Today's Stories

September 20 / 21, 2008

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies: a New Study of Neocon Influence

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Heidi Walters
Hung Up on Route 36: an 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

September 13 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Panic!

Jeffrey St. Clair
Inside Dirk Kempthorne's Closet

Wajahat Ali
Playing with the Constitution

Robert Fantina
Cheney Scales New Heights of Hypocrisy

Marcus Rediker
Notes on a Visit to the Favelas of Medellín, Colombia

Richard Neville
The Baby Killers

Ed Gaffney
Breaking the Siege of Gaza

Carla Blank
Neglecting a Grand Old Lady

P. Sainath
The Almighty and the U.S. Elections

Lee Sustar
Working Harder; Falling Further Behind

Joshua Frank
Liberalism and Its Bounds

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Guantanamoized Age

Dennis Loo
Shock and Awe Comes Home to Roost

Zach Zill
Squeezed Out in New York City

Omar Barghouti
So You Think You Can Dance? Israeli Profiling of African-American Dancers

Bill Quigley
Social Justice Quiz, 2008

Andy Worthington
Bush's Bitter Legacy

Stephen Dunifer
Free Radio: Liberating the Commons

Seth Sandronsky
Bailing Out Big Auto

David Yearsley
Portabella's Bach: Grim, Trite and Incredibly Boring

Patrick B. Barr
Obama's Punchless Campaign

Rannie Amiri
Tasting Ramadan

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Flight Not Taken

Richard Rhames
What, Me Reason?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Large Hadron Collider Powers Up

Poets' Basement
Deer Cloud and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Wasilla Valley PTA?

September 12, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
The Next Cuban Missile Crisis?

Michael Hudson
More Dangerous Than the A-Bomb? The Chicago School's Record of Infamy

Lloyd Miller
Palin and Alaskan Native and Tribal Rights: a Dismal Record

Steve Breyman
Georgia in NATO?

Maria Rivera
Cuba After Gustav and Ike: an Eyewitness Account

Jonathan Cook
Israel and the Dark Arts

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
U.S. Designs on Pakistan

M. Shahid Alam
The Mendacity of Missed Opportunities

Robert Weissman
Executive Pay and the "Market Economy"

Tanya Golash-Boza / David Brunsma
Immigration Raids Must Be Stopped

Website of the Day
Know Your Rights

September 11, 2008

Noam Chomsky
Towards a Second Cold War?

Sharon Smith
Afghanistan: You Call This a Good War?

Ron Jacobs
Palinomics: She Ain't No Working Class Hero

Marjorie Cohn
God, Guns and Oil: A Palin Theocracy?

Mike Whitney
Cheney in the Caucasus

Jeffery R. Webber
Bolivia: a Coup in the Making?

Paul Cantor
The Other 9/11

Peter Morici
The Surging Trade Deficit

Ray McGovern
Iran's Road Less Traveled to Nukes

Linn Washington, Jr.
Screening Mumia: The Suppression of Dissent in America

Website of the Day
Palin (Michael) for President!

September 10, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
A Temporary Respite from Permanent Decline

Conn Hallinan
The Return of U.S. Death Squads

Ralph Nader
Who Needs Regulations When You've Got a Golden Parachute?

Peter Morici
Can the Bailout Work?

Joanne Mariner
The Horrendous Case of Aafia Siddiqui

Laura Tate Kagel /
Jen Marlowe
The Pending Execution of Troy Davis: a Case for Clemency

Chuck Spinney
Incestuous Amplification and the Madness of King George

Dave Lindorff
Lazy Thinking and Prejudice

Scott Campbell
Where Now for Oaxaca's Social Movement?

Paul Farmer
Haiti and the Hurricanes

Anne Kilkenny
Letters from Wasilla: the Sarah Palin I Know

Website of the Day
Democrats and Zombies

September 9, 2008

Michael Colby
The Obama Poll Drop

Chellis Glendinning
Retorno a 1968: From Berkeley to Mexico City

Vijay Prashad
Losing Game

Jeffery R. Webber/
George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela From Below

David Michael Green
Country Last

Brian J. Foley
The New Face of Republican Power

John Ross
Mexican Flag Wrap

Pierre M. Sprey /
Winslow T. Wheeler
Joint Strike Fighter: Another Defense Acquisition Disaster

Nicole Colson
Sami Al-Arian's Long Road to Freedom

Marc Gardner
California's Anti-Homosexual Laws are Alive and Unwell

William S. Lind
The Baltic States and Russia: Toy Armies or Accomodation?

Website of the Day
All Hope Rests with Piper Palin

September 8, 2008

Mike Whitney
An Interview with Michael Hudson on the Worsening Debt Crisis

Tariq Ali
The Godfather as President

Pam Martens
The Man Who Vetted Palin

Bill Quigley
The Weary Road Home: Displaced Poor Continue to Return to New Orleans

Malini Johar Schueller /
Ed White
Not About Me: Obamamania, Racial Porn-fest and Palinama

Robert Jensen
Pop Music and 9/11

Uri Avnery
Lonely Rider

Win McCormack
Palin Family Values

Howard Lisnoff
How Far From a Police State?

Maria C. Khoury
Taybeh Oktoberfest in Palestine

Website of the Day
Scaring Students from Voting in Virginia

September 6 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Sarah Palin and the Good Book

Jeffrey St. Clair
That Dam Senator: A River Ran Through Him

Linn Washington, Jr.
The GOP Excluded Black-Owned Businesses from Contracts at St. Paul Convention

Patrick Cockburn
Did Bush Spies Monitor Iraqi Allies?

Gary Leupp
The September 3 Attack on Pakistan: a Precursor to More War Crimes?

Nancy Kurshan
CHI-town Lowdown: Memories of 1968

William Blum
Has Obama Already Lost?

Michael Winship
The St. Paul Police vs. the Independent Media

Fred Gardner
Joe Biden, Drug Warrior

Nikolas Kozloff
Sarah Palin and the Wal-Mart Moms: the Cultural Packaging of VP Candidates

Wajahat Ali
The Cryptkeeper and His Pitbull: the Past and Future of the GOP

Robert Fantina
Change Agents?

Karyn Strickler
Palin by Comparison: Sarah and the Hillary Voters

David Yearsley
What Their Fanfares Told Us About the Candidates

Richard Rhames
Bad Campaign Moon Rising

James L. Secor
Bandwagon Politics

Missy Beattie
Missy for Vice POTUS

Eric Patton
Baseless in Obamaland

Ben Terrall
Haiti and the Washington Consensus

Thom Rutledge
Mr. Magoo and the Kind Stranger: a Serious Political Problem

Dan Bacher
Arnold and the Manufactured Drought

David Macaray
Is Union Democracy at Risk?

Jane Stillwater
The Admiral's Child: a Psychological Reason for McCain's Flip Flops

Grady Harper
Should Hunting Really be High on Our Priority List?

Poets' Basement
Wolff, Payne and Holt

Website of the Weekend
We'll See Your Sarah Palin and Raise You With Maria McKee

September 5, 2008

Elizabeth Walters
Old Fears, New Worries in Louisiana

Bill Quigley
Gustav's Path of Destruction

Alan Farago
Nothing Means Anything: The Fantasy of John and Sarah

Dave Lindorff
The Things They Left Behind (Including McCain's First Wife)

Ira Glunts
A Lesson Before Lying: How Republicans Solved Sarah Palin's Jewish Problem

Peter Morici
The Big Slump

Deepak Tripathi
Politics, Morality and the GOP: John McCain as John Major?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Energy of a Hurricane

Michael Donnelly
Change. God. POW.: a Summary of McCain's Big Speech

Martha Rosenberg
Free to Good Home, SUVs

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Air War: On Wolves and Bears

September 4, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Real McCain

Paul Craig Roberts
Who is Wrecking America?

Ron Jacobs
The Perishing Republicans, the RNC 9 and the Twin Cities Cops

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Soft Surge

Andy Worthington
Rendered to Egypt for Torture

Osama Dawoud
How I Lost My Fulbright Scholarship

Stephen Lendman
Katrina Redux: the Militarization of New Orleans

Fidel Castro
Hurricane as Nuclear Strike

Website of the Day
Is McCain Palin's Bitch?

September 3, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
The Fake U.S. Victory in Iraq

Sen. Mike Gravel
Good Luck, Sarah!

Vijay Prashad
The Indian Left and the Indo-US Nuclear Deal

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin, Hunting and the American Psyche

Ralph Nader
Repeal Taft-Hartley

Howard Lisnoff
Forty Years in the Streets (And They're Still Beating Up Journalists)

Steve Early / Cal Winslow
Can SEIU Members Exorcize the Purple Shades of Jackie Presser?

Shepherd Bliss
A Field Report From Slow Food Nation

Bill Quigley
Living in the Car After Gustav

Website of the Day
Growing Up Okie: an Interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

September 2, 2008

Marjorie Cohn
Raiding Democracy in St. Paul

Jonathan Cook
Palestinian Village Faces Army Reign of Terror

Robert Weitzel
Biden and Israel

Corey D. B. Walker
Where Do We Go From Here?

John Ross
The Kidnapping Boom in Mexico

Eric Walberg
Wag the Dog in Georgia

Judith Scherr
No Day in Court for Ronald Dauphin

Richard Morse
Haiti, 2008

B. R. Gowani
What If the Israel Lobby was the African-American Lobby?

Michael Greenberg
Loofah Day in Cleveland

Website of the Day
Thanks for the Memories!

September 1, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Making a Killing in Iraq: McCain and the Telecoms

C. G. Estabrook
The War Will Go On

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Will a Russo-American Nuclear War Happen (Soon)?

David Macaray
An Elegy for Labor Day

B. R. Gowani
The Lobby as Juggernaut

Saul Landau
Real Gold Winners

Charles Orloski
Going Down to Hell's Cul-de-Sac

Gloria La Riva
Profit and Disaster in New Orleans

Website of the Day
Springsteen: Factory

August 30 / 31, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Speech; McCain's Palinomy

Bill Quigley
Gustav is Coming

Jeffrey St. Clair
Valley Boy: The Rise and Fall of Richard Pombo

Andy Worthington
Shining a Light on the Dark Prison

Deepak Tripathi
The Race for the White House: Notes From a European Observer

Stanley Howard
A Prisoner's Tale of Abuse

Dave Lindorff
Troopergate in Alaska

Wajahat Ali
Palin on the Prowl: a Cougar for the PUMAs?

Robert Fantina
McCain and Palin

Josh Schlossberg
A Bias for Life: the Role of the Environmentalist

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Voting

Missy Beattie
Stars, Stripes, War and Shame

Howard Lisnoff
Better Cuba Than Florida?

Suzan Mazur
Rethinking Evolution with Stuart Newman

Rev. Jim Rigby
What Would Jesus Ride to the Conventions?

David Yearsely
Katy Perry Meets Mozart

Serge Quadruppani
Italy's Years of Lead

B.R. Gowani
What If the Israeli Lobby Was the Islamic Lobby?

Richard Rhames
Empty Political Calories

Poets' Basement
Holt, Davies, Corsale and Landau

Website of the Day
Return of the Druids

August 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
How the Chicago Boys Wrecked the Economy

Brian Cloughley
Resurgent Russia

David Ker Thomson
Jacko and Me: Dispatches From Fifty

Joanne Mariner
A UK Window on CIA Abuses

Neve Gordon
The Ordeal of Sahar Vardi, Refusenik

Chris Genovali
Of Whales and Off-Shore Drilling

Ron Jacobs
What's a Godfearing Country to Do?

Michael Donnelly
Honest Abe in Denver?

August 28, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
The Battle of Chicago

Paul Cantor
Who Killed Victor Jara?

Saul Landau /
Farrah Hassen
Axis of Evil Defeats Neocons

Andy Worthington
Clearing Out Guantánamo

Ben Terrall
Return to Port-au-Prince

Leonard Peltier
Message to Obama: Symbolism Alone Will Not Bring Change

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Miasma of Bi-Partisanship

Donna J. Volatile
The Obama Construct

Website of the Day
Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou on the Meaning of Obama

August 27, 2008

Anthony DiMaggio
The Myths of Joe Biden

Jordan Flaherty
Three Years After Katrina

Ralph Nader
The Politics of Avoidance

Melissa Checker
Carbon Offsets, More Harm Than Good?

Bob Sommer
Blaming the Sixties

Cynthia McKinney
How the Democrats Helped Bush Hijack the Country

Ali Khan
Pakistan's Flawed Presidency

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Only Good Muslim is the Anti-Muslim

Dave Lindorff
Strip-Search Nation

David Macaray
Labor's Hard Lessons

Website of the Day
Stagnant Income in an Eroding Economy

August 26, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
The Big Questions About Iraq

Michael D. Yates
Obama and the Working Class

Paul Craig Roberts
Is War With Russia on the Agenda?

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Suicide Report

Rev. Jesse L. Jackson
Obama's Promised Land?

Huwaida Arraf
Sailing into Gaza

Joseph Grosso
Back to the Future: New York's Housing Crisis

Sheldon Richman
What About the Ossetians?

Binoy Kampmark
Impasse at Singur

Website of the Day
Taser Bait in Denver

August 25, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
US Out of Iraq by "2011"

Bill Quigley
Katrina, the Pain Index

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Outposts Seal Death of Palestinian State

James McEnteer
Death by Paranoia

Uri Avnery
The Devil's Hoof

Will Potter
The State Deparment's Green Scare Wing

Robert Jensen
Technological Fundamentalism

Stephen Lendman
Reinventing the Evil Empire

Wajahat Ali
Biden His Time

Carl Finamore
The Future of Trade Unions in China

Website of the Day
Don't Blow Up the Mountain, Boys

August 23 / 4, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
"Change," "Hope"...Why They Must be Talking About Joe Biden!

Jeffrey St. Clair
Killing Salmon with Paul O'Neill: Power, Profits and the Future of the Columbia River

Patty O'Grady
John McCain in a New Context: Why the Senator is No War Hero

Nicole Colson
Obama and Big Corn

Steve Conn
Obama and the Mining Cartel

Deepak Trapathi
Pakistan in Uncertain Times

Robert Fantina
Once Upon a Time in America: a McCain Administration

Jonathan M. Feldman
Obamanomics: Does the Left Have Anything to Say?

Joshua Frank
Targeting Pelosi (and the War Machine): an Interview with Cindy Sheehan

Osama Qashoo
Sailing to Gaza

Howard Lisnoff
The Long Silence: American Jews and the Palestinians

David Michael Green
Sen. McShame and the Wreckage: John McCain Discovers America

Dave Lindorff
Why Not Let the Republicans Deal With This Mess?

Christopher Brauchli
A Banner Month for Passports

Alan Farago
Who Crippled the Government?

Michael Winship
Cash Register Conventions

Richard Rhames
Vlad the Derailer: Can Putin Save America From Itself?

David Rosen
The Culture Wars Are Over: But Culture Warriors Are Still Terrorizing America

Patrick B. Barr
Don't Try to Tame the Lightning Bolt

Jamie Newlin
Western Turf Wars: the Politics of Public Lands Ranching

Poets' Basement
Glendinning, McEnteer and Bonner

Website of the Weekend
Cafe Reconcile, New Orleans

August 22, 2008

Boris Kagarlitsky
Fallout from the Georgian War

Laura Carlsen
Obama and Latin America: Change or Continuity?

Bob Barr
No War for Georgia

Marwan Bishara
From Russia with Love: Putin Hits Georgia, Bloodies Bush

Peter Morici
Is the Fed Still a Central Bank?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Big Heat

Charles Mostoller
The Battle for the Amazon

Sumbul Ali-Karamali
Obama is Not a Muslim: But Would It Be So Terrible If He Were?

Keith Rosenthal
Standing Up to Union-Bashing

John F. Miglio
The Devolution of the Baby Boom Generation

Website of the Day
Fire Sale in the Markets!

August 21, 2008

Allan J. Lichtman
Is Georgia 2008 a Repeat of Hungary 1956?

Dave Lindorff Loserville: How Obama Blew It

Ralph Nader
The Problem with Problem Banks

Joanne Mariner
The Military Commissions, So Far

Wajahat Ali
Descent Into Chaos: an Interview with Ahmed Rashid on Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Taliban

Ron Jacobs
Georgia and Historical Farce

Rostam Purzal
The Left and Iran

Anthony Papa
Unlocking the Power of Art to Counter Injustice

Website of the Day
Rocky Mountain Way

August 20, 2008

Michael Neumann
Russia and Georgia: Proportion and Distortion

Ray McGovern
Musharraf Out Like Nixon

Eric Walberg
Georgia's Ossetian Debacle

Fidaa Abed
Blocking a Gazan's Path to San Diego

Daniel Haack
The Pentagon's Most Prolific Pundit

Mike Whitney
Greenback Surges, Euro Shrivels

Website of the Day
Hands Off South Africa's Centre for Civil Society

August 19, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for Nuclear War?

Deepak Tripathi
A New Age of Torture

Marwan Bishara
The Politics of Evil in the US Elections

Saul Landau
Baseball Diplomacy or Just Baseball?

William S. Lind
Leave Georgia Alone, George

Martha Rosenberg
Whole Foods and Other Food Offenders

James Brittain
The Road to Tyranny in Colombia

Pratyush Chandra
Krugman's Great Illusion

David Macaray
AFSCME's Strike Against the University of California

Website of the Day
McCain Plagiarizing Solzhenitsyn

Weekend Edition
September 20 / 21, 2008

Whoa and Woe

Living in Sarah Palin's America

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

I can’t tell you how despondent I’ve grown in the last weeks.

Is there really no hope for this country, after all?  It now appears so.

In January of 2003, John Le Carre wrote that, “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember:  Worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.”

He was surely right then.  Except that what once looked like a period now seems like an epoch.

Just as I was foolish enough to believe that we could dare to hope again, so it now seems that we are locked once more in what has become an eternal loop of Republican depredations, and Democratic responses of “Wha happened?” as the absurdly predictable freight train rolls over them, right on schedule.

Sarah Palin and everything associated with her pick is truly the barometer of the country’s degradation.  We are now talking about making someone the potential leader of the Free World who is even more ill-informed, even more rigidly dogmatic, and even more ideologically regressive than was the hapless George W. Bush of 2000.  Only this time, we’re talking about doing so as we are still in the midst of eating eight years worth of the consequences of that same prior idiocy.  We are folding in half Santayana’s famous adage about being condemned to repeat history, so that we are already screwing up again by the time we get to the second half of the sentence.  To understand our current level of stupidity, one might imagine if, on the day after Pearl Harbor – as the smoke was still billowing over the wreckage and the bodies and oil still floating about the water’s surface – Americans all got together and said, “We need to make even more of our military forces vulnerable to surprise attack!”

Three major data points have been added to the Palin story in the last week, all of them discouraging in the extreme.  The first was the Charles Gibson interview.  If history records that this was the moment in which the American experiment in democracy finally came crashing down to the floor in a cloud of dust, then history should also record Gibson as the Great Enabler of democracy’s demise.  It’s not that he didn’t ask a tough question or two.  It’s just that he didn’t ask very many, he didn’t follow up properly on the ones he did ask, and he didn’t probe her in any way to see if she’s capable of the slightest independent philosophical thought, or the merest understanding of the arc of history.

So, who cares, eh?  Just another day at the shop in what calls itself the American media, right?  No, actually, not.  Here’s what’s going to happen.  Palin’s handlers are furiously pumping her full of as much Cliff Notes quips about the world she’s completely ignored all her life as they can jam into her brain in a month.  She does the Gibson interview, she does an even easier one on Fox, then she does the Biden debate (during which neither the media nor Biden push very hard, and she reels off a string of memorized platitudes and cheap zingers).  After which she is then kept tightly under wraps until the election, while the McCain campaign claims that she’s been exposed to plenty of tough questioning and anyone calling for any more is an elitist who is piling on like the snobs they are.  Oh, and don’t forget this part – piling on to a woman, no less, in ways they never would to a man, because they are not just elitist snobs, but also sexist, elitist snobs.

Thus, history will record the Gibson interview as the first, last and only chance to see what is really behind the crash course in rote memorization.  It’s bad enough, in the pathetic state the country has come to occupy, that a complete cipher like Sarah Palin stands as close as she already does to power.  So much worse is all the complicity.  Gibson’s interview was a serious crime – felonious abdication in the first degree – and all the more so because he and his network and the rest of the media pretend like it was enough, either in terms of depth, or of the number of interviews to which she’ll be subjected.  Where’s the shame?  If the members of the American media hadn’t all had their embarrassment chips surgically removed, none of these pathetic milquetoast side-kicks to power would ever be able to leave the house.

The second major data point on Palin is the exception that proves the media rule.  The New York Times is actually doing its job for once in the last eight years – unlike, say, in Election 2000, the run-up to the Iraq war, or when the Downing Street Memos were released.  They did some real journalism two weeks ago and exposed the fact that McCain had hardly done any vetting on Palin before picking her, and had hardly even met her.  Now they’ve done some more homework, and exposed what sort of person she’s been as mayor and governor.  The first problem, of course, is that the regressive right has spent decades sowing the myth of a liberal-biased media, with the Times leading the way.  This is precisely the tool they will use to dismiss these damning reports, and of course, they’ve already begun as soon as the first story was published.  The second problem is that this is an America where many people will believe that absurd line, despite the real tendecy of the mainstream media to be little more than corporate genuflectors.  And the third problem is that most Americans don’t even seem to care that much about the content of these exposés, regardless of the source.

They should, though, for what the latest article reveals is that Palin is grossly incompetent, grossly inattentive to her responsibilities, rigidly dogmatic, deeply uninformed, and a committed practitioner of cronyism, secrecy and the politics of destroying ‘enemies’, including by using the instruments of government to do so.  She’s a sort of dumbed-down Richard Nixon.  Or, well... a female George W. Bush.  These are just some of the highlights from the Times’ thorough review of the public record and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic Alaskans at the state and local levels:

! Palin got famous in Alaska for exposing corruption on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, where a member was doing Republican Party work on the public’s nickel.  But then she was later caught by a conservative journalist doing the exact same thing herself.  She admitted to him that she was wrong, and even though he didn’t publish anything about what she had done (of course), she nevertheless preemptively attacked him in the media for “smearing” her.

! Palin’s cronyism is so rampant that the Times reports “The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government”.  She gave a childhood friend of hers, a former real estate agent, a $95,000-a-year directorship in the State Division of Agriculture.  The old buddy “cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency”.  Her attorney general is a former borough assemblyman that no one in the legal community had heard of prior to his appointment.  He had never supervised people before, but now runs an office of five hundred staff.

! She and her staff use private email accounts to conduct state business, and purposely chose to do so in order to avoid future scrutiny, including potential subpoenas.

! Sarah Palin has now been in office for about 650 days.  She has spent 312 of those at her home in Wasila, 600 miles away from the capital (and has billed the state per diem expenses for that), leading the Times to find that “Democrats and Republicans alike describe her as often missing in action”.  So much so that members of the state legislature began wearing “Where’s Sarah?” pins.

! In Palin World, opponents of Sarah aren’t just opponents.  They are enemies of her, and of the state of Alaska, and they are labeled “haters”.

It goes on from there.  What emerges pretty clearly is Sarah Barracuda, alright.  But not in a good way.  Not some sort of tough fighter on behalf of her constitutents.  More like Sarah’s Barracuda than Sarah Barracuda.  This is a person who appears to be wholly without principle, wholly without competence in good governance, who knew as early as 1996 that she wanted to be president, was willing to do whatever was necessary to get there, and now is frighteningly close to achieving her goal.

The third and most frightening Palin episode of all is the reaction she has produced in the regressive ranks, including amongst most so-called intellectuals.  Any pretense of dispassionate analysis, any patina of real patriotic concern for the country, any half-hearted reference to fair political play, have all been definitively obliterated by this latest volley of right-wing insanity.  It is scary to see the robots in action, frightening to realize the utter resemblance they bear to the shock troops of any garden variety authoritarian or totalitarian movement, and disheartening in the extreme to realize how utterly opposite would have been their reaction had Palin been put on the Democratic ticket.  I long for some sort of time-warp experiment one could conduct, where regressives would go crazy in reaction to some Democratic individual or action, only to have it then correctly labeled as Republican.  Watch what happens, for example, should Barack Obama win the Electoral College vote (and thus the presidency), but not the popular vote.  I’d bet regressives would go to the Supreme Court arguing that the constitutional system is unfair, even though exactly that system and those circumstances produced Lil’ Bush eight years ago.

Of course, we actually have these scenarios all the time, with just the latest being the newfound ‘concern’ of those on the right for Hillary Clinton, after decades of destroying her.  In fact, the entirety of the Bush administration is precisely the same sort of experiment, from front to back.  Could you even begin to imagine what they’d say about this goon’s incredible incompetence and monstrous failings if he were a Democrat?  But they never cop to any of this, and they never make even the most feeble attempt at dispassionate analysis based on facts.  These are Borg.  They are frightening precisely in proportion to how massively, existentially frightened they themselves must be in order to so blindly follow scum-peddlers like Limbaugh, Rove and Bush, not to mention just about any religious huckster anywhere out there on the horizon – and there are lots of them.

What is perhaps especially discouraging is the regressive punditocracy, who have shown themselves in the last two decades to be completely biased and living unashamedly in a principle-free zone.  Cheering on Bill Clinton being impeached for lying about adultery by a gaggle of Republican pukes whose crimes on that very same front were far more egregious was a sickening sight.  Even worse was their complicity in the stealing of Election 2000, a massive affront to American democracy (and no, Mr. Justice Scalia, you little fascist thug, I will not “just get over it”).  I can say with full honesty that I was fully invested in that case in the necessity for a fair election process, that year and every year, without regard to the winner.  Democracy comes first, even – yes – if that means sticking George W. Bush in the Oval Office.  But I saw little of that dispassionate commitment to democratic process from the blowhards on the right, or on the Supreme Court.  These same people have since excused every failure and depredation of the absolute worst president in American history, ever, often finding ways to somehow still blame his calamities on the Clinton administration.  And now they fawn over Sarah Palin, who gives every indication of being Dan Quayle with a vagina.  And an even more massive ambition-to-competence-ratio score.  Does anyone seriously doubt, even for a moment, how widely and deeply these same folks would mortally eviscerate her, if she had been Obama’s pick?

The Palin nod was a masterful display of Rovian-style cynical calculation, in all its full destructive glory.  They figured, so far correctly, that they could get at least a triple, if not a home-run, out of a foul ball, as long as they gamed the system in that special way for which only amoral, sociopathic right-wing political operatives are so gifted.

First, they bring out Palin, who ignites a level of passion amongst the religious right shock troops that John McCain could never get anywhere near.  A clean and robust single!  But then they move the runner to second base by taking advantage of what they know will be the reaction to the pick by those outside the programmed posse.  Since she’s “Sarah Who?” to the whole world (including, five minutes ago, to those regressives who now are utterly gaga about their new hero), they know there will investigations and allegations which will immediately arise in response to the choice.  So they cleverly and cynically feign great umbrage at all of these because some of them were possibly over the top.  Now she becomes this great victim of the liberal press, and independent women voters are supposed to flock to her in support of what they think is a kindred soul suffering the products of sexism, as they have during their lives.  She’s meant to pick off Hillary Democrats.  It’s a smash double.

Which is then advanced to a triple, when this so-called unfair treatment by the media can now be used as an excuse to keep her away from any situation in which she might be revealed as knowing nothing about the world, let alone where her corruption, cronyism or incompetence as governor or mayor might be called into question.  And then, finally, if you can also position her so that any shots by Joe Biden in their 90-minute debate can be instantly deemed male bullying of a helpless woman victim (hey, what happened to Sarah Barracuda?), bang!, you’ve smacked the balled out of the park.

Amazing, eh?  Think what you can do if you haven’t had a scruple since 1968 (and even then, it was only by accident)!  Think what can be accomplished by (alleged) people who care only about winning!  Think about how much you can pillage from American politics today if you don’t give a damn about the destructive costs your actions will have on the system tomorrow!  You can take a foul ball and turn it into a home run.  You can take a corrupt and vicious policy know-nothing and make her president of the United States and leader of the Free World.

Amazing, indeed.

Just think if these guys were running Wall Street, instead of American politics.  You’d have CEOs bringing home tens of millions of dollars in compensation for making stupid and insanely greedy decisions that not only crashed their firms, but the entire world economic system as well.  Hard to imagine, eh?

Hey, wait a minute...!

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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