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Today's Stories
October 27, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair The Bi-Partisan Politics of Oil
October 26, 2004
Brian Cloughley Three Weddings and Lots of Funerals: Atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan
William Blum Fear Factors
Lenni Brenner The 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Lessons for 2004
Ben Tripp The Chicken Salad Election
Fidel Castro After the Fall
Greg Bates The Nation's Flawed Calculus
Walter Brasch Gag the Public: the War on Dissent
Niranjan Ramakrishnan An Open Letter to Pat Buchanan
Mickey Z. Rumble in the Jungle at 30: Ali, Foreman and the Congo
Amir Taheri The Boom in Conspiracy Theories
Alexander Billet Say It Ain't So, Bruce!: the Boss Endorses Kerry
Doug Giebel The Religion of G.W. Bush
Kathleen Christison Why I Liked Thomas Friedman's Latest Column Before I Didn't
October 25, 2004
Ralph Nader Letter from a Minnesota Highway
Werther West Texas Wahabbism
Dave Zirin Boston's Killer Cops: Death of a Fan
Fred Gardner Pot Shots: Oregon Revokes Dr. Leveque's License
Omar Barghouti Executing Another Child in Rafah
William J. Nottingham Lori Berenson's Story
John Chuckman A Foolish Consistency
Uri Avnery On the Road to Civil War
October 22 / 24, 2004
Alexander Cockburn You Can't Blame Nader for This
Rev. William Alberts On Bended Knee: Faith-Based Deceptions
Willliam A. Cook Killing for Christ
Saul Landau George W. Bush: a Man of His Words?
Bill Quigley I Held the Bullet in My Palm: Masked Haitian Police Shoot Children While Arresting Priest
Christopher Brauchli Seal It With a Frown: What Compassionate Conservativism Really Means
William S. Lind Fallujah and the Moral Level of War
Sharon Smith Guilt Trippers for Kerry
Greg Bates Kerrynomics: "Hurt the Ones Who Vote for Us"
Justin E.H. Smith Is Lesser Evilism a Compromise with Evil?
Rebecca Evans Tarnished Legacy: Pinochet and the Chilean Military
Mike Whitney Al Hurra TV: the Second Invasion
M. Junaid Alam Purchasing Individuality in America
David Krieger Nuclear Non-Proliferation: Examining the Policies of Bush and Kerry
David J. Ledermann The Emperor's New Crumbs
Lawrence Reichard Same Old FBI Story
Website of the Weekend Lie Girls: the Real Coalition of the Willling
October 21, 2004
Ben Tripp The Undecided Voter Examined
Joshua Frank Kerry and the Environment: It's Not Easy Pretending to be Green
Stan Cox What the Left Doesn't Get About Small Businesses
Bill Martinez State Depart and Cuban Visas: Only Anti-Castro Agitators Need Apply
Mark Engler The War and Globalization
Lina Britto and Lucia Suarez Bolivia: a Year After the October Insurrection
Website of the Day Two Pampered Children of Wealth
October 20, 2004
Yitzhak Laor "Did You Two Squabble?": a Bullet Fired for Every Palestinian Child
Jason Leopold Sinclair Broadcasting's Air War: a Long History of Journalistic Deception
Jesse Sharkey A Teacher's Account of How Military Recruiters Prey on High School Students
Col. Dan Smith Choking Free Speech About the Draft
Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Using My Religion
David Vest If Bush Wins, Blame Me
Jack Random The Jackson 17: Reflections on a Mutiny
Ron Jacobs Time to Kick It Up a Notch
James Brittain Plan Patriota and the FARC: a Change in the Countryside?
Christopher Dols Bombing Madison: Michael Moore's Fright Fest
Dave Lindorff First They Came for the Nurses...
Website of the Day Banana Republican Catalogue
October 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair Party Favors: the Political Business of Terry McAuliffe
Jeff Taylor Confessions of a Swing State Voter
Matt Vidal American Myopia: "More Money in Your Pocket"
Victor Kattan "It's Not Who You're Against; It's Who You're For": Palestine Takes Center Stage At Euro Social Forum
William Loren Katz What Goes Around Comes Around
Sean Carter O'Reilly Should Shut Up About Extortion Claiims
CounterPunch Wire Who's Really in Bed with Republican Funders: Kerry or Nader?
By DAVE LINDORFF
Okay, tell me the truth. Does anyone think that millionaire preppy George W. Bush has a badly tailored shirt or a badly tailored suit in his wardrobe? The question is important because that’s the lame excuse that Bush and Karl Rove have come up with to try and quiet the media buzz about the bulge under his jacket during the three presidential debates. After behaving like total cowards for the past two weeks, the White House press corps finally squeaked. In an interview with Bush, ABC's "Good Morning" reporter Charlie Gibson yesterday finally showed the guts to ask the president what the bulge in his jacket was. Bush's response was to laugh and try to play dumb (something he does convincingly). "I don't know what that is. I mean, it is, uh, it is, it's a-- I'm embarrassed to say it's a poorly tailored shirt," he said. Okay, before, the Bush campaign and the White House were saying it was a poorly tailored jacket. Now, the man in question says it was the shirt. Are we supposed to believe that the president wore the same shirt for all three debates? He changed his jacket. He changed his tie. But he kept the shirt? And a badly fitting one at that? Gibson, while showing more courage than his media colleagues in posing the question at all, didn't bulldog it. He let it go, limiting his question to the bulge seen in the first debate. Clearly the follow-up question should have been: "If you knew you had a badly tailored shirt that was causing this controversial bulge, why did you wear the same shirt in debate number two and debate number three?" Gibson also clearly didn’t look at the White House web site, where there was a 2002 photo showing the same bulge underneath a T-shirt Bush was wearing while driving a pickup on his ranch. That was clearly not the same shirt he was wearing in any of the debates. So now we know, if we didn't know it already, that the White House is lying. They're getting away with it because, except for Gibson, nobody in the mainstream press that tags around after the president is pressing him on it, much less investigating the matter more aggressively by trying to get sources from inside the president's camp to come forward. They're getting away with it because, as one reporter who has contacted friends in many of the major news outlets has been told, the mainstream press won't go after this story "because the Kerry camp hasn’t made it an issue." Get that: the media cannot go after a story about a candidate unless the other candidate makes it an issue. Now there's a wimpy new answer to the question: what is news? Fortunately, the American public is smarter than this. If they think that the president's dodge is ridiculous, it provides an opening for humor, and that's where the story is now showing up--on Jay Leno, David Letterman, and now most powerfully, in Gary Trudeau's "Doonesbury" strip. At this point, unless the president can come clean and give a credible explanation for the cause of the bulge that appeared under his jacket at all three debates and on his ranch (when he was being interviewed at length by an AP reporter), we have to assume that it was what it appears to have been--a transceiver and a hidden radio-linked micro-earpiece--and that he was cheating in the debates, getting tips and hints of how to answer from someone in the back room. There's still a week in this campaign. It will be interesting to see whether anyone on the campaign trail or in the Washington press corps has the guts to follow up Gibson's question to ask for a real explanation that would cover the bumps in the jacket at all three debates. The electorate at least knows something's amiss. Voters should all take that into consideration when they consider both the president's intelligence and his integrity. He's been caught cheating. Not on his wife; on the public.
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com
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