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A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 13, 2001
Peter Mahoney
Veteran's
Day, 2001
Rep. Ron
Paul
Expanding
NATO
Is a Bad Idea
November 12, 2001
Robert Jensen
Goodbye to
All That...
Patriotism
Nancy
Oden
My
Day at the Airport
CounterPunch Wire
East Timor
10 Years
After the Massacre
C.G. Estabrook
Instead
of Terror
Alexander Cockburn
Wide World
of Torture
November 11, 2001
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland
Insecurity: The Politics of Terror in America
November 10, 2001
Grover Furr
Seeking an Opposition
to the Afghan War
Bruce
Kyle
Anatomy
of a Green Smear:
Backstabbing Nancy Oden
November 9, 2001
Karen Snell
Torture By
Proxy
John Troyer
A
New Kind of Activism
Tariq Ali
Q &
A About the War
Michael
Colby
Schoolgirl
Gets Booted
for Anti-war Views
November 8, 2001
Mokhiber/Weissman
The
Cipro Rip-Off
Mitchel Cohen
The Smear Campaign
Against Nancy Oden
Steve
Perry
American
Roulette
November 7, 2001
Bahour/Dahan
Placebo Peace
Plan
Tom Turnipseed
Bush
Gives Billions
to His Oil Buddies
Cockburn/St. Clair
Greens, Airports
and
National ID Cards
Dr. Susan
Block
Ayatollah
Asscroft
Brian J. Foley
Bombing Campaign
Not "Self-Defense" Under International Law
November 6, 2001
Mark Scaramella
Where's
That Red Cross Money Going
C.G. Estabrook
Our Torturers
Sheperd
Bliss
Scott
Nearing on War
Rep. Ron Paul
Underwriting
the Taliban
Tariq
Ali
The
General Who
Came to Dinner
Evan Ravitz
Stop the War
Through
Direct Democracy
Steve
Perry
Hunger
in Afghanistan
November 5, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
Living
in the Minefields
David Price
Terror
and Indigenous People
November 3, 2001
Declan McCullagh
Nancy Oden Interview
Daniel
Wolff
The
Memphis Blues Again
Mark Weisbrot
War on Civilians
Dave Marsh
How
the RIAA (and the FBI) Cheat Musicians
Robert Jensen
Speaking
Out Against
War on Campus
November 2, 2001
CounterPunch
Wire
Green
Party Leader Detained at Maine Airport; Prevented from Boarding
Any Plane
Alexander Cockburn
FBI Eyes
Torture
November 1, 2001
Dean Baker
Dying
for Patents
Sami Amarah
US Attempts
to Recruit
Russian Vets of Afghan War
Molly Secours
Where
Are the Voices of Reason? Let the Women
Be Heard
William Blum
Unleashing the
CIA
October 31, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
Terrorize
the Poor,
Subsidize the Rich
Chris Clarke
Thank God
for Berkeley
Steve
Perry
The
Silent Genocide
Resources:
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About 9/11
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Five
Days That
Shook The World:
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By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
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CounterPunch
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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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Reviews of Gore:
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November
13, 2001
The Great Unificator
by David Vest
After floating the idea that Bill Clinton may
have been a KGB agent while studying abroad, charging him with
the murder of Vince Foster, hounding him through the swamps of
Whitewater, all without result, and impeaching him for lying
about sex with an intern, only to see him acquited, the man's
die-hard enemies have still not figured out that hating Clinton
for his personal failings is like holding Nero in contempt for
his fiddle technique.
Now we are told, by the same crowd who
threw the American govenment into deadlock and constitutional
crisis while doing everything in their power to cripple his presidency,
that Clinton should be investigated yet again for "failing"
to stop Bin Laden. He did not, it appears "do enough."
Did his failure to "do enough,"
one wonders, take place by chance on days when the president
of the United States was being interrogated for hours by Kenneth
Starr? Was it wise to force Clinton to concentrate on cigars
and butt-saving and the meaning of "is" during this
time? Or was it enough to rely on his much maligned ability to
"compartmentalize"?
If Al Gore were now president, does anyone
doubt that the same people who impaled themselves repeatedly
on Clinton's cigar, rank on rank, would be making Gore's life
a living hell?
God only knows what they would be doing
to President Ralph Nader.
But Clinton is gone to Harlem, Gore has
grown a disguise, and apparently the mainstream media cannot
locate Ralph Nader. (If they knew how to find him, surely they
would have asked his opinion of what to do about September 11.
Come to think of it, they haven't even asked Ross Perot. If they
can exhume the corpse of Jeanne Kirkpatrick and put her on Fox,
you'd think they could find out what recent presidential candidates
are saying.)
Instead, we have George W. Bush, and
a country united behind him. The error is to assume that Bush
has anything much to do with this. And yet, if you think the
country would be just as united behind Clinton, Gore or Nader,
you have been into the goofer dust.
That people are willing, however reluctantly,
to unite behind a Republican president but not a Democrat (and
certainly not a third party candidate, assuming one could get
to the White House) is due to one fact: the Republican party
is now dominated by people who will no longer unite behind anyone
who isn't one of their own. This is the problem shared by both
Democratic and future Third Party candidates.
Lyndon Johnson was the last non-Republican
who could unite official Washington. He could do it because he
was elected in a landslide and knew how to crack heads. Thus
the Congress was still effectively behind him even after the
voting public coughed him up in New Hampshire.
The Republican party of today is (in
large part) unwilling to participate constructively in any endeavor
it does not control. It controls the Supreme Court, and thus
Bush is president, even though Gore won the popular vote and
would have won a statewide Florida hand recount conducted under
any standard. (He would have won it narrowly, but there now appears
to be no plausible scenario under which he would have lost.)
Bush "changed the tone" in
Washington merely by becoming president. The Republicans now
praise themselves because they stopped barking when Clinton left.
Meanwhile, Bush's political instincts are as keen as his intellect
is dull. The far right are his core constituency, but he does
not need them for the time being, not with an 87% job approval
rating.
But he will need them yet again, when
the bubble bursts and his approval rating plummets, as it is
bound to do if the "war" drags on and the unemployment
lines keep getting longer. Therefore he throws them a bone: Oregon.
Oregon's assisted suicide law irks the
far right. Allowing Ashcroft (a "heavy" from central
casting) to interfere with it delights the core supporters without
really giving them anything and politically speaking hurts nowhere
but Oregon, which went for Gore anyway. Since the impact is confined
to a single state, more or less, the ruling will not provoke
widespread resistance. Even if the ploy doesn't work (the likely
scenario), Bush has already won his points with the far right
without alienating too many people who might have voted for him.
A final thought on the polls. Bush's
current job approval ratings are more like the NASDAQ during
the tech boom than they are like Enron, whose chairman, Kenneth
Lay, gave big bucks to put Bush in the White House. The high-flying
energy concern practically disappeared -- faster than the value
of stock in www.fattechbubble.gulp -- before Bush could even
finish his first year in office.
"Be careful of anything that's just
what you want it to be," Waylon Jennings used to sing, for
anyone who would listen. CP
David Vest
is a writer, poet and piano player for the Cannonballs. A native
of Alabama, he now lives in Portland, Oregon. Visit his webpage
for samples of the Cannonballs' brand of take no prisoners rock
& roll and other Vest columns: http://www.mindspring.com/~dcqv
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