Today's Stories

October 20, 2008

Michael Hudson
The ABCs of Paulson's Bailout

October 17 / 19, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Blow Ups and Bombers

Jeffrey St. Clair
Inside Hanford: a Trip to America's Most Toxic Place

Pam Martens
How the Banksters are Making a Killing Off the Bailout

Paul Craig Roberts
Government of Thieves

Mike Whtney
No More Investment Banks

Michael D. Yates
Bowling Alley Blues: Racism Dies Hard in Johnstown, PA

Suzanne Smith
The Energy-War Connection: McCain Said It, Why Don't We?

Carl Boggs
Prosecuting Bush

Ralph Nader
Closing the Courthouse Doors

Fidel Castro
The Global Crash

Dave Marsh
The Great Levi Stubbs

Saul Landau
Denial, the Election Musical Comedy

Jo Guldi
The Floods of Heaven

Kevin Zeese
Now the Cost of War Really Matters

Larry Everest
Afghanistan, Not a Good War Gone Bad

Steve Early
Stop, in the Name of Joe!

David Macaray
Hey, Joe

Ben Terrall
When Ike Hit Haiti

Missy Beattie
Palin and God's Children

Don Monkerud
American Exceptionalism

Helen Redmond
Health Care Now's Big Con

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Delta Vision: Canals and Dams to Bail Out Big Ag

Wajahat Ali
Bush Gets Stoned

Farzana Versey
The White Tiger's Stripes and Gripes

Vladimir Frolov
Medvedev to Obama: We Come Not to Bury America, But to Buy It

Kim Nicolini
Frozen River: At Last, a Great Movie That's Neither Hip Nor Cool

Poets Basement
Gibbons, Corsale, Davis and Fleming

Website of the Day
The Real Sarah Palin?

October 16, 2008

Mike Whitney
The End of Friedmanite Economics: an Interview with Robert Pollin

Jonathan Cook
The Acre Riots

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Is Obama Playing to the Gallery? Or Has He Lost the Plot in South Asia?

Alan Maass
A Supreme Injustice: the Death Penalty Case of Troy Davis

Chuck O'Connell
Our Needs Do Not Fit on Their Ballots

Mary Lynn Cramer
Krugman's Prize: Iconoclast, Apologist or Propagandist?

P. Sainath
The Race May be Over, But Race Isn't

Andy Worthington
The Shrinking Case Against Binyam Mohamed: Justice Department Drops "Dirty Bomb Plot" Allegation

Peter Gelderloos
Enric Duran, the Good Thief?

Stephen Martin
The Nourishment of Idleness: Where Has All the Money Gone?

Douglas Valentine
Why I'm Voting for Obama

Website of the Day
The Mormon Worker

October 15, 2008

Steve Conn
The Real Story of Troopergate

William P. O'Connor
The Legend of John McCain

Robert Weissman
The Partial Nationalization of US Banks: Public Ownership, But No Public Control

Jonathan M. Feldman
Before the Second Wave of Crisis: an Alternative to the Triple Failure

Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Race in America: Is a Vote For Obama a Vote Against Racism?

Conn Hallinan
Targeting Unions in Colombia

Justin Podur
The Financial Economy and Real Economy

Karl Grossman
The New Nuclear Navy

Dave Lindorff
Is the Government Really Turning Socialist?

Eric Walberg
The Quiet Russian

Martha Rosenberg
Of Blood and Eggs

Uri Avnery
A Fairy Tale

Monica Benderman
No More

Website of the Day
Contractor Misconduct Database

October 14, 2008

Robert Richter
McCain: War Hero or War Criminal?

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bailout and the Smell Test

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Wall Street Coup and the Bailout Scam

Steve Conn
Made in Alaska: Fear of the Fringe

P. Sainath
The Race Could be Over, But Race Isn't

Gregory Elich
How the Nobel Peace Prize Was Won

Stephen Martin
A Tectonic Shift in Hegemony at the G7

Rev. William Alberts
Don't Blink Twice

Laura Carlsen
The Fall of the Bush Dynasty Plan

Joanne Mariner
The Uighurs Come to Washington

Howard Lisnoff
Left Behind: a Biden Fundraiser and the Children of Holyoke

David Macaray
A Tale of Two Unions

Website of the Day
Six Degrees of Hank Paulson

October 13, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Farewell to Daniel Cassidy

Michael Hudson
Rescue for the Few, Debt Slavery for the Many

Patrick Cockburn
Pogrom Against Mosul's Christians

Chris Floyd
The God That Failed: the 30-Year Lie of the Market Cult

Fidel Castro
The Law of the Jungle: Racism, Obama and the Fall of the American Economy

Robert Weitzel
Olmert's Depths of Reality

Derek Wright
How Chrysler Killed My Uncle

Stephen Soldz
Guantánamo's SERE Standard Operating Procedures

David Michael Green
Greed is Not Good

Norman Solomon
Requiem for the Bailout: a Storyline

Charles R. Larson
Toni Morrison on Her Own Terms

Lisa Massaciuccoli
The Shoplifting Association of the Americas

Website of the Day
Arlo Guthrie: "I'm Changing My Name to Fannie Mae"

October 10 / 12, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is McCain a Lot Sicker Than We Know?

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Obama's Nuclear Ambition

Douglas Valentine
Mission CREEP: From John Mitchell to John McCain

Noam Chomsky
Exposing the Un-Democratic Face of Capitalism

Ralph Nader
The Derivatives Game

Syed Saleem Shahzad
Why the Neo-Taliban is Winning

Patrick Cockburn
War in the Time of Cholera

Paul Craig Roberts
A Possible Solution to the Economic Crisis

Mike Whitney
Run on the System

Peter Morici
The Deficit and the Damage Done

Christopher Ketcham
The End of the Economy

Stephen Martin
Shock and Awe in Economic Warfare

Chellis Glendinning
Wireless Mind, Gullible Mind

Saul Landau
All Guns, No Butter

Ahmad Faruqui
21 Days to Baghdad

Adam Turl
Sheriff Tom Dart vs. the Banksters

Serge Halimi
The Battle for the West

Anthony DiMaggio
Making a Killing: the Business of Elections

John Ross
The Sky is Falling on Mexico, Too

José M. Tirado
Meltdown in Iceland

Paul Krassner
Beat the Crowd in Denver: Cops and T-Shirts

David Macaray
Adventures in Unionism

Robert Fantina
Bankrupt and Belligerent

David Yearsley
The Playlist for Election 2008

Julian Clec'h
The Soap Washing Through Saudi Arabia

Adam Engel
Sexual Healing ... for the Planet

Phyllis Pollack
The Rolling Stones Go Home, Again

Missy Beattie
Going North: the Coming Nation of Alaska

Poets' Basement
Landau, Moser and Henson

Website of the Day
Sarah as Esther? New Video From Inside Palin's Church

October 9, 2008

Robert Bryce
From Enron to the Current Meltdown

David Vest
The Great Rescue of 2008: Could Whatever Follows Bush Be Even Worse?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Meltdown at the Pentagon

Andy Worthington
The Ordeal of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama the Subhuman

Helga Serrano /
Hector Tamayo
Ecuador Charts the Way

Dave Lindorff
When Money Flies

Mats Svensson
At the Checkpoint on the Day of Atonement

Rannie Amiri
The Time for Mordechai Vanunu is Now

Website of the Day
The Palestine Chronicle Needs (and Deserves) Your Support

October 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Imbecilic Tedium

Linn Washington, Jr.
Palin's Racist Remark

Mike Whitney
To the Bunkers!

Deepak Tripathi
The West is Broke

George C. Wilson
Butter Over Guns? McCain and Obama on Defense Issues

Andy Worthington
Seized in Pakistan

Charles R. Larson
"I'm John McCain and I Approved This Lie"

Patrick Irelan
Ecuador's Choice

Matthew Koehler
Log, Baby, Log: Bailing Out the Timber Industry

Stanley Heller
Time to Design a New Economy

Daniel Gross
Working Class Hero: Alexandra Svoboda

Kimberly Hartke
Raw Milk and Civil Liberties

Website of the Day
Olivia Wilde Does It Early

October 7, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Obama and McCain's Goofy Afghan Bluster

Gary Leupp
Seven Years in Afghanistan:
From "War on Terror" to
"War of Terror"

Uri Avnery
Olmert's Final Divorce
From "All of Eretz Israel"

P. Sainath
The Cop-Out Election
Major Candidates, Congress, Press, All Fail in the Big Crisis

Peter Morici
The Dow Tanks as Bank Bailout Fails to Restore Confidence

Conn Hallinan
The Great Game in the Caucasus:
Bad Moves by Uncle Sam

Martha Rosenberg
Training America's Youth
Today a Pheasant, Tomorrow Osama

Binoy Kampmark
Let's Talk About Extinction:
CERN and Halo

October 6, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
A Futile Bailout as Darkness Falls on America

Mike Whitney
Still on the Edge of the Abyss

Tariq Ali
Goodbye to Grosvenor Square

Emily Horowitz
How People Tell Cops They're Guilty Even When They Aren't

Michael Hudson
What Did Jesus Say?
A Christian Perspective on the Paulson Bank Bailout

Ron Jacobs
Winter Soldiers and Washington's Wars

October 3 - 5, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Creatures of Capital

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Paulson's Plan is a Fraud

Saul Landau
The Chutzpah of Hank Paulson

Jonathan Cook
The Souring of a West Bank Romance: Israel's Army and Settlers Fall Out

Andy Worthington
The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials

Dave Marsh
Bono (Himself) Challenges Me to a Debate

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Using the IAEA to Spy on Iran

John Ross
Massacre in Morelia

Brian Cloughley
The Unacceptable Face of Capitalism

Wajahat Ali
Dueling Partners: an Interview with Tariq Ali on Pakistan

Robert Schwartz
A Serious Blow to the Rights of U.S. Workers: NLRB Limits Political Strikes

Alan Nasser
FDR's Response to the Plot to Overthrow Him: a Paradigm for Today's Democrats?

David Ker Thomson
The Case for Drunk Driving

Peter Morici
Gone in 30 Days: U.S. Loses 159,000 Jobs in September

William Blum
When is a Holocaust Not a Holocaust?

William S. Lind
War on Two Fronts: Without Railroads

Michael Donnelly
The Ghost of Gen. McClellan

Thom Rutledge
On Presidential "Rule"

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Science and the 2008 Presidential Elections: a Survey of the Candidates

Dave Lindorff
Calling the Problem Early

Cindy Ellen Hill
Waging a Sustainable Peace?

Paul Krassner
Dying to Get High: the Side Effects of Medical Marijuana

Daniel White
Vietnam's Masterspy

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Absher, Gibbons and Jenkins

Website of the Weekend
How We Lost Glen Canyon: a Legal Chronology

October 2, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Can a Bailout Succeed?

Joe Bageant
Speaking in the Tongues of Brokers: the Bailout in Plain English

Ralph Nader
Soulmates in Deregulation

Mike Whitney
Why the Bailout Stinks

Madis Senner
When Push Comes to Pull: How a Foreign Banker Invasion Sent the Markets Reeling

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congress as Usual:the Crisis Will Pass, But This Bunch Will Remain the Same

William Blum
A Boy's Game: the Origins of the Financial Crisis

P. Sainath
Wall Street Transforms Presidential Race

Website of the Day
McCain's Meltdown in Des Moines

October 1 , 2008

Glen Ford
The Last Hold Up

Steven Conn
Trashing Sarah Palin: the Boomerang Effect

Alan Maass / Lee Sustar
Why Not a Bailout for the Rest of Us?

Kenneth Couesbouc
The Blame Game: When Wall Street Pigs Sprout Wings

Stan Goff
How the Republicans Can Win (And Deserve It)

Adolfo Gilly
Racism, Domination and Bolivia

Rannie Amiri
Bombs in the Levant

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Recurring Myth of Peak Oil

Adam W. Parsons
Food and Markets

Dave Lindorff
Bums' Rush to the Bailout: Where are the Hearings?

Douglas Valentine
The Bush Continuity Plan?

Adrien Rain Burke
The Party's Over: an Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Beauty Pageant

September 30, 2008

Pam Martens
What Wall Street Hoped to Win

Chris Floyd
The Shadow of the Pitchfork: Elite Panic on Wall Street

Stephen Martin
A Biological Walk Down Wall Street

Deepak Tripathi
A Bitter Harvest in Afghanistan

Mark Engler
Bad Money

Jonathan Cook
The Attack on Zeev Sternhell: Has Israel Become a Breeding Ground for Jewish Settler Terrorism?

Dave Lindorff
The Power of No

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Time for a General Strike?

Ahmad Faruqui
In Cold Blood: Buried Alive in Pakistan

John Chuckman
Will the Bride Wear White? As Rome Burns, Bristol Palin Prepares to Tie the Knot with Mr. "Sex on Skates"

David Macaray
Blaming the Labor Unions

Fatemeh Keshavarz
What Obama Could Have Said

Website of the Day
538: a Cognitive Map of American Politics

September 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
Black Monday

Jeff Gibbs
"Just Say No!" to Reverse Robin Hood

Paul Craig Roberts
Why America Should Listen to Ahmadinejad

Peter Morici
The Bailout and the Economy

Tim Wise
Racism as Reflex

John Walsh
Sarah Palin is a Rotten Mom

Uri Avnery
Israeli Fascism: Yes, It Can Happen Here

Alan Farago
Hell to Pay: the Financial Collapse and the Housing Market

Andy Worthington
Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials?

David Michael Green
Where's the Repudiation?

Carl Finamore
Capitalism on Steroids; Labor on Tranquilizers

Iris Keltz
Postcards from the DNC

Bill Hatch
Take This Shrimp Slayer!

Website of the Day
Tina Fey as Palin, Round Two

September 27 / 28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
How McCain Blew It

Linn Washington, Jr.
Alaska's Blacks and Palin: a Strained Relationship

Christopher Ketcham
An Israeli Trojan Horse

Mike Whitney
The People vs. the Banksters

Kevin Alexander Gray Race in the Race: Is Obama Shining Us On?

Anthony DiMaggio
The Unspoken War: Pakistan, the Media and Nuclear Weapons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Their Assets; Our Debts: How Economic Crises Are Overcome

Marc Levy /
Susan Erony
War Jokes Wanted: No Laughing Matter

Stan Cox
Livestock of Mass Destruction: Germ Labs in the Heartland

Saul Landau
Election Drizzle

Ali Khan
Meltdown in American Markets: an Islamic Perspective

David Rosen
The Great Fear: the Sexual Politics of Sarah Palin

Todd Alan Price
Bailing Out the Foes of Public Eduction

Matts Svensson
The Red and White Bird in Gaza

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan Through the Eyes of a Native Son

Robert Fantina
McCain and the Economy

Richard Rhames
Hank-ering for a Bailout

David Krieger
The U.S.-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Rethinking Charter Schools

Charles R. Larson
Dear Mrs. Abacha: a Nigerian Email Romance

Kim Nicolini
Sadism in the Desert

Poets' Basement
La Morticella, Holt, Moser and Buknatski

Website of the Day
The Great Schlep

September 26, 2008

Moshe Adler
Bailing Out Wall Street Won't Save Main Street

Bill Quigley
The U.S. War on Unarmed Working Mothers

Jonathan Cook
When Archaeology Becomes a Curse

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Visions of Pinpoint Control: the Romance of Laser Weapons

Madis Senner
Why the Bailout will Fail

Brian Cloughley
US Raids in Pakistan: Violations of Sovereignty

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Oh, Henry!

Joanne Mariner
Passport Fraud and Torture

Dan La Botz
The Financial Crisis: a View from the Left

David Macaray
Ralph's Management Indicted by Federal Grand Jury

Website of the Day
Nader and Obama Girl at the Office

September 25, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway

Sharon Smith
Democrats and Corporate Bailouts

Ralph Nader
Who Will Show Some Backbone Against the Bailout?

Christopher Ketcham
The Economy of Dead Sperm (or What I Learned From My Race-Car Grandpa Who Had No Bankers)

Eric Toussaint
Is Another Third World Debt Crisis in the Offing?

Robert Weissman
Getting Wall Street Pay Reform Right

David Estabrook
A Better Bailout Plan

Nikolas Kozloff
The Voyage of the SS Peter the Great

Steve Early
The High Price of Purple Dissent

Judith Scherr
Blue Helmets in Haiti

Laray Polk
South Ossetia and Abkhazia: Notes from the Inside

Website of the Day
Letterman Spanks McCain

September 24, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin at the UN: a Tutorial from Uribe

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis: How and Why Congress Should Play for Time

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Trials: Govt. Says Six Years Not Long Enough to Prepare Evidence

Steve Conn
Will Nader's Warning be Acknowledged in the Presidential Debates?

Karyn Strickler
The $700,000,000,000 Power Punch

Diane Farsetta
Stealth Marketers Gone Wild

Dennis Loo
Poisoned Legacy

John Halle
Wealth Tax Now!

Khalil Nakhleh
Palestinians Under the Occupation

Website of the Day
Nader: Debate Crasher

September 23, 2008

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
Bail Out on This Bailout

Michael Hudson
Henry Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal

Tariq Ali
Why was the Marriott Targeted?

Patrick Dyer
A Death Row Visit with Troy A. Davis

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah and the Palestinians

Joshua Frank
Oppose Barack Obama? How Dare Thee!

Alan Farago
Pushing the Referees: How the Financial Crisis Occurred

Dave Lindorff
The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

Tanya M. Kerssen /
Roger Burbach
Bolivia's Popular Upheaval

Harvey Wasserman
Nuclear Power Liabilities Dwarf Bush's Wall Street Bailout

Website of the Day
Hammered by the Irish: the Video

September 22, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout Plan: Will the Cure be Worse Than the Crisis?

Mike Whitney
Mushroom Clouds Over Wall Street

Christopher Ketcham
Let It Collapse!

Ron Jacobs
The Predators' Bailout

Anne-Marie McManus
Lost in the Rhetoric of Crisis

Robert Weitzel
The Twin Terrors of the Holy Land: a Sexy Fundamentalist and a White-Haired Zionist

Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Howard Dean

John Ross
A New Cold War Comes to Latin America

Steve Breyman
Does the U.S. Really Need Cluster Bombs?

Patrick Bond
On the Bellies of the Filth

Uri Avnery
Fly, Tzipora, Fly

Carl J. Mayer
An Open Letter to Michael Moore (AKA God's Pen Pal): Whatever Happened to Voting Your Conscience?

Website of the Day
Stop the Execution of Troy Anthony Davis

September 20 / 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is This the Stake Through Neoliberalism's Heart?

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Mike Whitney
Full-Spectrum Breakdown

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
The NY Yankees and the U.S. Economy

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

Susan Block
Palin as Venus in Furs: the Dominatrix Politics of Drilling and Killing

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

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

David Yearsley
Germany's Lost Organs: When Bigger Was Better

Raymond J. Lawrence
The Politics of Tribulation: Sarah Palin and the Rapture

David Rosen
One Billion Pills Later: Viagra at 10

David Michael Green
Living in Sarah Palin's America

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Freddie, Fannie, Daddy, Nanny

Howard Lisnoff
When We Notice the Homeless

John Goekler
Leaving Every Child Behind

Missy Beattie
Impalement

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

Charles R. Larson
Holden Caulfield, Rest in Peace

Tim Matson
Too Big for His Birches: Woodlot Economics

Susie Day
Attack of the Angry Fetus

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Gibbons, Jenkins and Ford

Website of the Weekend
Dylan & Baez: Deportees

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

October 20, 2008

McCain in the Ash Heap

Payback's a Bitch

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

With apologies to Churchill (who owed a few of his own):  Never have so many been so wrong about so much.

There are few things you’d less rather be right now than a conservative/regressive, and that is why.  It’s like the old Firesign Theater bit:  Everything You Know Is Wrong.  “Dogs flew spaceships!  The Aztecs invented the vacation!  Men and women are the same sex!  Our forefathers took drugs!  Yes!  That's right!  Everything you know is wrong!”

And, what’s worse, everybody knows it except you.  America is turning decisively away from its tragic thirty-year experiment with Reaganism-Bushism, and for very good reason.  Regressives have ruled the country more or less unabated (Democrats, the supposed carriers of the liberal torch, were during these last three decades either frightened, centrist or irrelevent – and usually all three at once).  Moreover, during the last years especially – the Cringe Decade – the right was particularly forceful, particularly unfettered, particularly successful at having its way, and particularly arrogant in the self-righteous belief in its authority on all things.

Once small problem, though.  If you sat down with a pen and paper and tried to invent a more thorough litany of failure on the right’s watch, you’d be hard pressed to top what they’ve actually done.  I suppose inadvertently nuking all the major cities of the United States would be worse, but I can’t think of much else.  The simple truth is that the regressive movement took a great and proud and prosperous country and ran it into the ditch at 130 miles an hour.  Worse yet, for them – and unlike the bad old years of Willie Horton, or invading Panama, or Clinton’s faux scandals – the public isn’t fooled anymore.  They had already caught on to the game, in large part, a few years back, which is why Bush has been moribund in the absolute cellar of job approval ratings for almost the entirety of his second term.  Things were already tough for the black hats, but then this economic crisis came and walloped people severely, right in the wallet.  One thing about Americans – they’re seriously selfish.  You take away their reputation and their liberties and their democracy and they might – might! – vote against you.  You take away their money, they’ll rip your fucking lungs out, Bro.

And if John McCain seems particularly short on breath of late, that’s why.  There’s nothing quite like the total absence of breathing organs to put a crimp in your respiratory function.

But this crackup is way, way bigger than the righteously deserved toilet training of one John Sidney McCain the Third.  This is the end of an era, and not a moment too soon.  It now looks like Democrats will win a 1932-style, landslide, realigning election (as I predicted one year ago), smashing McCain in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, picking up double-digit seats in the House, and possibly even gaining a filibuster-proof majority of 60 in the Senate.  Even Mitch McConnell, a smug horror story of a minority leader for his decrepit party, looks like he’ll be losing his seat, along with such smarmy dreaded incumbents such as Elizabeth Dole and Norm Coleman.  This has all the makings of a serious and even perhaps lethal spanking for the hated GOP.

That would leave wishy-washy sometime-conservative Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy as the sole remaining bulwark of regressivism in the American government.  Which is to say none at all.  It used to be said that ‘justices read election results too’, and never was that more true of anyone than of Kennedy, well before this year, but especially now.  Even as we speak (and as I also predicted), we’re seeing many on the right scrambling now to reinvent themselves as progressives (for some, like David Brooks or Coleman, who had been lefties back when that was trendy, this represents a reconversion conversion).  Anthony Kennedy will surely be on that list.  In the 1930s, this same scenario developed, and a troglodyte majority on the Supreme Court started striking down New Deal legislation in a time of massive duress, only to have an angry public, Congress, and highly popular president turn on them.  Kennedy won’t make that mistake.  He ain’t gonna sacrifice his personal legacy to keep Clarence Thomas pure, that much we can guarantee.  Can you imagine, for example, a Democratic Congress vigorously moving national health care, or jobs, legislation, and a Democratic president ceremoniously signing it into law, only for Kennedy to provide the swing vote on the Court striking it down as unconstitutional?  Fat chance.  The guy’s not suicidal, and he doesn’t want 300 million angry Americans trying to Google his address.

The trajectory of the regressive movement over the last thirty years has led us to this horrid place.  At least you could say that their little mini-revolution began with some ideas, however disastrous those were, and however much they always masked the true kleptocratic purpose of the movement.  Reagan had his Cold Warrior shtick, along with some notions of political economy he was peddling.  Greedy and stupid Americans, their post-war prosperity already perceptibly beginning to slip away in the late 1970s, foolishly bought the whole package – anything to keep the wallet stuffed and the bloated car out of the hands of the repo man.  Reagan surely did not win the Cold War, but he surely did exacerbate the steady unraveling of the middle class.  The national debt was tripled, while the burden of taxes was shifted from the rich to the non-rich, and organized labor was undermined at every turn.  Surprise, surprise – the rich got a lot richer, the poor got poorer, and the middle class stood still.

By the time we got to 2004, the bogus ideas were no longer even bothered with, as the regressive electoral appeal was reduced down to pure lies and a patent appeal to fear.  The marketing genius Karl Rove managed to fool all of the people some of the time, and turned war hero John Kerry into someone to be feared and doubted, while war avoider George Bush became GI Joe.  That’s a hell of a lot of political detergent to move off of supermarket shelves, but – along with some old-fashioned electoral fraud in Ohio, of course – it worked one last time.  Bush bragged about winning political capital to spend in his second term, but you’d have to be as stupid and disingenuous as the little toad himself (the same guy who declared the Iraq war over before it actually began, and who said “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie”) to have believed that nonsense.  The truth was that 2004 was the last gasp of the old black magic, and it just barely worked.  Use lies, racism, homophobia, xenophobia and national security bogeymen to scare pathetically ill-informed Americans, and in non-recessionary times you could win another election.  Back then, at least.

That game is over now, exhausted for a generation or more, though a shamefully and embarrassingly desperate John McCain is still trying to play it.  And why wouldn’t he?  If he doesn’t care about his honor and integrity and reputation – and he evidently doesn’t, at least compared to how much he cares about winning the presidency – what else is there for him to do?  He can’t run on issues, he can’t run on solutions, he can’t run on his wonderful VP choice, and he can’t run on the peace and prosperity his party has delivered.  Indeed, he has to run from all those things.  That leaves only one other option, which is for McCain and his team of Rove proteges to do to Obama what Rove himself did to Kerry – that is, sow enough doubt about his trustworthiness in the minds of voters to make them hold their noses and default to the seemingly (but not really) safe choice of the seemingly (but not really) known quantity.

But it’s just not working anymore.  In fact, so much is it not working anymore, that nowadays you have regressive politicians and pundits renouncing their own team for trying it.  Where were these folks back in 1998 when a group of serious and serial philanderers impeached a president for lying about a blow job?  Where were they when Rove and Bush told South Carolinians that McCain had fathered a child with a black mistress, or ridiculed Al Gore for supposedly having claimed to have invented the Internet?  Where were they in 2002, when Saxby Chambliss, another Vietnam war avoider, ran ads morphing the face of triple-amputee Vietnam vet Max Cleland into those of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein?  And where were they when Rove and Bush were swift-boating Kerry in 2004?  I’ll tell you where.  They were cheering it all on.

Not so much now.  Dylan once said you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but in 2008 you’d have to be an inter-galactic astronaut or the doorkeeper for Cheney’s underground bunker to not know.  And so the regressive right blovitoriate is splitting before our very eyes, into two camps.  One is the unreconstructed Neanderthal set, like William Kristol and Victor Davis Hanson, who can’t quite believe what they’re seeing (“But this can’t be right – we own the presidency!”), who thought the Sarah Palin pick was just plain inspired, and who are encouraging McCain to stop pussyfooting around already.  Kristol, for example, watching it all just melt away, has been furiously trying to find a gambit to keep the regressive dream alive.  First he advised McCain to go all Rove on Obama, which McCain did, sending Palin out to describe That One as having ‘palled around with terrorists’.  Unreal.  You know you’re in deep shit when Sarah Palin is your voice of moral authority (her best line yet has been her claim this week to be relieved that she has been fully exonerated by the Alaska legislature’s corruption probe, which in fact flat-out accused her of breaking the law by abusing power for personal gain).

Anyhow, having realized that Ayers accusations are actually diminishing McCain’s popularity rather than enhancing it, Kristol is now calling for McCain to fire everyone on the staff and for the “competent” McCain and Palin to just do constant press conferences until election day.  Nevermind that allowing Palin to talk to the press or public in any unstructured environment would put McCain in danger of being on the ugly side of a fifty-state sweep right now.  (You think I’m kidding?  McCain is up a whopping six percent in Georgia at the moment, eight percent in Mississippi, and one percent in North Carolina, home of Jesse Helms.  He’s currently losing by two points in that bastion of leftist fomentation, that revolutionary hotbed, the People’s Republic of North Dakota.)  Perhaps the most amusing line of this entire election cycle came from the McCain campaign staff, (perhaps slightly miffed by the suggestion that they all lose their jobs), who claimed that Kristol, of all people, has now drunk from the cup of Obamania.  Wow.  Who needs a dictionary definition for paranoia when you’ve got that to work with?

The other great line that Kristol floated as a rationale for voters to choose McCain, and a theme of late among the drowning right-wing punditocracy, is that McCain should argue for votes by saying that he will be there to block what is sure to be a Democratic and – wait for it now – liberal (oooooooh!!) Congress.  Let’s leave aside the obvious and traditional solution to such a quandary, which is that McCain could instead simply encourage voters to choose Republicans all up and down the ticket (could there be something toxic about the R-word in 2008?).  But even apart from that rather obvious bit of logical lunacy, what sort of frighteningly vapid bonehead do you have to be to think that divided government is a winning notion in 2008?  I mean, raise your hand if you think that what Americans want right now, in the middle of multiple crises, including one which is destroying their retirement savings and threatening their jobs, is a gridlocked government in which Congress passes legislation shot down by the president’s veto pen, and the president proposes solutions ignored by a Congress controlled by the other party.  Do they really pay these guys big bucks to pen this sort of drivel?  These morons are the pundicratic equivalents of Wall Street’s equally brilliant masters of the universe, only in six figures instead of nine.

Take, for example, Victor Davis Hanson, who says that, since the campaigns of previous GOP nominees – ranging from the racism of the Willie Horton project to the swiftboating of war heroes – were worse than the present transgressions, therefore “McCain as a vicious campaigner is a complete fabrication, but, again, a brilliant subterfuge on the part of Team Obama that, in fact, has run, via appendages, the far more vicious race”.  Yeah, Cindy McCain said that too, arguing that Obama has run “the dirtiest campaign in American history”.  I suppose if you find trouncing her husband to be dirty politics, she’s right.  But the notion that a campaign which is trying to win by tying the other guy to an unknown former radical who blew stuff up when the candidate was eight years old is somehow not running a vicious campaign is so big a stretch that not even a lot of regressives will make it anymore.  Nevermind that the education commission that both Obama and Ayers served on was a project of the Annenberg family, huge supporters of Reagan and, yes, one John McCain.  And nevermind that that means that the Annenbergs, and McCain, and all the conservative members of the commission have, by the same logic, palled around with terrorists at least as much Obama.  Oops.

But, for my personal favorite, there’s that famous political philosopher, Ted Nugent (better know to some as a horrid screaming shred-metal rock singer, or an enthusiastic murderer of animals), who advises McCain to go all Reagan and tell the people once again that government is the problem, not the solution.  Yep, just as every American is scrambling for a lifeboat in an economic Category 5, and even the Bush administration is doing its very best impression of V. I. Lenin by plunging the government deep into economic interventions, he literally advises McCain to “Tell us the federal government has no business in the home loan industry and that you will take our economy away from the Treasury Department bureaucrats and give it back to the bankers, stockbrokers and company leaders that have made our economy thrive since Alexander Hamilton served at Treasury.”  Hey, Ted, you forgot pedophiles and serial murderers on your list of popular people right now!  Stockbrokers?  Yes!  CEOs?  Yes!  Oh please, John McCain, please.  Please sing their praises in the closing weeks of the campaign.  Just because Ted Nugent seems like the very antithesis of a thoughtful political theorist, just because he seems like a metal-headed rocker who has turned it up to eleven once too many times, I guarantee you, John, that he is not.  Your can win the presidency if you’ll just follow his advice and talk incessantly about all the heroic stockbrokers and CEOs you’ll put in your cabinet!  This will really resonate with American voters right now!!  Maybe you could even pardon some of those Enron guys and put them to work running the country.  (Again.)

Meanwhile, the other faction of the wrong-wingers are leaving the sinking ship as quick as they can and hoping nobody notices.  Like David Brooks, for example, who called Palin “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party” and is otherwise similarly leaving behind his old comrades on the right in article after article he authors.  Or Frank Schaeffer, who describes himself as a “lifelong Republican, [who] worked to get [McCain] elected instead of George W. Bush” in 2000, but who now writes:  “John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as “not one of us”, I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.”  Ouch.  Or, Christopher (son of William F.) Buckley, who has endorsed Obama, only to be driven out of the National Review, the conservative journal famously launched by his father back (to the future) at a time when no one was listening to such gibberish.  According to Young Buck, he’s “been effectively fatwahed by the conservative movement” ever since his act of great apostasy.  That’s a great line, as was the entirety of Buckley’s hilariously accurate and embarrassingly realistic script for “Thank You For Smoking”.  Memo to regressives:  It’s not a real good idea to piss off people with such sharp skewering knives.  Meanwhile, welcome to the sanity club, Chris.  We hope you’ll stay a while.  You’ll always be welcome among the fast-exploding ranks of the reality-based community.

So grim has the McCain campaign become, and so diminished are the fortunes of the regressive right, that people are jumping ship now as if they owned stock in General Motors.  And why wouldn’t they?  This last week in particular has been one of the most horrible ever in American politics.  You could start with the fact that a grossly under-qualified nominee for Vice President is already nearly being indicted for abuse of power, and she hasn’t even hit Washington yet.  So far, that’s just a reflection on the grossly under-honorable man who selected her, purely to benefit his own career aspirations.  But when you add in the fierce devotion that Palin engenders among the legions of the scary right, you can really get depressed.

All of this was on such full display this week that even John ‘Say Anything’ McCain seemed taken aback at one or two events.  I think he realized just who it is that his campaign is attracting nowadays.  I think he realized his complicity in fomenting such visceral hatred that we now see people attending rallies of one of the two mainstream parties in America screaming out “terrorist” and “kill him” with respect to the man they’re introducing as Barack Hussein Obama.  I think he was a little shell-shocked that not only members of his own party were publicly rebuking him, but civil rights hero John Lewis compared him to the racist monster George Wallace.  This would be especially devastating if it had occurred in an America where people paid attention to politics, since McCain had just recently named Lewis as one of a few people whose advice he would seek out were he president.  That comment, uttered just last August, was already an odd remark, since Lewis is a liberal Democrat, and McCain once opposed making Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday, and because Lewis let on directly afterwards as to how McCain had never sought him out even for small talk during the two decades they’ve both served in Congress.  But now, of course, it’s even more absurd, because the first bit of advice Lewis offered caused the McCain camp to go insane and demand that Obama rebuke Lewis, even though the two have nothing particularly to do with one another.

The truth is that a guy who once possessed a broad reputation for decency and integrity, deserved or not, came to grips this week with the realization that he is not only losing his last bid ever for the presidency, but that he is losing his honor as well.  McCain knows that he will not only go down in history as a two-time presidential loser, but also as yet another hate-mongering, horror-show, thug graduate from the McCarthy/Nixon/Atwater/Rove/Schmidt school for the criminally insane.  The once proud John McCain, filled up with generations of military values extolling the crucial importance of gentlemanly honor, has become just another ill-smelling hack.  Worse yet, he’s a loser hack, who will never have the chance to rehabilitate himself.  At least when George H.W. Bush pissed all over his country he won the race, and got to join that most exclusive club, and then he had four years to make people mostly forget about Willie Horton.  McCain, on the other hand, has bungled his way into the full-on nightmare vision of a lost election coupled with lost integrity.

But McCain owns this Shakespearean tragedy in full.  Part of me is a bit sad to say that, remembering the John McCain who once had the honesty to note that “America has the best Congress money can buy”, or who called the freaks of the religious right “agents of intolerance”.  But most of me is no longer sad.  George W. Bush and the regressive movement have devastated the country and planet where I live, and their motive for doing so was ultimately just simple greed.  McCain has spent the past eight years facilitating that monstrous and monstrously lethal mass rape.  It is therefore fitting that a man who was once highly respected should experience ruin not once, but twice, at the hands of a moral dwarf like George W. Bush.  In 2000, Bush used the scummiest of scummy techniques to emasculate John McCain, a man who was infinitely his better in every respect.  Now again today, the Chimpster-in-Chief sits in his Oval Office, smirking as ever, sociopathically oblivious as the legacy of his two terms – both of which McCain actively helped him win – sealing the senator’s fate for a second time.

The number of sacrificial victims to the fragile ego of one George Walker Bush is astonishing to contemplate.  It’s staggering to imagine that one individual’s personal childhood inadequacies could wreak so much havoc on an entire planet, but indeed they have.

From Tony Blair’s career to the lives of a million Iraqis.  From Americans’ wallets to their country’s very honor.  From environmental destruction to the Republican Party itself.  All relegated to the ash heap of history.

John McCain is only the latest to be added to that list.

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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