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Exclusive to CounterPunch Newsletter Subscribers!

How Bill (and Monica) Saved Hillary from a Federal Indictment

Here's the second in Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's series as they describe Hillary Clinton's years in Little Rock and her narrow escape from federal charges that would have destroyed her political career for ever. PLUS KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY on how Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards are failing Black America even as they hunt for votes in So uth Carolina's "Black Primary." Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Remember contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now

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"Imperial Crusades: a Diary of Three Wars" by Cockburn and St. Clair

Today's Stories

August 17, 2007

Joanne Mariner
Terrorizing Social Protest

August 16, 2007

Jonathan Cook
The Second Lebanon War, a Year Later

Christopher Brauchli
Babes in Toxic Toyland

Norman Solomon
Backspin for War

Lee Sustar /
Orlando Sepuldeva

Victory on the Picket Line: How Immigrant Workers Won Their Strike Against Cygnus

George Bisharat
Boycott Movement Targets Israel

Binoy Kampmark
Tasteless: Gordon Ramsey and the Death of Gastronomy

Evelyn Pringle
Protection Racket?: the FDA and Avandia

Hugo Blanco
The Epic Struggle of Indigenous Andean / Amazonian

Website of the Day
Burning Man: the Field Recordings

 

August 15, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
"No American President Can Stand Up to Israel"

Michael Neumann
In Memoriam: Raul Hilberg

Jordan Flaherty
The Struggle to Free the Jena Six

Sonja Karkar
Can You Hear the Cries from Gaza?

Felice Pace
NPR Watch: Will Linda Gradstein Go to Gaza?

Joshua Frank
On Censoring Pearl Jam

Dave Lindorff
Terrorist Nation?

Carla Blank
Elvis Presley: King or Apprentice?

David Vest
Guralnick, Elvis and Racism

Harvey Wasserman
Why the Neocons Won't Miss Karl Rove

Peter Rost, M.D.
FDA Approved Drug Makes You Hypersexual and a Compulsive Gambler

Russell Mokhiber
An Arab American's Pocket Political Dictionary

Website of the Day
Stoners Busted

 

August 14, 2007

Paul de Rooij
Humanitarian Wars and Associated Delusions

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congress's Busted September: Disingenuous Gestures Amid Catastrophe

David Rosen
The Case of Genarlow Wilson: Racism, Justice and Age-of-Consent Laws in America

Gary Leupp
Bush Warns Puppets Not to Praise Iran

Clifton Ross
Latin America at the Crossroads

Muhammad Idress Ahmad
The Politics of Democracy Promotion

Jacquelyn Godin
A Circle of Poison: Pesticides in the Plantations

Uri Avnery
Oslo Revisited

Ramzy Baroud
A Palestinian Miracle at the UN?

James McEnteer
Philistines as Cultural Critics

Website of the Day
When Cheney Called Iraq a Quagmire

 

August 13, 2007

Jeremy Scahill
The Mercenary Revolution

F. William Engdahl
The Hidden Agenda Behind Bush's Biofuel Plan

Alexander Cockburn
The Veldt Will Never Be the Same

Kathy Kelly
Iraq's Refugees: "et to Work"

Chris Floyd
No Light, Light Tunnel: the Bipartisan Guarantee of More War in Iraq

Paul Craig Roberts
Hegemony of the Cockroach

William Blum
First Pullout, Then Bloodbath?

Kenneth Couesbouc
The Language of Dominion

Rannie Amiri
Tancredo's Screedo: a Lethal Mix of Ignorance and Insanity

Brenda Norrell
Priests Expose Secret Cycle of US Torture

Fran Shor
All Fall Down

Ron Jacobs
Dr. Strangelove Meets Dubya's Double Buzz Twofer

Website of the Day
The Beauty of Defiance

 

August 11 / 12, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
How the Democrats Blew It in Only 8 Months

Stan Goff
The Cover-Up of Pat Tillman's Death

Ralph Nader
GM Radio: Payola to Rightwing Talk Shows?

Vijay Prashad
Destination Darfur: a New Cold War for Oil

Greg Moses
SubPrime People: Behind the Banking Crisis

Alan Farago
The Cratering Mortgage Market, WCI Communities and Amb. Al Hoffman

Patrick Cockburn
The Cracks in Saddam's Dam

Ben Tripp
On Fleeing the Country

Robert Fantina
Romney's Dance: The Rightwing Flip-Flop

John Ross
The Guelaguetza Strategy in Oaxaca

Seth Sandronsky
Organizing Nurses

Paul Krassner
Assholes of the Week: From Mitt Romney to Bill Richardson

Website of the Weekend
Pearl Jam: Censored by ATT

 

August 10, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
China's Threat to the Dollar is Real

Stan Goff
How Pat Tillman Died

Marjorie Cohn
A Blank Check for Domestic Spying

Saul Landau
In the Age of Immigrant Panic

Chris Floyd
Goading Xerxes: the Coming Strike on Iran

Daniel Ellsberg
A Vision for Cindy Sheehan's Campaign

Anthony Papa
The Upside Down Flag: a Country in Distress

Farzana Versey
On the Heels of Sir Salman

Sgt. Kevin Benderman
Freedom or Totalitarianism?

Nuri Nuri
Memories of T99 Nelson

Website of the Day
Lessons in Obfuscation from Sen. Larry Craig: How to Talk About Looting the Public Domain

 

August 9, 2007

Stan Goff
The Fog of Fame: Pat Tillman as Everyone's Political Football

Paul Craig Roberts
In the Hole to China

Alan Farago
The Terror of the Mortgage Pools

William S. Lind
The Surge's New Math: One Step Forward, Two Back

Doug Giebel
Letter from Montana: What the Bushvolk Have Done to America

Harvey Wasserman
Radioactive Bailout in Advance

Jacob Hill
The Tail End of Free Trade: NAFTA's Impact on the Manufacturing Sector

Raul Zibechi
The Dark Side of Agrofuels

Dave Zirin
The Making of Barry bin Laden

Website of the Day
"Babies Just Come with the Scenery"

 

August 8, 2007

Andy Worthington
Backing Up Lt. Col. Abraham on Gitmo Abuse

Jeff Halper
The Catch in Israel's "Generous Offers" at Jericho

Greg Moses
No Light in August for Texas Refugees: Judge Orders Baby Sent to Palestine

Nurit Peled-Elhanan
The Murder of Abir Aramin, 9 Years Old

Sukant Chandan
British Prisons as Islamic Universities

Robert Fisk
A Lebanese Surprise

George H. Strauss
The Military Society

D.K. Wilson
Bonds, the Haters and 756: Why Bob Costas Can't be Trusted

Bill Day
Leonardo DiCaprio's Baggage: the Perils of Celebrity Environmentalism

Tim Campbell
Monkey See, Monkey Do Politics

Website of the Day
Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

 

August 7, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Why the Surge Has Failed

Andy Worthington
Why Do We Need the Democrats?: They Have Failed to Restrain Bush on Gitmo, Iraq and Domestic Spying

Kathy Kelly
The Little Girl of Hiroshima

Stan Cox
The Antiwar Majority: Look Quickly, You Might Miss It

Sonja Karkar
Israel's Settlement Project

Sen. Russ Feingold
A License to Wiretap--Anyone

Alan Farago
Dancing in the Light of Florida

Norman Solomon
Let Us Now Praise an Infamous Woman

Binoy Kampmark
Giving Good Face: What Jeremy Bentham and Facebook Have in Common

Dave Lindorff
The Gelding Congress

John Stauber
Coffee with the Troops at Yearly Kos

Website of the Day
George Carlin on Education

August 6, 2007

Bill Quigley
Fighting for the Right to Learn in New Orleans

Kathy Rentenbach
Guatemalan Gold, Guatemalan Bones

Uri Avnery
White Elephants: Bush's Middle East Arms Deals

Col. Dan Smith
Of Time and Iraq

Ralph Nader
Cruise Ship Blues

James Neshewat
War? What War?: a Report from the New SDS Confab in Detroit

D.K. Wilson
Barry, Bud and 755

Greg Moses
Safe Passage for Willie Nelson

Fidel Castro
Hard and Obvious Realities

Mike Whitney
Judgment Week on Wall Street

 

August 4 / 5, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch and the Luck of the Bancrofts

Peter Linebaugh
Speaking in Irish Tongues

Saul Landau
Faith-Based War

Alan Farago
The Candidates and the Collapsing Economy

Dave Zirin
When Domes Attack: Even in Minnesota

Barucha Calamity Peller
Oaxaca is Not Over

Anthony DiMaggio
Double Standards in U.S. Aid to the Middle East

Dave Lindorff
Spy Power: Bush Demands, Democrats Deliver--Again and Again and Again

Fred Gardner
Write Off Your Congressman

Nicola Nasser
The Iranian Option

Benjamin Dangl
Privatizing Repression in Paraguay

Rannie Amiri
Bribe, Divide and Conquer

Daniel Gross
CSR on Trial: Starbucks Behind the Brand

Sherwood Ross
Obama Renounces Use of Nuclear Weapons

Manuel Garcia, Jr
A Bridge Truth Movement?: From 9/11 to Minneapolis

Missy Beattie
The First Mannequin and the "Crime Scene"

Ron Jacobs
The Outlaw Trip to Mexico: Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad

Website of the Weekend
Photos: Texas Immigrant Prison

 

August 3, 2007

Gabriel Matthew Schivone
An Interview with Noam Chomsky on Responsibility, War Guilt and Intellectuals

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Jewish Problem in Tehran

Patrick Cockburn
Sunnis Walk Out of Iraq Government

Little Steven Van Zandt
Die, Greedy Swine! Die! Die!: How the Record Companies are Killing Rock Music

Christopher Brauchli
Bush Makes Putin Look Like James Madison

D. K. Wilson
Two Sides and a Middle: Michael Vick Ain't the One to Ask

Linda Ford and Ira Glunts
Maxwell's Silver Hammer: Syracuse University Enlists in the Global War on Terror

Kelly Overton
The Casualties of Green Scare: the Feds' War on the Animal Rights Mvt.

Monica Benderman
In Freedom's Name

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Minneapolis Bridge Collapse: Was Cheney at the Scene?

Website of the Day
A Cinematic Look at the Police State in Action

 

August 2, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
The Return of the Robber Barons

Stanley Heller
Report from the Land of Apartheid

Eric Ruder
Fighting PTSD; Fighting the Army

Robert Fantina
Still Getting It Wrong: the NYT and Iraq

Alan Farago
The Toxic Mortgage Waste Crisis

Chris Floyd
Chertoff, Chiquita and Death Squads

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon's Crucial Special Elections

Sen. Russ Feingold
Closing the Book on the Abramoff Era

Anthony Papa
Drug Treatment isn't a Silver Bullet

Norman Solomon
The Big Guns of August

Website of the Day
Louie, Louie Video Contest

 

August 1, 2007

Debbie Nathan
More Secret Payments by Former NYT Reporter to Web Porn Star Surface in Nashville Courtroom

Fred Gardner
Ciao, Michelangelo

Gary Leupp
Why Iraq's Best-Loved Athlete Can't Go Home

David Rosen
America's Top 10 Political Sex Scandals

Winston Warfield
Is the Tillman Case Still a Coverup?

Daniel McBride
Lessons from Bomber Harris: If the US Strikes Pakistan

Glen Ford
The Corporate Plan to Crush Black Resistance

Thomas P. Healy
The Toxic Career of Indiana's Environmental Commissioner

John V. Whitbeck
The Five Percent Solution

David Krieger
Nuclear Weapons and the University of California

Website of the Day
The Tragic Story of Hisham Mohammed

 

July 31, 2007

Kathy Kelly
Dancing in the Darkness: the Story of Abu Mahmoud

Clancy Sigal
The Ghosts of Passchendaele

Paul Krassner
Assholes of the Week: From Baby Doll to Cheney

Joe DeRaymond
Return to the Republic of Death?

Diane Christian
"Winning": What Bush Could Learn from the Shade of Achilles

Chris Floyd
Good News is No News: Why the Bush Adm. Buries Accounts of Extremist Recantations

Ramzy Baroud
Bush's Real Agenda in Palestine

Alan Farago
Battle for the Soul of Florida

Fidel Castro
In Spite of Everything: Reflections on the Pan American Games

Dan Bacher
The Fish Terminator: Schwarzenegger's Campaign to Build the Delta Canal and More Dams

 

July 30, 2007

Marjorie Cohn: Independent Counsel Time

Patrick Cockburn
Four Million Iraqis on the Run

Peter Quinn
Irish in America

Uri Avnery
A Warning to Tony Blair

John Ross
Zapatista Intergalatica Lands on Earth

Ron Jacobs
Free the San Francisco 8

David Vest
Farewell, Old Friend: Another Legend of the Blues is Gone

Jeffrey St. Clair
T99 Nelson: Seduced by a Legend of the Blues

Website of the Day
Collateral Repair Project

 

July 28 / 29, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Now the NYT is Selling "Bloodbath" as a Rationale to Stay in Iraq

Ralph Nader
Rotten Justice

Robert Fantina
American Lies and Iraqi Nationalism

Fred Gardner
Prohibitionists Attack, Reformers Fundraise

 

July 27, 2007

John Ross
Bombing Pemex--or Not?

Arthur Neslen
Gaza was a Gas for Blair

Dave Lindorff
Declaring the US a Battlefield: Martial Law is Now a Real Threat

Julene Blair
The Environmentalist Within

Christopher Brauchli
Bush Uses Children as Shock Troops in His War on Socialized Medicine

Jesse Hagopian
Fund the Wounded, Not the War

Charles Modiano
Manufacturing a Villain: Sports Illustrated's Vilification of Barry Bonds

Bill Day
The Hollow Environmentalism of Leonardo DiCaprio

Walter Brasch
Leaders Afraid to Lead

M.D. Mitchell
Farm Based Camps

Website of the Day
Fighting Sarcoma

 

July 26, 2007

Kathleen Christison
The Siren Song of Elliot Abrams

Andy Worthington
Why the Pentagon's Gitmo Study is a Joke

Clancy Chassay
How the Bush White House Seeks to Destroy Lebanon

Marjorie Cohn
Showdown Over Executive Privilege

Susie Day
Apartheid Americana

David Price
Tour de Witch Hunt: Drugs, Diaries and Purges

Marie Trigona
Argentina's "Dirty War" Crimes Trial: The Torturer Priest

Norman Solomon
Media Spin on Iraq: We're Leaving (Sort Of)

William S. Lind
How to Win in Iraq

Natsu Saito
Ward Churchill and the Regents at the University of Colorado

John Stauber
Netroots and the Iraq War: Does Ending It Matter to Them Anymore?

Website of the Day
Sticking It to the Man

 

July 25, 2007

Andy Worthington
Gains and Losses at Gitmo

Gary Leupp
Bush Speechwriter, Michael Gerson, Calls for Attack on Syria

Ray McGovern
The Sad Decline of John Conyers

Dr. Susan Block
Bonobo Bashing in the New Yorker

Joshua Frank
Hillary's Neocon: the Imperial Vision of Richard Holbrooke

Tina Richards
What Harry Reid Doesn't Know About His Own Bill

Ben Terrall
Indonesia's Bloody Brand of CounterTerrorism

Farzana Versey
God Acquitted!: Lessons from the Case of Darwood Ibrahim

Mohammad Ali Salih
A Bomb in My Briefcase?

Laura Carlsen
A Strange Homecoming: Reflections on the First US Social Forum

Ron Jacobs
Come to Kennebunkport!

Sunsara Taylor
Knocked Up is F**ked Up

Website of the Day
Wal-Mart's Flip Flops: Feet Killers


July 24, 2007

Saul Landau
How to Walk in Bushtime

Kathy Kelly
The Plight of Iraqi Refugees in Jordan

Russell Mokhiber
The Michael Vick / George Bush Thing

M. Shahid Alam
Islam Now, China Then

Patrick Cockburn and Anne Penketh
Meeting in Baghdad

Dave Lindorff
Overcoming John Conyers

Binoy Kampmark
You Tube You Can't: Failure of a Medium

Richard Neville
Murdoch's Transplant: a Warning to the Wall Street Journal

Cindy Sheehan
We Must Move Beyond Politics as Usual

Evelyn Pringle
Anti-Depressants and Birth Defects: Why is the CDC Downplaying the Risks?

Norman Solomon
Media Corrections We'd Like to See

CP Newswire
Reading Harry Potter Not Sinful

Website of the Day
Sea Islands Black Heritage Festival

 

July 23, 2007

Andy Worthington
Narcolepsy on Gitmo Detainees

Uri Avnery
A Trap for Fools

Patrick Cockburn
Turkish Prime Minister Threatens to Invade Northern Iraq

Sousan Hammad
The Children Without a Title

John Walsh
Todd Gitlin's Nader Fixation

Harvey Wasserman
Spinning Kashiwazaki: PR Flacks Rush to Aid of Crippled Nuke

Martha Rosenberg
The Life and Times of a Hog-Hanging Farmer

Collin Baber
Here Come the MRAPs: Resurrecting Apartheid Armor for Iraq

Reza Fiyouzat
Iran's Forgotten Anti-Nuke Movement

Stephen Lendman
Saving a President: Scare-Mongering and Executive Orders

Website of the Day
The Port Huron Project

 

July 21 / 22, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Giuliani and the Dogs of War

Werther
How to Read a National Intelligence Estimate

Ralph Nader
Atomic Blowback

David Keen
Buy Hard: How to Sell an Endless War

Fred Gardner
Karl Rove, Pothead: When Good Drugs Happen to Bad People

Gary Leupp
Edelman's Edict: Is Hillary "Reinforcing Enemy Propaganda?"

Robert Fantina
Fear in Iraq

Saker
The Future of Palestine: an Interview with Jonathan Cook

Rannie Amiri
Nasrallah in the Crosshairs: How will the Third Lebanon War Start?

Mike Whitney
The Crisis in Hedgistan

Dr. Susan Rosenthal, MD
The Hidden Injuries of Powerlessness: Linking Alienation and Dissociation

Monica Benderman
Facing the Truth

Dan Bacher
Deltagate: the Politics of Fish Kills

Michael Baney
Fujimori's Long Race From Justice

Missy Beattie
Here, There and Everywhere

Ron Jacobs
Tremble, Tyrants

Adam Engel
Radical Language: an Introduction

Thomas Naylor
California Split: an Open Letter to Schwarzenegger

Poets' Basement
Landau, Ford and Engel

Website of the Weekend
Surge in Action

 

July 20, 2007

Eliza Szabo
Fatal Neglect: Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan

Pam Martens
Doctoring the News: CNN's Sanjay Gupta, Laura Bush and Merck

Alan Farago
Winners and Losers in the Housing Market Crash

Harvey Wasserman
Lies and Leaks: The Earthquake That Screamed "No Nukes!"

Marjorie Cohn
Iraqis will be the Deciders

Dave Zirin
White Noise and the Black Athlete

Anthony DiMaggio
American Public Opinion and Israel

Scott Liebertz
Oaxaca on Edge

Linn Washington, Jr.
British Cops Assault Rape Allegations

Bill Piper / Anthony Papa
Flying High?: The Political Junkets of Bush's Drug Czar

Ramzy Baroud
Bush's War Policy: When Time Heals Nothing

Website of the Day
The Prankster Art of Mark Jenkins

 

July 19, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
The Next Invasion of Iraq

Remi Kanazi
Is This Ben Gurion or Hell?: a Palestinian Adventure Through Israel's Largest Airport

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Surging Costs of the Iraq War

Sharon Smith
Democrats and Health Care: Behind the Rhetoric

Dave Lindorff
Killing Cabbies in Iraq

Conn Hallinan
Have Gun, Will Travel: Mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan

D. K. Wilson
The Michael Vick Case Pulls Back the Veil on Who We Really Are

Joshua Frank
Democrats as Leviathan: Another Step Toward War with Iran

Norman Solomon
The Ghost of Wayne Morse

Russell Hoffman
Rattling the Reactor: Quakes, Fires and Leaks at the World's Largest Nuke

Ray McGovern
Bush's Wooden Headedness Kills

Website of the Day
Protesting Power


July 18, 2007

Brenda Norrell
Spy Towers on the US Border

Col. Dan Smith
How the US Could "Lose" Saudi Arabia

Martha Rosenberg
Lord of Crookharbour: the Trial of Conrad Black

Conn Hallinan
Bombing and Spraying Afghanistan

Binoy Kampmark
The SIM Card Terror Case

Patrick Bond /
Rehana Dada

Who Killed Sajida Khan?

Tom Johnson
The Long Road ... to Nowhere

Paul Craig Roberts
A Free Press or a Ministry of Truth?

Bob Quellos
Pushing the Poor Out of House and Home

Felice Pace
Falling for Lieberman's Iran Resolution

Robert Weissman
National Health Insurance: More Humane and More Efficient

CP Newswire
Shocking Report Showing Involvement of US Psychologists in Torture

Website of the Day
Gilad Atzmon Live!

 

July 17, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Just Another Day in Iraq: 100 Fathers, Mothers and Children Killed

Marjorie Cohn
Out of Control: Executive Power Plays

Evelyn Pringle
Inside Bush's FDA

David Rosen
Moral Hypocrisy on the Hill: the Christian Right, Sexual Scandal and the Pleasures of the Courtesan

Susan Miller
Width Matters: Displacement and Israel's Wall

Franklin Lamb
Did the UN Cave to Israel on Lebanon's Shabaa Farms?

Don Monkerud
Considering Victory in Iraq

Harvey Wasserman
Nuclear Surge

Russell Hoffman
Japan Dodges a Radioactive Bullet

Dave Lindorff
Feingold Turns to Dross

Dave Zirin
Reclaiming Sports as True Fiction

Website of the Day
Che at the UN: 1964

 

July 16, 2007

Gary Leupp
Cheney Urges Bush to Strike Iran

Ellen Cantarow
The Untold Story of Iraqi Women

Paul Craig Roberts
Impeach Now

Allan J. Lichtman
The D.C. Madam's Public Service

Dan Bacher
Cheney and the Klamath: Was the Veep Behind the Nation's Worst Salmon Kill?

Patrick Cockburn
The Killing of Khalid W. Hassan

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Property is Racism

James Brooks
AIPAC and Mahmoud Abbas: the Undemocratic Road to Defeat

Liaquat Ali Khan
The Judicial Crisis in Pakistan

Julie Flint
Suleiman Jamous in Limbo

Website of the Day
Free Suleiman Jamous!

 

July 14 / 15. 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Support Their Troops?

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Tangled Web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majhid Khan, Dubious US Convictions and a Dying Man

Ralph Nader
Lawlessness, Waste and Incompetence

Robert Fantina
The Illegalities of the Iraq War

Ron Jacobs
Architecture as Military Strategy

Joshua Frank
Eat, Fight, Screw, Pray: An Interview with Joe Bageant

Conn Hallinan
Guns, Foundations and Free Trade: How the Right Targets Africa

Dr. Susan Rosenthal, MD
War and Dissociation

John Ross
No En Nuestro Nombre!: a Letter to the Mexican Antiwar Movement

Fred Gardner
Who's Afraid of Cannabidiol?

Rannie Amiri
A Primer on Israeli Doublespeak

Charles Modiano
ESPN's Rap Sheet: Pacman as Black Man

Anthony DiMaggio
America's Parochial Press

China Hand
Executive Orders and Coercive Diplomacy

Missy Comley Beattie
Reprobate Rhetoricians

Dr. James J. Murtagh, Jr.
Harry Potter Battles Big Brother

Kenneth Rexroth
On Thomas More's "Utopia"

Poets' Basement
Engel, Davies and Orloski

Website of the Weekend
GOP Sex Hypocrites: a Slideshow

 

July 13, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
The Decider in Denial

Winslow T. Wheeler
Bush's Iraq Benchmarks Assessment: Grading on a Curve for the Wrong Test

Imran Khan
When Dictators Serve US Interests

Todd Chretien
The Wal-Mart of Garbage

Sam Husseini
Killing the Constitution

Dr. Herman Mindshaftgap
Why, in Truth, There is No Surge

Anthony Papa
The Hard Road Home

D. K. Wilson
The Wonderful World of Mike Greenberg and Barry Bonds

David Michael Green
In the Last Throes, Judiciously

Website of the Day
Strange Attraction: Mrs. Thompson and Mr. Wolfowitz

 

July 12, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
Restoring the People's Power

Robert Jensen
Lessons from the Lal Masjid Tragedy

Dr. Susan Block
Hookergate II: The Senator and the Veep

Joshua Frank
The Liberal Thrashing of Ward Churchill

John Chuckman
How Terror Lost Its Meaning

Corporate Crime Reporter
The Problem with Bribeline

Mike Whitney
Demonizing Putin

Nicola Nasser
Will New Delhi's Palestinian Policy be Neutralized?

Richard Rhames
Requiem for the Paxilated

William S. Lind
Not Fourth Generation Warfare

Website of the Day
Video: World's Largest Nuclear Explosion

 

 

July 11, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
The Benchmark Blame Game

Richard Neville
Is This Man a Psychopath? Bomber McNeill, the Faceless Pol Pot of the Sky

Debra McNutt
Privatizing Women: Military Prostitution and the Iraq Occupation

John V. Walsh
A Plea to Ralph Nader

Scott Liebertz
Where's the Outcry? Mexico's Monitor Radio vs. RCTV

George C. Wilson
Beware the Iran Hawks

James McEnteer
My Impossible Dream Candidate

Philip Rizk
Submission or Resistance in Gaza?

Johnny Hazard
Mexico Commemorates a Fraud

Dave Lindorff
On the Road with Impeachment

Website of the Day
Sly Stone's Higher Power

 

July 10, 2007

James Ridgeway
True North: Big Oil in the Arctic

Tariq Ali
New Clashes in Islamabad: Judges and Jihadis Torment the Regime

Javed Hussein
Pakistan's Waco?: The Storming of the Red Mosque

William Blum
Neocons, Theocons, Demcons, Excons and Future Cons

Ralph Nader
Grown in China

Jay Arena
New Orleans, Public Housing and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex

Anthony DiMaggio
A Begrudging Reversal: The New York Times and the "Anti-War" Turn

Eva Liddell
Has Ann Coulter Got the Hots for John Edwards?

Jerry Kroth
Democratic Defectors and the Israel Lobby

Alice Woodward
White Supremacy and the Jena Six

Nikolas Kozloff
Where's Jerry?: On Cheney Impeachment, Rep. Nadler's a No Show

Paul Shannon
It's Time to Reform Sex Offender Laws

Website of the Day
March for Remembrance

 

July 9, 2007

Fidel Castro
The Killing Machine: Reflections from a Target of the CIA

Diana Johnstone
King Sarko the First

John Walsh
Will the Greens Seize the Moment?

Uri Avnery
The Jordanian Option

Ramzy Baroud
The Palestinian Left: a Lost Opportunity?

John Ripton
The New West Bank Palestinian State

Stephen Lendman
Making Gaza Scream

Bruce Jackson
Bush Going Down: the Correct Way to Affix a Stamp

Michael Donnelly
What's the Matter with Winchester?

Doug Giebel
Wanted: Old Men with Nothing to Lose

Website of the Day
Ron Paul on This Week with George

 


July 7 / 8, 2007

Saul Landau
Blame the Puppet

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Parasitic Imperialism

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
What Lies Beneath: Dispatches from the Frontlines of t he Burqa Brigade

Alan Maass
Will "Sicko" Spark a Movement?: a Film, Militant Nurses and a New Opportunity for Single Payer Health Care

John Ross
The Fire Last Time

Pat Williams
The Supreme Court and Mr. Peanut

Rannie Amiri
The Unbreakable Mordechai Vanunu

Farzana Versey
Does the Taj Mahal Deserve to be a Wonder of the World?

Bart Gruzalski
Bush, the Revolution and the Iraq War

Paul Rockwell
An Army of None

Reza Fiyouzat
Tax Cuts for the Rich Only Benefit the Economy of the Rich

Monica Benderman
Americans, Honestly!

Kenneth Couesbouc
Total War: From Clausewitz to Clinton and Bush

Dave Lindorff
Poll: Impeach the Bastards

Charles Modiano
History's Hit Job on Thomas Paine

Missy Beattie
King Cretin

Dal LaMagna
A Peacemaker's View of Baghdad

Jean Gerard
Those So-Called Oil Contracts in Iraq

Anne Dachel
Autism: an Epidemic of Fairly Recent Origin

Ron Jacobs
Modes and Melodies of Resistance

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Engel and Buknatski

Website of the Day
Van Morrison and Bob Dylan in Athens


July 6, 2007

Daniel Ellsberg
When the Crimes of the White House are Unpunishable

Gary Leupp
The Cracks in Cheney's World

Harvey Wasserman
Leonard Peltier vs. Scooter Libby: the Hero and the Henchman

Omer Subhani
Our Dead are Not the Same: Ignoring Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan

Marjorie Cohn
Compassion, Conspiracy and Commutation

Christopher Brauchli
Kingly Edicts: Bush's Executive Orders

David Michael Green
Scalia Time: the Wrecking Ball Court

China Hand
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August 17, 2007

Berserker Politics

Karl Rove and Damage Done

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

Imagine you could be a gambler, and never lose. Now you understand Karl Rove.

How can a gambler never lose? Only when he gets to throw the dice, and pick up the winnings, while somebody else stakes the bet.

To a certain degree, that's the story of any political consultant. Somebody else finances the campaign, somebody else is the candidate, and the consultant becomes a political genius if the candidate wins, or the poor guy who just happened to be stuck with a lousy horse should the candidate lose. The only thing at stake for the consultant is his reputation, but even that hardly seems vulnerable. Bob Shrum managed to amass an amazing 0-7 won-loss record in the presidential sweepstakes and still got invited by John Kerry to make it 0-8 in 2004.

But Karl Rove is much more than a successful consultant to presidential candidates. His candidate made it to the White House, and to a very large extent, Rove was handed the keys to both the policy and politics hot-rods when they got there. That means that when we say that somebody else provided the stakes with which Rove got to play, we're no longer just talking about campaign contributors with dollars on the line, or candidates with reputations to be made or lost. Now we're talking about American soldiers and Iraqi civilians who've paid the highest price possible for Rove's policy decisions. Now we are talking about American citizens who will be working long hours to finance the debt that Rove ran up. Now we're talking about an entire planet suffering the consequences of global warming negligence for generations to come. And that's just the start.

Rove The Gambler came to the White House with the best deal imaginable from his perspective. He could, in governing, gamble for the highest stakes, and if he won he would be feared and revered as the greatest political genius of his generation, perhaps of the century. But if he lost, other people would pay the price. To those of us whose morality chip wasn't somehow misplaced on the assembly line, such a game might seem momentarily tempting but ultimately too reprehensible to play. Not so for Karl, who not only played, but played with a vengeance, literally and figuratively.

Rove had a dream, and he brought it with him to the White House. The first thing to notice if one wants to understand the character of this man ­ and therefore also the character of the presidency he drove ­ is the nature of this dream. It was not Karl Rove's great aspiration in life to cure cancer, or eradicate poverty, or bring peace to the Middle East, or double the number of college students in America. No, handed the keys to the government of the world's sole superpower, Rove had something else in mind ­ something infinitely more meager. His great dream in life was to emulate his hero, Mark Hanna, and reestablish a generational-long hegemony for the Republican Party in America.

If that seems like a small-minded aspiration for a man who fancies himself as a student of history and the big picture, it is. But all the more so because Rove was prepared to do anything in order to achieve his little goal. It is not unfair to say, then, that Iraq has been smashed, a million people murdered, the American military broken, the American treasury depleted, the environment dangerously threatened, the Constitution tattered, and the country's reputation eviscerated ­ all on a gamble that things would break the other way and... what? Leave the GOP in power for the next quarter-century. Oops. As Maxwell Smart might've said, "Missed it by that much!" What an incredible amount wagered for so little potential return, even if it had gone all right.

Of course, the greatest irony of all is that, not only did the Karl Rove wrecking machine destroy all of those things that most people care about, but it also wound up profoundly demolishing the very goals that Rove himself most sought. The Bush presidency is utterly in the toilet, and it would seem clear even with 17 months remaining that it will be regarded as the very worst presidency across all of American history. As for the Republican Party, its woes were only beginning to become evident with the election blow-out of 2006. Not many people can say that they managed to lose control of both houses of Congress in one election. That rarely happens. But Karl Rove did it.

And 2008 will be even more devastating. Rove might even be correct in arguing that the Democrats will nominate Hillary Clinton and that she is enough of a liability to cost her party the White House, even in a can't miss year. I doubt it, because if there's one thing Clinton is, it's smart, and if there's another, it's ruthless, and she will therefore turn the Republican candidate ­ with his help, no doubt, as we're already seeing today ­ into a clone of George W. Bush. Faced with the choice of the obnoxious but harmless Hillary, on the one hand, and four or eight more years of Bushism, on the other, enough voters will hold their nose and choose aggravation over devastation, handing Clinton the White House. But regardless of what happens in the presidential race, congressional elections will be absolutely devastating for the GOP, not only widening Democratic majorities in both houses, and not only ending both the Republicans' capacity and will to act as a block on legislative progress, but actually threatening the very existence of the party itself. This happy problem, which couldn't possibly be visited upon a nicer group of fasc..., er, people, will only then be amplified in coming years and elections, as today's young voters ­ who have already rejected the Republican Party ­ matriculate through the electoral system, replacing dinosaur GOP devotees who cut their teeth on Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Ironically enough, then, Rove destroyed the very thing that he had mortgaged everything for in seeking its empowerment. And even more ironic yet, he may well have created the very antithesis of what he most coveted: There may well be generational dominance of a single party in our future, yes ­ just not the one that Rove happened to have in mind. While many of us can't be bothered to shed even crocodile tears for the demise of the Republicans, the collateral damage from Rove's all-in bet has been devastating to everything else that we care about. But, again, no worries for him. He bet with other people's stakes, and he can probably still get lots of work from those candidates willing to do anything to win office (read virtually every Republican).

I don't know what happens in a childhood to produce a figure like Karl Rove, but it can't have been good. Like a serial killer with ice-water running through his veins, for whom the idea of compassion or remorse is a foreign concept, Rove is the quintessential amoral man ­ the very definition of a sociopath. Don't take the way he treats you personally ­ it's not that he doesn't like you. He just utterly couldn't give a shit one way or the other, dude. But woe unto you if you possess something that he wants, like money, a vote, cannon fodder capability, or shock troop potential. He will simply say or do whatever is necessary to liberate you from your dollars, your common sense or your life in order to achieve his goals. There are myriad examples, but one which is highly illustrative is Rove's response to Hurricane Katrina. While you and I looked at our television screens and saw there a disaster in which compassion and immediate action were the watchwords of the day, Rove ­ the guy Bush put in charge of the crisis ­ was at that exact same moment spinning the gears in his head, literally thinking instead about the partisan political implications of relocating a quarter-million black (and therefore likely Democratic) voters out of the state, thus perhaps putting Louisiana back in the Republican column in future elections.

It's no wonder that a guy with such empathy defects could spot George W. Bush coming from miles away, like freight train rolling down the mountain. Bush was the perfect partner for the exploits of someone like Rove, who once trained under both Donald Segretti and Lee Atwater. Jim Hightower (himself one of the many unfortunate members of the Rovian Wreckage Club) once mused that Bush père ­ infinitely more sane and humane than his son, though still borderline on both fronts ­ was born on third base, thinking he hit a triple. If that's so, the mind strains to find the appropriate metaphor for the Boy King. Perhaps we could say that he was handed ownership of the entire ball club based on his family name, only to think he had earned it on his own, pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Trouble is, that's no metaphor at all ­ it was quite literally true. Sigh.

In any case, it was just this child of privilege who ­ unlike a similarly situated Roosevelt or Kennedy ­ utterly lacked the compassion thing, that Rove picked out to be his perfect pony. There would be no political tactic too cheap, no empty bumper-sticker slogan too banal, no policy choice in the service of down-and-dirty politics too destructive, and no shattering of the very fabric of constitutional governance too egregious with George W. Bush as his candidate and president. Rove told him what to do and say, and Bush did it. For a while, though only with the massive assistance of 9/11, it worked.

Nevertheless, from the beginning, I found the notion that Karl Rove was a political genius to be as offensive as it was shortsighted. (And what does it say about the wisdom of our wonderful national punditry that they continued to perceive him as such, in some cases even after November 2006?) But the idea that Rove is a political genius is even more absurd today. In fact, the man has been an abject failure, a flaming disaster, by every metric that counts. Whether we compare his performance to his own aspirations, or we add up the overt wreckage, or the more subtle damage, or if we consider what could have been ­ in every case this "genius" is revealed in reality to be a pathetic loser.

First, Rove can be easily demonstrated to have completely failed even according to just the limited goals of his own ambition, leaving aside for the moment the matter of its sheer moral vacuousness. In his cover story on Rove's implosion in The Atlantic, Joshua Green reports that the Great Guru had five particular initiatives in mind after capturing the White House, all in service to forcing into existence his dream of a permanent Republican realignment. He planned to "establish education standards, pass a 'faith-based initiative' directing government funds to religious organizations, partially privatize Social Security, offer private health-savings accounts as an alternative to Medicare, and reform immigration laws to appeal to the growing Hispanic population". Notice, again, that none of these were driven by the desire to produce good governance or to better the lot of the American people, and that all of them completely privileged politics over policy.

But notice, also, that every one of them failed in one fashion or another. The White House was able to channel public funds to religious organizations, but not nearly in the quantity it had in mind. It did pass No Child Left Behind, in an attempt to drive teachers out of the Democratic tent, but it had the opposite effect and has now become one of the most hated pieces of legislation in recent American history, likely soon to be unraveled or modified completely out of recognition. The others on the list were all complete non-starters, with two of them ­ Social Security and immigration ­ blowing up in the president's face, and thus revealing his political impotence (some political capital, George) along the path to substantive failure. Thus, even if we leave aside Iraq (and anyone who believes the White House line that Rove had nothing to do with that decision needs to immediately see the nice man with the white coat and the cup of easy to swallow pills), Rove is a complete and utter failure purely against the benchmark of his own twisted aspirations.

None of his five particular goals was achieved, and the greater vision of a generation of Republican hegemony to which these initiatives were always in service has in fact instead been set back a generation, if not permanently. It is by no means unimaginable that the GOP could now enter into a tailspin of mortal collapse over the coming years, ultimately joining the Federalists and the Whigs on the ash heap of American political party history. But even if it doesn't unwind that far, no one has done this much damage to their own cause since Hitler at Stalingrad. And you can bet that there are a boatload of reformed Republican lemmings on the Hill right now, desperately trying to salvage a mere job from what was only a few years ago an empire, complete with imperious swagger, who rue the day they ever heard the name Karl Rove.

Rove also failed in countless very overt ways (even though many of those bills will not come due until the days and years ahead) against any reasonable measure of what constitutes good governance and a successful presidency. It's fun to watch regressives twist themselves into contorted pretzels with more convolutions than 26-dimensional string theory, trying in desperation to slather on the pancake makeup two inches thick all over the rotting corpse of their political project. But not even the winning mortician from this year's National Taxidermy Championship could revive this mess after the IED of hard reality turned it into so much political hamburger. It's gonna take the computer graphics of Hollywood to have a prayer of convincing voters that the last seven years have been the Good Old Days. Enter Fred Thompson, stage right, of course, as the walking Hail Mary pass late in the fourth quarter. But he is far more likely to produce an Ishtar than the next Star Wars. He's no Reagan, and even Reagan couldn't put a happy enough face on this disaster. Indeed, Thompson, or whoever is unlucky enough to win the nomination, will actually be the anti-Reagan ­ the Republican Carter of 2008 ­ forced to defend a status quo that most voters are already more anxious to abandon than a good case of the clap. And if it's that bad today, just wait till 15 months from now when they go to vote. By then they'll be trading in their first-born children to get Republicans out of Washington.

Call that Rove's Achievement. Dress it up any way you like. Slop on the greasepaint by the bucketful. Spin it around till it's more twisted than Jerry Falwell's sexual fantasies. It doesn't matter. At the end of the day the record of this presidency ­ Rove's presidency ­ is as utterly dismal as it is completely consistent in its dismalness. Turning a record surplus into a record deficit. Failing to defend the country against the 9/11 attacks. Failing to crush or apprehend the alleged perpetrators of that attack. Failing to win a war in Afghanistan. Launching a completely needless war in Iraq. Failing to win the war in Iraq. Destroying the American military. Failing to rescue an entire American city from destruction. The first president since Hoover to lose jobs on his watch. Wages stagnant. Gas prices doubled. Exacerbating global warming, the worst environmental crisis in human history, and undermining attempts by others to deal with it. Undercutting environmental standards on clean air and water. Leaving the Middle East in shambles. Shredding relations with historical allies. Producing the greatest trade deficit in history. Offering tax credits to corporations assisting them in exporting American jobs. Destroying legal and constitutional doctrines dating back as far as seven centuries. Allowing the assault rifle ban to lapse. Standing by while North Korea went nuclear. Tearing up treaties that have kept the peace for half a century. Undermining international institutions. And more, and more, and more.

This is an astonishing, jaw-dropping record of disaster. In saner days, a president would have been run out of town on a rail for nearly any single one of these, let alone the whole lot of them. But we live in strange times, and nobody is more responsible for creating that strangeness than Karl Rove, because nobody has benefitted more from the fear, disorientation and detachment from common sense he produced than he has. That makes it hard, despite this glaring record of sheer failure, for many Americans to comprehend the magnitude of what has been wrought. Indeed, since Democrats utterly lack an instinct for the jugular (or most any other body part), what would be truly amusing would be to see Rove doing a Rovian hit job on his own legacy. Can you imagine the TV ads? The scurrilous rumors leaked to friendlies in the press? The character assassination by innuendo? The fear mongering? Too bad it will never happen ­ it is perhaps the only way we could truly measure the full extent of this disaster.

So Karl Rove ­ the man appointed "genius" by the geniuses of the American media ­ has been a complete failure as measured against his own standards and aspirations, and against even the most charitable reading of the objective benchmarks we associate with any presidency, such as leaving the country safer, healthier, wealthier, more powerful, etc. But, of course, that is just the beginning of the story. The damage done by an amoral man ­ or, better yet, the wounded child crouching in fear within the shell of an amoral man ­ who happens to control the greatest military and economic machine ever to bestride the planet is potentially catastrophic in theory, and has been quite literally so in practice. It is true that it could have been worse. Then again, it's highly unlikely that we know the full story of 9/11 today, and 17 months remain for Cheney to engineer a military assault on Iran, either or both of which gets us that much closer to the worst outcomes imaginable.

But there is another way in which Rove has harmed the country, though accounting for this particular set of transgressions is a more subtle process. The overt damage done is bad enough, but we would be highly remiss not to note as well the psychological effects, both at home and abroad, of the methods consistently applied by Rove and his minions and master.

Never before has America had such a divisive presidency, certainly not one that was intentionally so. More ironies abound here. Newt Gingrich, the quintessential bomb-thrower and a guy cut from precisely the same sociopathic cloth as Rove, blew-up congressional comity in the 1990s, and then foisted his political ethos on the rest of the country in the form of the shameful Clinton impeachment, a raw attempt at a constitutional coup. Then, after Republicans had spent the previous six years ripping apart the fabric of American political culture, in waltzes another Republican to heal the wounds, a supposed "Washington outsider", a "uniter, not a divider", only to become the most divisive president in history. And intentionally so. The story goes that Rove made the decision early in the Bush presidency that the American middle was evaporating, and therefore the key to winning subsequent elections would not be swaying independents, as had been the approach theretofore, but rather doing a better job than the other side of mobilizing the base. That meant throwing more red meat to Wall Street geeks and Schiavo freaks than a whole herd of live Texas longhorns could supply. But it also demonstrated the complete lack of concern for governing well, as this arrogant approach necessarily polarized both Washington and the electorate. That was bad enough before 9/11. No president should ever seek to polarize the country into hostile and angry ideological camps in order to win elections. But after that terrorist attack, when an agonized nation was looking to heal its wounds, it was unconscionable.

To this divisiveness can also be added lost credibility in government. Today, more than 60 percent of Americans do not trust the government to honestly describe foreign threats. That's an astonishing number for any question about institutional trust, let alone one concerning the domain most people consider the core responsibility of government. If we're lucky, most of that will dissipate when the Bush administration finally stops torturing the American public with its very existence, as if all 300 million of us were on lock-down in Guantánamo. It seems to me unlikely that the effect will ever completely disappear, however, especially for younger Americans who've never lived other than under the insane regime of the radical right. And this is precisely the sort of damage I meant when I referred to more subtle forms of destruction. Ever since Ronald Reagan, America has been treated to a steady diet of words and actions undermining the relationship between public and public servants, between the people and their government. This cannot produce anything but a corrosive effect on the health of the polity in the long run, as it very much has already.

Needless to say, if Americans are disenchanted with the actions of the Bush administration, those living abroad are even more horrified. This additional damage shows up repeatedly in polls, and in the destroyed careers of politicians, like Tony Blair, and parties, like José María Aznar's People's Party in Spain. On September 12, 2001, the United States had the deeply felt sympathy and the support of much of the world, including even the people of Iran. Today the country is largely reviled across the planet. That, too is the legacy of Karl Rove.

Which brings us back once more to a final measure of Rove's failure, a comparison of what is with what could have been. Even without 9/11, Rove had the capacity, especially after marketing Bush as a compassionate conservative, to draw the country together around a series of moderate initiatives, cooling down the national acrimony launched for political advantage by his own party in the 1990s. But then after 9/11 this was vastly more true, and it was true, moreover, internationally as well as domestically. The American public, if not much of the world, was ready to rally around a president seeking to defend and protect the common good. To claim that the reality of this presidency in comparison thus represents an opportunity squandered is the understatement of the century. Rove not only failed massively in terms of his own goals, in terms of the direct effects on millions of lives, and in terms of the more subtle destructive effects on the fabric of American democracy, but he also failed massively against the potential for success the administration completely wasted.

In short, no matter what your yardstick (other than, of course, winning elections at any cost), Rove's career represents a complete failure, with tragic consequences for the country and the world.

Earlier this week, I saw an ad in the New York Times for a new book. Two things about this ad were notable. One was that the book's subject is the Marshall Plan, a story of international diplomacy from half a century ago ­ in short, nothing whatsoever to do with Bush, Rove or contemporary American politics. And yet the other remarkable thing about the ad was the bold-letter text at the top, above a graphic of the book, employed today to market a book about a wholly different topic from a wholly different era. It read: "There was a time when the world believed in America and what it stood for".

That text would not have appeared in an advertisement for this or any other book, back in 2000. But, today, it makes perfect sense. The words well capture, in a single phrase, the legacy of Karl Rove and the damage done.

Rove is often described as a genius, but the record emphatically demonstrates just the opposite. He destroyed everything in sight, including the political party for whose would-be fortunes he willingly sacrificed all else, not least the things that matter most ­ peace, truth, democracy, integrity, decency, lives.

No, this was no genius, except in the most nefarious sense. The real genius was of the American Founders, who ­ with just this scenario in mind ­ built a political infrastructure that could hope to prevent Karl Roves from happening.

As it was, nearly every intended bulwark in that system, nearly every check and balance both inside and outside the government, failed to perform its intended function these last years, and Karl Rove ­ the smallest amongst us ­ ran wild for the better part of a decade, cutting a swath of enormous destruction in his path.

Perhaps these ramparts, tattered as they were, were just sufficient enough to slow down the runaway train, though. Perhaps we'll survive this nightmare and reclaim our government and our sanity, after all.

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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