Today's Stories

August 2 / 3, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Who's Really Running Iraq?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Is the King of Pork Dead?

Brian Cloughley
Baleful Imperial Power

Robert Fantina
Redefining Progress in Iraq

Fatemeh Keshavarz
What Qualifies "Them" for the Death Sentence?

Harvey Wasserman
Meet the Real Terrorists of the 1960s

David Macaray
Labor, Management and the Adversarial Relationship

August 1, 2008

Jonathan Cook
Palestinians Face Home Demolitions Spree by Israel

Nikolas Kozloff
McCain's Mad Dog Advisor Max Boot

Rannie Amiri
Islamobamaphobia: a New Word Enters the Lexicon

Peter Morici
U.S. Economy Loses Another 51,000 Jobs

Christopher Brauchli
South Dakota's Abortion Fairy Tale

M. K. Bhadrakumar
Coup in the Great Caspian Play

Patrick Cockburn
Turkish Court Says Ruling Islamic Party Can't be Shut Down

James J. Brittain
The Continuity of FARC-EP Resistance in Colombia

Dan Bacher
Warren Buffett, Salmon Killer

Website of the Day
Shark Genocide: 100 Million Deaths a Year

July 31, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Next Big Bail Out: State, Local and Private Pensions

Carl Finamore
Protest Politics and the Democrats: A Street Protester Looks Back at 1968

Mike Whitney
What's Going on in Afghanistan

Joshua Frank
Obama's Green Coal: Another Myth from the Change Agent

Andy Worthington
The Peculiar Case of Jarallah al-Marri

Ralph Nader
The Living Legacy of Rosa Parks

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
The Wave of Capitol Crimes

Robert Weissman
The Collapse of the WTO Talks

Dave Lindorff
Bush Judge Does the Right Thing on Executive Immunity

Website of the Day
Perils of the New Pesticides

July 30, 2008

Brian M. Downing
Assessing the Surge

Chuck Spinney
Should Obama Escalate the War in Afghanistan? A Thought Experiment

William S. Lind
Why McCain is Wrong on Iraq

David Ker Thomson
Against Bike Lanes

Karl Grossman
Nuclear-Powered Amphibious Assault Ships?

Mike Whitney
Apocalypse Down Under

Martha Rosenberg
Heifer Palooza

James Murren
Where Your Life is Worth One Bullet

Dave Lindorff
The Impeachment Hearing

Ron Jacobs
A Conspiracy to Kill Iraqis?

Website of the Day
Mapping Job Loss to China

July 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
King of the Hill Indicted! Ted Stevens' Empire of Corruption

John Ross
Return of the Gunboat

Peter Morici
When Will Henry Paulson Learn?

Alison Weir
Israeli Strip Searches

Gary Leupp
"Bewilderment and Confusion on the Left?"

David Macaray
The Calculus of Union Strikes

Brenda Norrell
Censored in Indian Country

Marjorie Cohn
End the Occupations: Of Iraq and Afghanistan

Eric Ruder
A New Consensus on Iraq?

Website of the Day
"If You Could See Me Now ... "

July 28, 2008

Dr. Bryant Welch
Torture, Political Manipulation and the American Psychological Association

Kathy Kelly
Pictures from Summer Camp on the West Bank

Mike Whitney
Bad News and Bank Runs

Peter Morici
Spreading Layoffs, Sagging GDP

Christopher Brauchli
Death by (Power) Surge in Baghdad

Clifton Ross
The Spectacle and the Movement in Colombia

Stephen Lendman
The Bush Administration's Secret Biowarfare Agenda

Website of the Day
Stone's Dubya: the Trailer

July 26 / 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
How Bush is Wiping Out McCain

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Alaskan Oil Spills

James G. Abourezk
The Surge Has Worked?

Joseph Nevins
Death as a Way of Life on the Borderlands

Uri Avnery
What's Driving the Jerusalem Attacks

Linn Washington, Jr.
Politics and Injustice in Philadelphia

David Yearsley
Sodomy, Snuff Scenes and the Berlin Opera

Binoy Kampmark
Socializing Losses: Bailing Out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Saul Landau
Truth in Comedy: Stop Whining It's All in Your Head!

Joshua Frank
Big Sky Rebels

Brendan Cooney
Europe's Hypocrisy

Jonathan Cook
Settlers Eye Historic Jerusalem Neighborhood

Robert Fantina
McCain, Iraq and the Campaign

Lee Sustar
Will the US Get Its Way with Iran?

Michael Winship
The Company We Keep

David Macaray
Organized Labor Makes a Convenient Target

Missy Beattie
Pelosi's Panhandling

Robert Weissman
The Scourge of the IMF

Kim Nicolini
Batman and the Old Order

Poets' Basement
Orloski, Ford and McEnteer

Website of the Weekend
Bad Hoosiers

July 25, 2008

Harvey Wasserman
NRC: New Nukes Not Ready for Prime Time

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for the Facts About Israel?

Alan Farago
Where's the Outrage?

Paul D'Amato
The Arrest of Radovan Karadzic and the Selective Prosecution of War Crimes

Gary Leupp
War With Iran? State Dept. Realists vs. Cheney's Ultras

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Eyes Wide Shut in India

Mike Whitney
Obama Dazzles Old Europe, While McCain Cries, "No Mas!"

Paul Krassner
Inside Camp Mogul

Mike Roselle
All Hail Nero!

Website of the Day
Pressing Starbucks

July 24, 2008

Greg Moses
Who Killed Azem Hajdari?

Andy Worthington
Folly and Injustice: Salim Hamdan's Guantanamo Trial

James Bovard
Daniel Ellsberg's Lessons for Our Time

Joe Bageant
Life in the Post-Political Age

George Wuerthner
Boondoggle in the Fields

DC Larson
Shutting Out Ralph Nader

William Willers
The Forest Products Industry in Public Education

David Macaray
On the Prospects for a SAG Strike

Website of the Day
Pacifica Radio Archive of 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago

July 23, 2008

Winslow T. Wheeler
An Air Force in Free Fall

Paul Craig Roberts
The Mother of All Messes

Ralph Nader
Pavlov's America

Mike Whitney
Visualizing Dow 6,000

Susie Day
Senator Sicko: Jesse Helms and the Theatre of the Depraved

Website of the Day
"A Kinder and Gentler Machine-Gun Hand..."

July 22, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Ten Years On, Bolivarian Revolution at Crossroads

Patrick Cockburn
Boost for Obama Over Iraq Withdrawal

Soldz, Olson, Reisner Arrigo and Welch
Torture After Dark

Moshe Adler
Everyone Must Share, Not Just Charlie Rangel

Martha Rosenberg
Protecting Bones from Drugs that Protect Bones

Dan Bacher
Bechtel and the Big Dig

Harvey Wasserman
Is Gore Inching Toward Solartopia?

Anthony Papa
A Slugger's Drug Redemption

Binoy Kampmark
Mad Over Benedict

Website of the Day
Hiroshima: A-Bombed Objects

July 21, 2008

Ishmael Reed
Remnick's Latest Blunder

Mike Whitney
The Democrats are the Real Problem

Andy Worthington
Dictatorial Powers Upheld: the Meaning of the Al-Marri Decision

Scott Pellegrino
Should "Meet the Press" Desegregate?

John Ross
McCain Crosses the Border, Gets No Satisfaction

Robert Weitzel
Blowback Through the Looking Glass

Mike Stark
I was Spied on by the Maryland Police

Website of the Day
Pinky Solves the Illegal Immigration Crisis

July 19 / 20, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
It's a Dull Race

Jeffrey St. Clair
How to Beat a Mining Company: Why a Gold Goliath Threw in the Towel

Dave Lindorff
I Was a Victim of the TSA

Saul Landau
Obits for Opposites: Carlin and Helms

Ron Jacobs
Why Afghanistan is Not the Good War

Uri Avnery
Different Planet:the Israel / Hezbollah Prisoner Swap

Neve Gordon
The Untold Story of Ni'lin

Roane Carey
Dr. Benny and Mr. Morris

Robert Fantina
Ashcroft, Torture and the U. S.

Christopher Brauchli
The General Lied

Fred Gardner
Cannabinoid Researchers Won’t Take the High Road

David Macaray
Labor Unions and the Courts

Richard L. Hutto
The Ecology of Severely Burned Forests

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Mother's Milk of Politics Turns Sour

Ronnie Cummins
Netroots Nation or Nation of Sheep?

David Yearsley
Opera and Globalization

Alison McKenna
A Close Call for Medicare

Wajahat Ali
The Dark Knight Ascends

Poets' Basement
Ko Un

Website of the Day
What If Edward Said Had Told This Joke?

July 18, 2008

Corey D. B. Walker
A Kinder, Gentler Imperialism?

Mike Whitney
Swan Song for Fanny Mae

Robert Bryce
Iran Rising

Mike Roselle
Ed's Chicken: Fighting King Coal in Appalachia

Bouthaina Shaaban
U. S. to Mandela: Happy 90th and You're No Longer a Terrorist

Eve Spangler
The Deaths of Children

Website of the Day
Lowbagger Needs Your Help

July 17, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Airport Gestapo

James G. Abourezk
Big Oil's Raid on the Great Plains

Ralph Nader
D. C. Socialists Save Crashing Capitalists

Allan J. Lichtman
Conservative Denial

Andy Worthington"Screwed Up" and"Abused": Omar Khadr's Interrogations at Gitmo

Ronnie Cummins
Move Over MoveOn

July 16, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Star Whores: How John McCain Doomed Mt. Graham

Paul Craig Roberts
War Crimes Paradox

Conn Hallinan
To the Edge in the Middle East

Dave Lindorff
Torture for Torturers?

William S. Lind
Running the Narrows in Iraq

Christopher Brauchli
Sweepstakes Politics

Website of the Day
History of Iraqi Art

July 15, 2008

Michael Hudson
Why the Bail Out of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is Bad Economic Policy

Brian Cloughley
Iran's Missile Tests

Patrick Cockburn
Sadr's Militia May Live to Fight Another Day

John Ross
Crunchtime for Mexico's Oil

Howard Lisnoff
When Torture Was Practiced on U. S. Soil

Website of the Day
Rachel Corrie Soccer Tournament

July 14, 2008

Uri Avnery
Will Israel and / or the US Attack Iran?

Paul Craig Roberts
Enabling Tyranny

Trish Schuh
Talking to Iran's Only Jewish Member of Parliament: an Interview with Morris Motamed

Patrick Cockburn
Immunity in Iraq

Mike Whitney
Betancourt Unbound

Alan Farago
Will Miami's Cubans Vote Blue?

Seth Sandronsky
Taxing U. S. Stocks and Bonds

Phyllis Pollack
Stones Paint It Black

Website of the Day
Our Pal in Butte, Jackie Corr, RIP

July 12 / 13, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Lock and Load--It's the Law!

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Origins of the Western Greens

James Abourezk
Talking World War III Blues: From Dylan to Iran

Nicole Colson
The Ethanol Scam

Stan Cox
Fixing a Broken Agriculture

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Is There an Oil Shortage?

Wajahat Ali /
Omid Safi
The Future of Iran: an Interview with Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi

John Stauber
There May be a Left, But is it Moving? An Interview with David Sirota

Alan Farago
The Crash of the King of Liquidity

Missy Beattie
Dark Neighborhoods

Robert Fantina
Bush's Last Yes Man: Canada, Guantanamo and Yankee Poodles

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak Hires the Mosque

Gregory Kafoury
After the Obama Betrayal

Fran Shor
The Audacity of Hype

Martha Rosenberg
Why Heifer International is Rolling in Dung

David Macaray
Will There be an Actors Strike?

Andrew Wimmer
No Lies! No War!

Ron Jacobs
They Call Me the Seeker

Farzana Versey
The Kashmir Chiaroscuro

Kim Nicolini
Angelina Jolie's Wanted: Taking the M-Fers Down with Guns and Exploding Rats

Poets' Basement
Wright, Fleming, Solomon and Birnbaum

Website of the Weekend
Parsing Jesse Ventura

July 11, 2008

Kevin Alexander Gray
Why Does Barack Obama Hate My Family?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Historical Amnesia and the Shoot Down of Iran Air Flight 655

Peter Morici
Breaking Down the Trade Deficit

Mike Whitney
Worse Than McCain?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Oiling the War Machine

Robert Weissman
Crime, Punishment and ExxonMobil

Ramzy Baroud
The Not-So-Historic Barak-Talabani Handshake

Kelly Overton
If There is a Chimp Heaven

Adrian Burgos
In Praise of Jules Tygiel

Website of the Day
Wendell Berry on Mountaintop Removal

July 10, 2008

Brian McKenna
McCain's Melanoma Cover-Up

Paul Craig Roberts
Watching Greed Murder the Economy

Saul Landau
Mississippi River Blues

Ron Jacobs
Who Will Leave Iraq First?

Joshua Frank
Cutting Deals with Big Timber's Darth Vader

Peter Morici
What's Driving the Wall Street Rout

Alan Maass
Jesse Helms Finally Does the Right Thing

Robert Weissman
Humanitarian Failure at the G8

William Blum
Dr. Strangelove

Alan Farago
Coral Reef Meltdown

Website of the Day
Lieberman Must Go!

July 9, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Are They Really Oil Wars?

Luis Rodriguez
The Deadly Fallout from Gang Injunctions

Sheldon Richman
What's Wrong with Selling Your Vote?

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Lessons from Sa'di of Shiraz on"Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"

Chad Hanson
Blowing Smoke: Logging Industry Lies on Forest Fires and Climate Change

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Problems with the FISA Bill

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Defining Deviancy Down with FISA

Dave Lindorff
Paul Krugman's Blind Spot

Stanley Heller
A Damned Good Assembly

Philip Rizk
Sick at the Gaza Crossing

Website of the Day
Mumia on Nader

July 8, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Riding the Colombia Gravy Train

Laura Carlsen
North America Doesn't Exist: the New Geography of Trade

Mike Whitney
Bush's Rampage in Somalia

Andy Worthington
Scandal at Diego Garcia

Patrick Irelan
The Empire Goes to the Movies

Chellis Glendinning
The Un-tied States of America

David Macaray
A Union Story

Dave Lindorff
Mumia's Long-Shot Appeal

John Chuckman
The Myths of Independence Day

Phillip Doe
FISA and the Decline of America

Website of the Day
Daniel Ellsberg on Warrantless Wiretap Bill

July 7, 2008

Patrick Bond
Can Reparations for Apartheid Profits be Won in US Courts?

Kathy Kelly
Cold Shoulders

Andy Worthington
Repatriation as Russian Roulette

Clifton Ross
A Rescue Staged for the Screen

Elizabeth Schulte
Obama's War Room

Ralph Nader
The Patriotism of Deeds

Dave Lindorff
Keeping Count

Binoy Kampmark
The World According to Jesse Helms

Stephen Fleischman
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Change

Website of the Day
Time for a Change

July 5 / 6, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Could Anyone be"Worse" Than Bush?

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Preliminary Notes from No Man's Land

Patrick Cockburn
Blowback from a Strike on Iran

Mike Whitney
Hunkering Down in Afghanistan with Field Marshall Obama

Robert Fantina
Obama, Iraq and Change

Binoy Kampmark
The Anwar Case: Snitching and Sodomizing

Rannie Amiri
Can Nasrallah Unite Lebanon?

Eric Ruder
Hidden Casualties

Brian Cloughley
Israel Flexes Its Muscles

William Blum
Some Thoughts on Patriotism

Frank Barat
The One-Word Solution

Christopher Brauchli
Bush's Phony Pollution Accounting

David Yearsley
Rubbert Shines, as US Envoy Puts Foot in His Mouth

Ron Jacobs
U. S. Blues

Karim Makdisi
On Soccer and Politics in Lebanon

Wendy Thompson /
Chris Kutalik
What Can We Learn from the American Axle Strike?

N. D. Jayaprakash
The NPT as a Roadblock to Disarmament

Ramzy Baroud
Journalistic Imperatives

Kelly Overton
Animal Rights and Obama

Richard Neville
Bitch Fights and Tomorrow's Top Model

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Gibbons, Matson and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Ginsberg and Cassady on"Extremists"

July 4, 2008

Kathy Kelly
Istiklal

Dave Lindorff
My War Story

Paul Krassner
Confessions of a Barista

Jackie Corr
In the Footsteps of Evel Knievel: Obama Heads Back to Butte

Laray Polk
Military-Industrial Convergence

Dan Bacher
Dead Runs: Salmon Fishing Banned in Central Valley Rivers

Walter Brasch
The Rocket's Red Glare--May be Chinese

Charles Modiano
Hall of Fame Hypocrisy

Website of the Day
Springsteen: Independence Day

July 3, 2008

Sharon Smith
Exxon's Legal Guardians

Andy Worthington
Another Torture Victim Gets Charged

Laura Carlsen
NAFTA and the Elephant in the Room

Peter Morici
Crisis Grips the Jobs Market

Ramzi Kysia
Breaking Into a Prison

Martha Rosenberg
Mandatory School Milk and the Early Death of Football Players

Anne Landman
Who Really Benefits From Voluntary Codes of Corporate Conduct?

Dave Zirin
Grand Theft Hoops

Kristin Bricker
US Contractor Leads Torture Training in Mexico

Website of the Day
Bush Tours America to Survey Damage from His Presidency

July 2, 2008

Patrick Irelan
Holy Obama

Vijay Prashad
Lunch with Karzai

Brian Cloughley
Sense of Honor, French and US Style

Ralph Nader
Economic Domino Theory

Robert Fantina
General Stupidity: McCain, Obama and Clark

Dave Lindorff
What's So Special About Veterans?

Parvez Ahmed
Obama and Those Pesky Muslim Rumors

Robert Bryce
The Democrats and Off-Shore Drilling

Website of the Day
King Corn: Q&A

July 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Two Months Later, Seymour Hersh Strains to Catch Up With CounterPunch

Mike Whitney
Getting to the Heart of America's Economic Crisis: an Interview with Michael Hudson

Douglas Macgregor
Obama's General?

Steven Higgs
Fighting the NAFTA Super-Highway

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland

Binoy Kampmark
The Global Seed Police

Dave Lindorff
Blood Money Democrats

Roger Burbach
Fighting Food Fascism

Richard W. Behan
The Story Behind George Bush's Lies

Gary Leupp
The McCain Edge Among Voters on Iraq

Website of the Day
Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice

Weekend Edition
August 2 / 3, 2008

McCain Slings Slime; Obama Slow to Respond

Obama as Dukakis

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

John McCain is a scumbag.

I choose my words carefully, and in full recognition of past sacrifices and contributions he has made.

But I am sick to death of seeing my country go down the toilet.  And I am sick to death of my country wrecking other parts of the world.  And I am sickest-at-heart of all that the people doing this represent the sleaziest side of American politics.

These are the Karl Rove acolytes, who learned their craft from the Lee Atwater team, who learned from the Nixon ratfucker squad.  From there it may go directly back to Satan, for all I know, possibly with a stopover at Joe McCarthy’s desk.

There will always be people like this.  Alleged humans who are willing to do anything to win at politics.  Fine, we can’t control that.  But it says everything about any candidate when he or she puts people like this in charge of their campaign.  And it says everything about us as a society that we would ever let those who do so win the highest offices in the land, let alone frequently.

Hence, my comment about McCain.  It has now become transparently clear that this man will do anything to be president.  Whatever scraps of decency and uniqueness and detachment from his own sick party he once had have now all been mortgaged against that goal.  The McCain who once knew Bush’s tax cuts were irresponsible now favors them, despite eight years of direct evidence turning informed speculation about potential consequences into historical fact.  The McCain who once criticized the sex-obsessed theocrats running his party as “agents of intolerance”  now seeks their endorsement.  The McCain who once stood for a cleaner politics is now firmly ensconced in the sewer, from whence he is reaching down and hurling great gobs and handfuls of what flows all around him.

It was not enough that he mocked Obama for not going to Iraq, only then to whine about how Obama was grandstanding when he turned around and went, and everybody from General Petreaus to Prime Minister Maliki to the entire public of Germany made McCain look the fool.  It’s not enough that he’s now desperately trying to turn the very fact of Obama’s popularity against him by running ads comparing the Illinois senator to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.  And it’s still not even enough that McCain is running ads – based on wholesale and proven lies – that Obama skipped out of meeting with wounded American troops in order to shoot some hoops.

No, what really proved that McCain is a scumbag is the one line – now repeated multiple times – that Obama “would be willing to lose a war in order to win a campaign”.  Even if they weren’t just finishing up living through the consequences of precisely such politics for eight years now, Americans should be apoplectic in anger that the same folks are back using the same tricks again.  Mostly, though, they should be horrified and enraged that such language could be used in a presidential campaign.  They should be precisely as willing to elect any person uttering such disgraceful epitaphs as they would a Holocaust denier, a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, or a serial pedophile.

This is not a policy difference.  This is not a disagreement over issues.  This is not even a personal critique of an opponent’s professional or even character-related qualifications for office.  This is an outrageous smear of the most vile kind.  McCain has said – without a scrap of substantiating evidence to back his claim – that Obama is willing to sacrifice the lives of American soldiers and Iraqi citizens in order to advance his personal career ambitions.  How serious an assertion is this?  I would regard such alleged behavior as among the most heinous crimes that a person can commit, not different from hiring out a murder.  Except, that is, that we’re talking about probably a million murders.  I have no doubt, and plenty of solid evidence, that that’s exactly what the Bush people did when they launched their Iraq war based on lies.  I have little doubt, and some evidence, that Hillary Clinton and John Edwards and John Kerry committed exactly this crime in voting for the invasion.  I think they are all deserving of the gravest punishments, not least including, to start with, a complete banishment from the corridors of power and prestige.  These are war criminals, plain and simple.  McCain has long been one of them, as one of the war’s most avid backers while surely fully cognizant of the lies forming the pretext for invasion.  Now he has doubled down by politicizing yet again the gravest decision a country can ever make.

The weight of ironies here – on top of boundless disgust – are enough to keep a roaring Saturn V stuck on the launch pad.  Start with his nauseating new campaign slogan, “Country First”.  I’ve news for you, McCainiac.  A candidate who really put country first wouldn’t employ Rove-trained scum-slingers to hurl baseless accusations against an opponent, all of which have the effect of massively cheapening America’s political process.  Many people alive today don’t remember that there actually was a time – before Rove, before Bush and his father, before Atwater, before Nixon – when this sort of campaign ploy was considered way beyond the pale of decency.  There was a reason for that, and we need to return to that ethos for precisely that reason.  Willingness to campaign in such a fashion is highly corrosive to the fabrics of decency, respect and trust that are the necessary foundations upon which democracy ultimately rests.  Take those away by legitimating and rewarding such vile tactics, and you’re ultimately left with a tattered democracy, if any at all.  Country first?  No, John – you’ve actually done  just the opposite.  When you claim that your opponent is sacrificing people’s lives and American national security to win a campaign without having any evidence for that claim, you’ve put your own desperation to be president well ahead of the country you claim to love by undermining its democracy and by you, yourself, using the war to score political points.

This is all the more ironic because McCain knows better than anyone the consequences of politicizing war.  He spent six-and-a-half years being tortured under the ugliest kinds of physical and mental duress.  He has since become something of a student of the conflict in which he made these great sacrifices, the Vietnam War.  If he were honest enough to allow himself to go there, he would admit the truths of that war which are undeniably supported by the documentary record, including the government’s own secret history of Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers.  What these reveal is that McCain – along with many other POWs and MIA, 58,000 Americans killed, tens of thousands more gravely wounded, and perhaps several million dead Vietnamese – was a victim of precisely the same sort of politicking of war that he and his president and his party have now brought to the lucky people of Iraq.

We know that governments from Truman to Nixon and every one in between lied to the American people about Vietnam, and not just small lies either.  And we know that Lyndon Johnson, the man more responsible for the war than any other person, didn’t even believe that it was a war that could be won, but fought it anyhow, in large part because he believed that commie-baiting Republicans would use the “loss” of Vietnam against him in elections if he didn’t, just as they had earlier with China.  Of all people in the world, John McCain should never indulge in this sort of gutter filth.  He rotted away the better part of a decade of his own life, mangled and traumatized, in the Hanoi Hilton in order to help Johnson attain his personal prize of another term as president (or so Johnson thought), and because Republicans had politicized national security, also to win elections.  Is he okay with that?  I’m sure not.  I’m not okay for him, nor for any of the John McCains of this world.  Short of genocide, what greater possible crime is there than launching a war in order to advance one man’s career ambitions?

A third irony is that while he was bravely serving his country and having his patriotism exploited by political hacks like Johnson and the various mutant would-be humanoids of the GOP, the very people who would later bring us the most recent version of their sociopathic amorality were back then sitting by the sides of swimming pools, sipping margaritas, and making career plans to get rich by hook or crook.  George Bush had his daddy get him a free pass.  Dick Cheney took five draft deferments.  John Ashcroft seven.  And so on, and so on.  Quick:  name one person on the Bush national security team in 2003 who actually showed up for combat when it was his turn.  There was only one – Colin Powell – who, while hardly a sweetheart himself, was not coincidentally the only one of all of them to oppose invading Iraq.  McCain has hitched his wagon to a whole barnyard full of chickenhawks and their despicable war.  The fact that Cheney literally said “I had better things to do in the 60s than fight in Vietnam” tells you something of what these guys must have thought about patriotic patsies like John McCain, who risked their lives in service to their country, just as David Kuo’s insider revelations about how Rove and company secretly mocked the religious right congregations they used as Republican shock troops tells you more of the same.

But it gets a lot worse yet.  In irony number four, McCain would be savaged by these vicious thugs once again, and it was for the same mistake of having once served his country.  When it looked like he was going to clobber Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries, the serious money made sure that that wouldn’t happen, and that their reliable kleptocrat, Little George, would be ushered into the White House instead.  The very same animals who are now mauling Barack Obama on behalf of John McCain were shredding the senator himself on behalf of Bush just eight years ago, falsely accusing McCain in South Carolina of fathering a love child with a black mistress, and of being off his rocker from his POW days.  Whatever happy news there is in the fact that a movement this evil will inevitably wind up eating its young, it remains a statement of the sad journey John McCain has taken that he would employ the very same hitmen to now do the same to someone else.  Shame on you, John McShameless.  Shame on you.

Fifth, it’s both outrageous and outrageously ironic for McCain to level this charge against Obama, as opposed to, say, Clinton or Edwards or Kerry.  Of the four of them (and many more), only Obama has always opposed the war.  Only Obama had the guts to do so at the beginning, when the Bush people had made that an excruciatingly hard thing to do.  True, he wasn’t then in the US Senate, and he didn’t actually have to cast a vote on the issue.  Nevertheless, it was pretty widely understood at the time – not least by Rove and the three Democratic would-be presidents listed above – that going on record against the war was the kiss of death for any presidential ambitions.  Obama not only took that risk, but he hit it just right, not opposing all wars (for there are rare ones for which the alternative is even worse), but opposing dumb wars, and labeling Iraq just such.

Lastly, the greatest irony of all is that nobody politicized this war more than Republicans did.  Bush admitted to an interviewer in 1999 that he would use such a war for purposes of insuring his domestic political power.  Cheney literally had a formula of “Start a small war.  Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade”.  Moreover, if there had ever been any question of why Bush went to Congress for an Iraq war resolution just weeks before the congressional elections of 2002 – thus cynically pinning Democrats between the Scylla of a war they knew was based on lies and the Charybdis of the GOP using national security as a sledgehammer in this first post-9/11 election – it should have long prior been put to rest by Rove’s congressional election briefing plan, which was accidentally leaked, indicating that the party would be using national security issues as its election strategy.  Add to all of that the commander-in-chief’s little aircraft carrier landing stunt, the myriad times that the president wrapped himself in the mantle of American soldiers (live and dead), the plastic Thanksgiving turkey, the 2002 abomination against Max Cleland and the 2004 version against John Kerry, and all the rest, and you get a very, very politicized war.  Not only should John McCain not be adding to the pile of such disgusting tactics, he should be on his knees begging the country for forgiveness of his party.

But that country – the better country of my youth, frankly, for all its faults – no longer exists.  It appears that little can tame the GOP’s taste for the jugular.  And, in part, this is not entirely unexpected, since it always freakin’ works.  Then again, so does genocide, but many of us have made the amazing moral leap to recognize that not every prize is worth the price paid to obtain it, even if you can manage to get other poor slobs to do the paying.  And so we refrain from genocide.  Or launching wars to advance our careers.

So, look, it’s now July.  McCain has hired the known assassins, and they’ve already begun their work, a fact which became visibly obvious in the massively changed tenor of the McCain campaign this last week or two.  So, Barack Baby, do I have to spell it out for you, my man?  Can you not see the freight train that is headed your way?  Must we have yet another example of Democratic roadkill, to join those of Dukakis, Gore, Cleland, Kerry and the rest, before one of you guys learns to throw a punch or two?

This is your swiftboat moment, dude.  John Kerry waited three weeks to respond to the crap they threw at him, after which he might as well have gone off windsurfing and not bothered responding at all.  Why are you not shredding McCain for lying about your Iraq trip and the canceled visit to wounded soldiers?  (Even the media is pointing that out, despite the fact that they love McCain almost as much as they fear the GOP.)  Why are you not disemboweling McCain every day of the week, every week of the month, for his outrageous allegation that you are sacrificing lives in order to win an election?

And why aren’t you on the offensive?  McCain has given you openings you should be able to drive a Mack truck through, and you need to be saturating the airwaves with these.  Why isn’t every other television commercial a viewer sees one of yours, showing Phil Gramm calling Americans “whiners” for feeling economic pain, showing McCain saying “Gramm doesn’t speak for me”, then noting that Gramm in fact spoke on behalf of McCain to the Wall Street Journal on that very same day?  Why aren’t you running ads turning McCain into George Bush’s long lost Siamese twin?  Why aren’t you hammering McCain at his point of greatest strength, undercutting his so-called national security credentials by showing clips of all his errors, including before the war began when he said it would go easily, during the early parts when he said it was going fine, his absurdly bogus Baghdad market walk-through, and his myriad recent gaffes which suggest his brain clicked off sometime in the 1980s?

Despite the fact that the candidate has now issued a semi-strong rebuttal spot two weeks into this ugliness, I must say, I liked the Barack Obama of the primary season better than the current model.  I liked his politics and his integrity more, but most of all I liked his fighting spirit, and his immediate response to scurrilous attacks.

Now that the attacks have gotten worse, I’m wondering what happened to that guy?

Hey Barrackis:  One Dukakis is per lifetime is more than enough.

McCain and his Gang of Rove have more than transcended the threshold of decency these past weeks, and have done so repeatedly.

It’s time for you to take him down.

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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