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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

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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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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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