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Read Cockburn and St. Clair's Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press and discover how the CIA gave a helping hand to the opium lords who took over Afghanistan, thus ushering the Taliban into power.

New Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively to Subscribers: Welcome to the Capitalist System! Love It or Change It: Cooking the Balance Sheets? We're So-o Shocked; Martha Stewart's Tips for Prison Décor? Don't Bet on It; Fiddling While Rome Burns: Liberals Pledge Allegiance to Ethic of Greed and Exploitation; Ridge Suggests Big Labor is Tool of Terrorism; Drink Water in Vegas and Glow in the Dark: Senate Okays Mad Yucca Mountain Plan; When Giants Walked: Jim Abourezk Recalls His Senate Years; Vanessa's Postcard from Down Under. Remember, the CounterPunch website is supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! Or Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683

July 13, 2002

M. Junaid Alam
Raping the Palestinians

Matt Vidal
Corporate Ethics Red Herrings

July 12, 2002

Sean Donahue
The Other Harken Energy Scandal: Oil, Death Squads
and Colombia

Walt Brasch
Sin Tax Scam
"Psst. Cigarettes. A Buck Each."

Steve Perry
A Tale of Two Twits
Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?

July 11, 2002

Lloyd Marbet
Arrested by the Chamber
of Commerce

David Krieger
Law vs. Force

David Vest
Fountain of Foo:
Strike Three Called

Irit Katriel
A Deep Ideological Crisis

Richard Glen Boire
Dangerous Lessons:
Public School Drug Testing

July 10, 2002

CounterPunch Wire
Third Party Woes
South Carolina Denies Kevin Alexander Gray Ballot Status

Nassar Ibriham & Majed Nassar
Bush's Middle East Plan: Always Changing, Never Changing

Robert Fisk
Ain't That America:
A Strange Kind of Freedom

Dave Marsh
The Return of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting

Bernard Weiner
Hope and Despair in
the Body Politic

Gary Leupp
European Worries and
Bush's Terror War

July 9, 2002

St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.

Jack McCarthy
Florida: a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?

Robert Fisk
How a Saudi Billionaire
Does Beirut

Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated

Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging with Tanks

Bill Christison
Disastrous Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?

July 8, 2002

Rick Mercier
Yucca Mountain Bound

Lev Grinberg
The BUSHARON Global War

Tariq Ali
How Bush Used 9/11 to Remap the World

Lori Allen
The Tugs of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew

July 7, 2002

Alexander Cockburn
White House Crooks

July 6, 2002

Gavin Keeney
Loose Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush

Michael Neumann
What's So Bad About Israel?

Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh

Resources:
100s of Links About 9/11


CounterPunch:
Complete Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath


Five Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond

By Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula

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Published March 15, 2002

  • Facing Down Rehnquist and Scalia:
  • Jennifer Harbury at the Supreme Court;
  • ADL Throws in Towel, Pays Up:
  • How They Worked for Apartheid Regime and Spied on NAACP:
  • Cockburn on America the Bully:
  • From Teddy Roosevelt to George W.
  • St. Clair on Musicians Against the Death Penalty & The Legacy of the Mekons.


    Search CounterPunch

Read Whiteout and Find Out How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden

Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the Press

by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair

The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff

The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid

Edited by Roane Carey

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair

The Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine

Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair

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Reviews of Gore:
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Private Warriors
by Ken Silverstein

CounterPunch's Booktalk

Weekend Edition
July 13, 2002

Go Tell Karl Rove!
The Anti-Republican Party

by Gavin Keeney
As Karl Rove twiddles the dials on the White House Moonshine Machine, prepare yourself for the coming bloodbath. In-between now and then (November 2002) expect to be lectured on individual liberty, personal hygiene, civic duty, discretion, prudence, staying the course?, the middle-to-high moral ground, the implicit loveliness of capitalism, and -- if needs be -- the reborn born-againism of our latterday be-knighted crusader for all things kind and gentle.

If this fails, expect the immediate invasion of Iraq, to begin as soon as the polls show the republicans losing serious real ground in the Senate and House elections. It might also be worthwhile, then, while all this posturing is under way, as trial balloons come and go, as bluster turns to compromise, as deals are made to salvage individual reputations and fortunes, that the voter huff and puff in return -- first this way, then that way -- by way of whatever venue you find worthy, sending false signals to the White House number crunchers. Send Bush's numbers up one week, send them to the bestial floor the next week, run en masse to third party candidates, embrace your least favorite new democrat (for five minutes), and in November vote anything but republican. If voting for a third party candidate will be a vote for the republicans, you'll probably have to vote for the new-old democrat anyway.

Send nice letters to the White House. Send lots of them. Send e-mails to republican congressional candidates extolling their virtues. Ask them how you can funnel to them your life savings without setting off campaign finance reform alarm bells. Join focus groups and pine for a return to Reaganism -- nice dull trickledownism. Complain to newspapers about media bias. Write your friends and ask them to switch parties (several times). Sow so much confusion that the Moonshine Machine blows a circuit and is rendered inoperable.

In other words, tell Karl Rove to get lost.

After you've completed your first round of monkey business, and the smoke is still rising from the War Room at the White House, relax. Smile, enjoy your last weeks of summer and prepare for the Great Confusion. Media will change its prognosis every twenty-four hours. The republicans are up, the republicans are down, the republicans are stuck, the numbers are volatile, the American public is fickle. Whatever you hear, smile. When you do finally vote make sure the effort has not been in vain.

In the last weeks of October pull out all the stops. Call republican candidates and tell them you don't understand them any longer and you are sorry to hear they may lose. Send them campaign contributions in the form of rolled pennies. If you have any green stamps left from the 1960s, send these. Send them an IOU. Put signs out on your lawn or stoop with a picture of one candidate but afix the logo of the opposite party. Mix things up. Distribute literature in your neighborhood asking voters to wear clothespins on their noses when they go to the polls. Offer them a clothespin. If asked by a republican zombie on the street if you are a republican, feign the attention span of an eight-year old and say "sort of". Send clothespins by the boxcar load to the White House. You could even paint them red, white and blue or include some soiled laundry. When the calling centers start blitzing the nation with automatic get-out-the-vote messages unplug your phone. If they persist, block the call. If the local republican or democratic machine calls close to the election, tell them you're an anarchist and you'll be on vacation during the election.

In other words, tell the political machinery to get lost.

After you've switched parties about half a dozen times (not on paper but during any correspondence or interaction with the machinery of contemporary politics), re-register as an independent. If you cannot vote in your local primaries as an independent, change to any party whatsoever, but vote anti-republican. When Bush makes his next speech about ethics and dental hygiene, exercise, or how to balance your checkbook, send adulatory letters and faxes to the White House. Praise the make-believe president for being so clean, buff, and perhaps throw in an erotic memento. You could even send naughty birthday wishes, even though it's not his birthday. Include a picture of yourself in your birthday suit. Imagine tens of thousands of birthday cards arriving at the White House in September and October, gumming up the mailroom, as it sorts through letters looking for support for the destruction of Iraq, Iran, North Korea -- the axis thing -- and throws out all the whiny letters from disgruntled investors who lost everything on Wall Street and don't have a pot to piss in.

In other words, tell the Bush League to get lost and join the anti-republican party.

Gavin Keeney is a landscape architect in New York, New York. and the author of On the Nature of Things, a book documenting the travails of contemporary American landscape architecture in the 1990s.

He can be reached at: ateliermp@netscape.net

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