still, he smiled when he shook the guy’s hand!

Not so impressive, eh?  These goons can’t even do carping well.

They have no leaders, no constructive contribution to the debate other than shouting “No!”, and now so little power that they can’t even filibuster from the minority in the Senate.
This party is over.

And, surveying the wreckage of a once great country, not a minute too soon.

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. 

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