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Today's
Stories
December 6 / 7, 2003
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
December 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
November 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
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
Click Here
for More Stories.
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December
6 / 7, 2003
Conspiratorial Reading
How Bush Can Still Win
By BEN TRIPP
My two most cherished conspiracy theories are:
1. Bush knows the exact location of Osama
bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and he's waiting until late October
of 2004 to make the busts, thus ensuring he'll win on a tsunami
of popular approval as the President Who Won The War On Terrorism
(favorite fillip on this theory is that it will be orchestrated
so both misdemeanants are found in the same location, possibly
a bath house or adult novelty shop, thus proving Bush was Right
All Along.)
2. Code Red on Election Day-for God's
sake, keep out of the streets. Martial law. Chaos. Are you
crazy? Elect someone new in the middle of a friggin disaster?
We may see Chicago nuked, or Godzilla rise from the sea and
trample the Mid-Wilshire district in Los Angeles. Bush to appear
on national television during election day, his face grave and
soot-smeared from personally digging victims out of the rubble
and handing turkey sandwiches to the survivors. He encourages
voters to go out there and vote for whoever they think is the
right man for the job. He dashes a tear from his eye and gives
CPR to an infant.
3. Michael Jackson was framed.
See, since the aircraft carrier hoopla
and the secret trip to Baghdad, I understand that these Bush
League pillocks will stop at nothing. W. has become his own
stunt double. There will be no more sedative-addled rushes between
secure locations such as occurred on 9/11. There will be no
more blowback such as followed the notorious 'Mission: A Codpiece'
appearance aboard that Navy aircraft carrier, following which
the war in Iraq actually began. From now on, the Bush operatives
are going to run things their way, which means into the ground,
which means they are going to get their boy elected if it kills
him.
This has been the most political White
House in American history ( I should know, I'm writing a book
of American History and I've had to research every last one of
the sons of bitches-turns out there were about three good administrations
since 1801). By 'political', cher lecteur, I don't mean
this White House contains an unusual proportion of politicians,
although White Houses do contain on average more politicians
than, say, a circus or a gynecologist's convention (excluding
Bill Frist). Rather I mean that the motivations of this White
House are predicated entirely on political means and motives.
It has no public policies except those based on political advantage.
Crush opposition, ram through personal agenda, sodomize public,
rinse and repeat. There is no legacy here, except the legacy
of wealth the ultra-rich are accreting under cover of confusion.
What we have is a machine entirely devoted to self-perpetuation.
It cares nothing for cost. It cares nothing for environmental
impact, workplace safety, or the common good. This here machine
chugs night and day, spewing fetorous Hadean reeks, making more
of itself. Dr. Seuss warned us this would happen, but we grew
old and forgot.
For people accustomed to the simple concept
of Doing Whatever It Takes, it was merely a matter of time before
they started reading the paranoid conspiracy web pages and decided
to act out the best theories. "I know," one of the
Neocons must have said during the donut & prayer meeting
one morning, "Let's send Junior to Baghdad. He can parachute
in with a bag of toys on Christmas morning. Maybe if we can
work it he could fight Saddam in hand-to-hand combat and kill
him. We just have to get a couple cameras in there." Bush
got all excited and piped up: "fuck yeah, I could yell,
'this is for America! This is for Freedom!' and gut him like
my Mom used to gut wild boars." That calmed everybody down
and they settled for whisking him into Baghdad a couple hours
during Thanksgiving Day. This is how they're thinking, if thinking
is the word I want. Bill Frist shows up for his first week as
Senate Majority Leader and immediately starts saving people in
road accidents and resuscitating heart attack victims. You notice
he hasn't done any of that heroic stuff recently? The Bush people
noticed, too. Lesson learned: all you need is a photo op, then
get the hell on to the next thing. Promise nothing. All der
Hosenscheisser had to do was land on the carrier. The banner
was overkill. So in the refined version of the same human cannonball
routine, they merely have him show up somewhere dangerous for
a few minutes. No message, no embarrassing graphics. The simple
fact that he's there is enough. If Bush's operators could have
gotten some advance warning, you can bet he would have pried
that tiger's jaws off pouf celébre Roy Horn during a whistle
stop in Las Vegas.
The deadly part of this is that we're
occupying two foreign nations (Iraq and Afghanistan, for those
of you who may have forgotten) for reasons having little or nothing
to do with the terrorist threat that emerged as Bush's raison
d'etre (since he stopped drinking, before which he had a raisin
d'etre--a little yock for the francophones out there). Not only
are we fighting these two wars, and apparently losing both of
them through sheer hubris, but we've exploded, so to speak, the
terrorist menace from its original 'small but determined enclaves'
into 'anybody with a grudge that doesn't eat ham'. Which takes
some doing. At this point if we want to wipe out terrorism by
force of arms we'll have to demand everybody on Earth eat a crispy
chicharrone, and anybody who refuses, we shoot him dead. In
fact my anti-terrorist tee-shirts (emblazoned with a picture
of raw pork) are selling like corndodgers. Terrorism is running
rampant the world over. Meanwhile, in America (you remember
that place) we've given up huge chunks of our liberties,
our economy is looking lively as a corpse with farded cheeks,
the visible holes plugged with mortician's wax; we've got a deficit
so big that like a black hole or Donald Rumsfeld's ass it will
suck all matter into itself. Our old people, our poor people,
and our working class (at this point all three categories are
the same people) have been publicly and brutally screwed; and
the rest of the world, with which we have in past times enjoyed
some laughs, is afraid to come near us lest our condition prove
to be communicable. Meanwhile, Michael Jackson.
On a day when British embassies came
under lethal attack as a direct result of precedent Bush showing
up in London (they should have flown him in during the wee hours,
like in Baghdad), a day when embassies exploded, when an immense
and angry crowd rose up and staged effigy-toppling in the heart
of England's capitol-on this day, Americans tuning in to the
news didn't see any of it. We saw an empty parking lot instead.
A parking lot across which, God willing, erstwhile entertainer
Michael 'Do I Look Like Lilian Gish Yet' Jackson would walk into
captivity. Once again, our news media failed us. The rest of
the world was in flames, and we were watching Lot C, Row 14,
from a helicopter. One of my other favorite conspiracy theories
is that the Bush people know a dirty secret on every desk editor
of every news agency in North America, and they make quiet phone
calls whenever it's time to look the other way, sort of a journalistic
version of the boxing maneuver known as 'taking a fall'. But
I suppose the actual problem is they don't make real journalists
any more. I suspect, however, someone on the Jackson case got
a phone call from somebody in the DOJ suggesting that day would
be an excellent day to make a bust. And the same person then
called Fox and CNN. The timing is timeous, to say the least.
In any case, the conspiracy loop is complete. Four more years.
Even if they can't manufacture any propitious
good news, such as the capture of a prominent terrorist viz.
bin Laden or Noam Chomsky, all Bush's people need to do now is
send Bush on a few more quasi-daredevil stunts like his dawn
raid on Mesopotamia and make sure they get the footage (News
Flash! George Bush gets to Baghdad a day before Hilary Clinton!
News Flash! George Bush runs with the bulls at Pamplona!)
Then create a national crisis right around election time that
requires just exactly the sort of figurehead Bush is, and also
keeps voters away from the polls in droves (Abe Lincoln pointed
out vis-a-vis wartime presidencies that "you don't change
horses in midstream", by which he may have meant 'horseshit',
but obiter dicta). Finally, they need to throw in a celebrity
scandal whenever a real story breaks that doesn't suit them.
The day Bush is impeached, expect Brad Pitt to be arrested while
masturbating to a Richard Simmons exercise tape and Britney Spears
to be found strangled to death in Ben Affleck's garage).
Alert readers, and you know who you are,
will suggest that there is a fourth conspiracy here: the rigging
of the voting machines. All the Neocons need is low voter turnout
and a close race, and with the machines under the control of
Republican operatives, the election can be snatched simply by
altering the required few thousand digital ballots. What about
that conspiracy? Bad news, fellow humans. That's not
a conspiracy. It happened in 2002, and it will happen again
in 2004. I'm only talking about unfounded speculation here.
Or is peculation the word I want?
Ben Tripp
is a screenwriter and cartoonist. Ben also has a
lot of outrageously priced crap for sale here. If his
writing starts to grate on your nerves, buy some and maybe he'll
flee to Mexico. If all else fails, he can be reached at: credel@earthlink.net
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
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