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August 30,
2004
Justin Podhur
The
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Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites at TheNaderbasher.com
Mike Whitney
Israeli Moles in the Pentagon: What More Could They Possibly
Want?
Ron Jacobs
Live, From New York: the Majority of Protesters Claimed No Candidate
David Lindorff
Sunday in Manhattan: the Sound of Marchin', Chargin' Feet, Boy
Dave Zirin
USA Basketball: The Team White America Loved to Hate
Sam Husseini
Israeli Spying on the US: a Long History
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August 28 /
29, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
William S. Lind
The Desert Fox
Paul D'Amato
The Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
Joshua Frank
Greens at the Crossroads
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Justin E.H.
Smith
The New Age Racket and the Left
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
Ali Tonak
Help the NYPD?
Mark Engler
New York Says "No"
Justin Felux
Haiti: the Attica of the Americas
Poets' Basement
Gelman, Albert, Ford and Hamod
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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August
31, 2004
High
Plains Grifter
The
Life and Crimes of George W. Bush
By
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Part
One: The Ties That Blind
The mad cowboys are on the loose. Pack
only what you can carry. Liberate the animals. Leave the rest
behind. The looters are hot on the trail. Only ruin stands in
their wake. Not even women and children are safe. Especially
not them. Run for the hills and don't look back. Don't ever look
back.
So the story goes, anyway.
We find ourselves living out
a scene in a bad Western. A movie filmed long after all the old
plot lines have been exhausted, the grizzled character actors
put out to pasture, the Indians slaughtered and confined to desert
prisons, the cattle slotted into stinking feed lots, the scenic
montane backdrops pulverized by strip mines. All that remains
are the guns, bulked up beyond all comprehension, and the hangman
and his gibbet. We've seen it all before. But there's no escape
now. Someone's locked the exits. The film rolls on to the bitter
end. Cue music: Toby Keith.
Perhaps only the Pasolini of
Salo:
120 Days of Sodom could have done this celluloid scenario
justice. Or the impish Mel Brooks, who gave us Blazing
Saddles (one of the greatest films on the true nature
of American politics), if you understand the narrative as comedy,
which is probably the most emetic way to embrace it. Both Pasolini
and Brooks are masters of scatological cinema. And there's mounds
of bullshit to dig through to get at the core of George W. Bush.
Because it's all an act, of
course, a put on, a dress game. And not a very convincing one
at that. Start from the beginning. George W. Bush wasn't born
a cowboy. He entered the world in New Haven, Connecticut, hallowed
hamlet of Yale. His bloodlines include two presidents and a US
senator. The cowboy act came later, when he was famously re-birthed,
with spurs on his boots, tea in his cup and the philosophical
tracts of Jesus of Nazareth on his night table. Bush is a pure-blooded
WASP, sired by a man who would later become the nation's chief
spook, a man frequently called upon to clean up the messes left
by apex crooks in his own political party, including his own
entanglements (and those of his sons) with the more noirish aspects
of life. His grandfather was a US senator and Wall Street lawyer,
who shamelessly represented American corporations as they did
business with the Nazi death machine. Old Prescott narrowly escaped
charges of treason. But those were different times, when trading
with the enemy was viewed as, at the very least, unseemly.
His mother, Barbara, is a bitter
and grouchy gorgon, who must have frightened her own offspring
as they first focused their filmy eyes onto her stern visage.
She is a Pierce, a descendent of Franklin, the famously incompetent
president, patron of Nathaniel Hawthorne and avowed racist, who
joined in a bizarre cabal to overthrow Abraham Lincoln. (For
more on this long neglected episode in American history check
out Charles Higham's excellent new book Murdering
Mr. Lincoln.)
Understandably, George Sr.
spent much of his time far away from Barbara Bush's icy boudoir,
indulging in a discreet fling or two while earning his stripes
as a master of the empire, leaving juvenile George to cower under
the unstinting commands of his cruel mother, who his younger
brother Jeb dubbed "the Enforcer." This woman's veins
pulse with glacial melt. According to Neil Bush, his mother was
devoted to corporal punishment and would "slap around"
the Bush children. She was known in the family as "the one
who instills fear." She still does...with a global reach.
How wicked is Barbara Bush?
Well, she refused to attend her own mother's funeral. And the
day after her five-year old daughter Robin died of leukemia Barbara
Bush was in a jolly enough mood to spend the afternoon on the
golf course. Revealingly, Mrs. Bush kept Robin's terminal illness
a secret from young George, a stupid and cruel move which provided
one of the early warps to his psyche.
Her loathsome demeanor hasn't
lightened much over the years. Refresh you memory with this quote
on Good Morning America, dismissing the escalating body count
of American soldiers in Iraq. "Why should we hear about
body bags and deaths and how many," the Presidential Mother
snapped. "It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful
mind on something like that?"
Even Freud might have struggled
with this case study. Imagine young George the Hysteric on Siggy's
couch in the curtained room on Berggasse 19. The analysand doesn't
enunciate; he mumbles and sputters in non-sequential sentence
fragments. His quavering voice a whiny singsong. The fantasy
has to be teased out. It's grueling work. But finally Freud puts
it all together. This lad doesn't want to fuck his mother. Not
this harridan. Not this boy. He wants to kill her and chuckle
in triumph over the corpse. Oh, dear. This doesn't fit the Oedipal
Complex, per se. But it explains so much of George the Younger's
subsequent behavior. (See his cold-blooded chuckling over the
state murder of Karla Faye Tucker.)
Perhaps, Freud isn't the right
shrink for Bush, after all. Maybe the president's pathology is
better understood through the lens of Freud's most gifted and
troubled protégé, Wilhelm Reich. (I commend to
your attention Dr. Reich's neglected masterpiece Listen,
Little Man.) Sadly, we cannot avail ourselves of psychological
exegises of either Freud or Reich. So Justin Frank, the disciple
of Melanie Klein, will have to substitute. In the spirit of his
mentor, Frank, author of Bush
on the Couch, zeroes in on the crucial first five years of
W's existence, where three factors loom over all others: an early
trauma, an absent father and an abusive mother. It is a recipe
for the making of a dissociated megalomaniac. Add in a learning
disability (dyslexia) and a brain bruised by booze and coke and
you have a pretty vivid portrait of the Bush psyche.
With this stern upbringing,
is it really surprising that Bush evidenced early signs of sadism?
As a teenager he jammed firecrackers in the orifices of frogs
and snickered as he blew them to bits. A few years later, as
president of the DKE frathouse at Yale, Bush instituted a branding
on the ass-crack as an initiation ritual. Young pledges were
seared with a red-hot wire clothes hanger. One victim complained
to the New Haven police, who raided the frathouse. The story
was covered-up for several decades until it surfaced in Bush's
first run for governor of Texas. He laughed at the allegations,
writing the torture off as little more than "a cigarette
burn." From Andover to Abu Ghraib.
In his teens, this man child
was shoved into a distant boarding school. It must have been
a relief for him. The squirrely adolescent with the pointy ears
did just enough to get by. At Andover they called him "Bushtail."
Ambition wasn't his thing. And he didn't have the athletic talent
or thespian skills to do much more than play the role of class
goof. So he went on to an undistinguished academic career, highlighted
only by his ebullient performances as a cheerleader and a reputation
for selling fake IDs. Even in his youth he was adept at forgery.
George the Younger snuck into
Yale on a legacy admission, a courtesy to his father and grandfather.
He was a remedial student at best, awarded a bevy of Cs, the
lowest score possible for the legacy cohort. Repositories like
Andover and Yale know what to do with the dim children of the
elite. George nestled in his niche. No demands were made of him.
He spent much his time acquainting himself with a menu of designer
inebrients. He was arrested twice. Once for petty theft. Once
for public drunkenness. No one cared.
When Vietnam loomed, Lil' George
fled to New Haven for Houston and the safe harbor of the Texas
Air National Guard, then jokingly known as Air Canada--a domestic
safe-haven for the combat-averse children of the political elite.
It was a deftly executed dodge.
His father pulled some strings. Escape hatches opened. The scions
of the ruling class, even the half-wits, weren't meant to be
eviscerated in the rice paddies of the Mekong--that's why they
freed the slaves.
But soon George grew bored
of the weekend warrior routine. And who among us wouldn't? He
slunk off to Alabama, and promptly went AWOL for a year and a
half. Nobody seemed to miss him. He wasn't a crucial cog in anyone's
machine. George? George Bush??
How did the president-in-training
fritter away those idle days? Supposedly he was lending his expertise
to the congressional campaign of Winton "Red" Blount.
But he apparently soon went AWOL from this assignment as well.
Other campaign staffers recall young George ambling into the
campaign office in the late afternoon, propping his cowboy booted
heals on a desk and recounting his nocturnal revels in the bars,
strip joints and waterbeds of Montgomery. The other staffers
took to calling him the "Texas Soufflé.". As
one recalled, "Bush was all puffed up and full of hot air."
Precisely, how did he wile
away those humid nights on the Gulf Coast? According to the intrepid
Larry Flynt, he spent part of his time impregnating his girlfriend
and, like a true southern gentleman, then escorting her to an
abortion clinic. Checkbook birth control, the tried and true
method of the ruling classes. A year later, according to Bush
biographer J.H. Hatfield, George W. got popped in Texas on cocaine
possession charges. The old man intervened once again; George
diverted for six months of community service a Project PULL in
a black area of Houston and the incident was scrubbed from the
police blotter and court records. Today, Bush denies all knowledge
of those squalid indiscretions. Just two more lost weekends in
George's blurry book of days.
Speaking of cocaine, Bush,
by many accounts, had more than a passing familiarity with the
powder. Several acquaintances from his days at Yale tell us that
Bush not only snorted cocaine, but sold it. Not by the spoonful,
but by the ounce bag, a quantity that would land any black or
Latino dealer in the pen for at least a decade. Young Bushtail
had become the Snow Bird of New Haven.
Even the Bush family, so smugly
self-conscious of its public image, didn't seem to care much.
Jr wasn't the star child. They just wanted him alive and out
of jail. (The habitual drunk driving was already a nagging problem.
On a December night in 1973, George came up from Houston to visit
his family in DC. He took his younger brother Marvin out drinking
in the bars of Georgetown. Returning home after midnight, Bush,
drunk at the wheel, careened down the road, toppling garbage
cans. When he pulled into the driveway, he was confronted by
his father. Young Bush threatened to pummel his old man, mano-a-mano.
Jeb intervened before young George could be humilated by his
father. A couple of years later, the drunk driving would later
land him in the drunk tank of a Maine jail-his fourth arrest.)
No need to plump up his resumé with medals or valedictory
speeches. Anyway back then, the inside money was riding on Neil,
who they said had a head for figures, or perhaps young Jeb, whose
gregarious looks hid a real mean streak. (Neil, of course, came
to ruin in the looting of the
Silvarado Savings and Loan (though he deftly avoided jail
time), while Jeb proved his utility in Florida and amplified
his presidential ambitions.)
By all accounts, the family
elders saw George as a pathetic case, as goofy as a black lab.
They got him out of the National Guard eight months early (or
20 months, if you insist on counting the Lost Year) and sent
him off to Harvard Business School. He didn't have the grades
to merit admission, but bloodlines are so much more important
than GPA when it comes to prowling the halls at the Ivy League.
The original affirmative action, immune from any judicial meddling.
In Cambridge, he strutted around in his flight jacket and chewed
tobacco in class. The sound of Bushtail spitting the sour juice
into a cup punctuated many a lecture on the surplus value theory.
At Harvard, one colleague quipped that Bush majored in advanced
party planning and the arcana of money laundering. George met
every expectation.
Then came the dark years. Booze,
drugs, cavorting and bankruptcy in dreary west Texas. There he
also met Laura Welch, the steamy librarian who had slain her
own ex-boyfriend, by speeding through a stop sign and plowing
broadside into his car with a lethal fury. (Rep. Bill Janklow
got 100 days in the pen for a similar crime; Laura wasn't even
charged.) They mated, married, raised fun-loving twins. In 1978,
George decided to run for congress. His opponent cast him as
carpetbagger with an Ivy League education. It worked. And it
didn't help his chances much that Bush apparently was drunk much
of time. After one drunken stump speech, Laura gave him a tongue
lashing on the ride home. Bush got so irate that he drove the
car through the garage door. He lost big.
Eventually, Laura got George
to quit the booze--though the librarian never got him to read.
It wasn't a moral thing for her. Laura still imbibes herself,
even around her husband. She smokes, too. Refreshingly, so do
the Bush Twins, who have both been popped for underage drinking.
George was Laura's ticket out
of the dusty doldrums of west Texas. She sobered him up and rode
him hard all the way to Dallas, Austin and beyond. "Oh,
that Welch girl," recalled a retired librarian in Midland.
"She got around." Wink, wink.
If the son of a millionaire
political powerbroker can't make it in Midland, Texas, he can't
make it anywhere. George was set up in his own oil company in
the heart of the Permian Basin. His two starter companies, Bush
Exploration and Arbusto, promptly went bust, hemorraghing millions
of dollars. His father's cronies in a group called Spectrum 7
picked up the pieces. It flatlined too. A new group of savoirs
in the form of Harken Oil swooped in. Ditto. Yet in the end,
George walked away from the wreckage of Harkin Oil with a few
million in his pocket. One of the investors in Harken was George
Soros, who explained the bail out of Bush in frank terms. "We
were buying political influence. That was it. Bush wasn't much
of a businessman."
Among the retinue of rescuers
in his hours of crisis was a Saudi construction conglomerate,
headed by Mohammad bin Laden, sire of Osama. The ties that blind.
Flush with unearned cash, George
and Laura hightailed it to Arlington, the Dallas suburb, soon
to be the new home of the Texas Rangers, perennial also rans
in the American League. Bush served as front man for a flotilla
of investors, backed by the Bass brothers and other oil and real
estate luminaries, who bought the Rangers and then bullied the
city of Arlington into building a posh new stadium for the team
with $200 million in public money, raised through a tax hike,
for which Bush, the apostle of tax-cuts for the rich, sedulously
lobbied. Here's a lesson in the art of political larceny. The
super-rich always get their way. When taxes are raised, public
money is sluiced upward to the politically connected. When taxes
are cut, the money ends up in the same accounts. As William Burrough's
hero Jack Black (the hobo writer, not the rotund actor) prophesied,
you can't win.
The Rangers deal was never
about building a competitive baseball team for the people of
Dallas/Ft. Worth. No. The Bush group seduced the city into building
a stadium with nearly all the proceeds going straight into their
pockets. It was a high level grifter's game, right out of a novel
by Jim Thompson, the grand master of Texas noir. Bush played
his bit part as affable con man ably enough. Even though he only
plunked down $600,000 of his own cash, he walked away from the
deal with $14.7 million-a staggering swindle that made Hillary
Clintons's windfalls in the cattle future's market look like
chump change.
As team president, Bush printed
up baseball cards with his photo on them in Ranger attire, endulging
his life-long fetish for dress-up fantasies. He would hand out
the Bush cards during home game. Invariably, the cards would
be found littering the floors of the latrines, soaked in beer
and piss.
Tomorrow: Mark His Words.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been
Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature
and, with Alexander Cockburn, Dime's
Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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