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Today's Stories December 17 / 18, 2005 Gabriel Kolko The Decline of the American Empire December 16, 2005 Tom Kerr CNN's Goddess of Vengeance: What's Not to Love About Nancy Grace? Mark Engler The WTO in Hong Kong: Is Market Access the Answer to Poverty? John Bomar When Ollie North Came to Hot Springs Patrick Cockburn Iraq Votes; Now What? Pierre Tristam Iraq, Ourselves William S. Lind The Fine Art of Withdrawal Cyril Neville Why I'm Not Going Back to New Orleans Robert Jensen Monkey See, Monkey Do: Reason, Evolution and Intelligent Design Saul Landau Bolivian Democracy and the US: a History Lesson Website CounterPunch & Dr. Price Vanquish Anthropologist Spies   December 15, 2005 Oren Ben-Dor The Ethical and Legal Challenges Facing Palestine Stan Cox "Agroterrorists" Needn't Bother Joshua Frank Organic Inconsistencies: Federal Food Politics Ben Terrall Waivers for State Terror: Bush and the Indonesian Generals Patrick Cockburn Silence Descends on Baghdad Monica Benderman What Peace Needs Walter A. Davis Fear and Loathing in San Quentin Vijay Prashad Our Torture Problem Website of the Day Hourly Wages After Four Years of "Recovery" December 14, 2005 Patrick Cockburn Iran Poised to Win Iraqi Elections Paul Craig Roberts Lethal Developments Lawrence R. Velvel A Bore Called Bob: On Trying to Read Woodward Wayne Garcia The Summer of Sami John Sugg Preach Peace, Sami; Get Truthful Prosecutors Gary Leupp Bush and the Constitution: "Just a Goddamned Piece of Paper" Ray McGovern Torture: a Defining Moment Alan Maass They Murdered a Peacemaker April Hurley, MD NPR Swallows Bush's Guestimate on Iraqi Dead Kevin Alexander Gray Richard Pryor's Mirror on America   December 13, 2005 Stephen T. Banko, III Heroes Patrick Cockburn America's War So Far: 1000 Days of Getting It Wrong Laura Carlsen What's at Play at the WTO Karl Grossman Nuclear Routlette in the Troposhere: Another NASA Plutonium Launch Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Original Sin Kevin Zeese Report from the International Peace Conference in London Norman Solomon At the Gates of San Quentin Michael G. Smith Ending the Death Penalty Stew Albert California Killers Bob Dylan Song for Tookie: George Jackson Phil Gasper California Murders Tookie Williams: a Report from San Quentin Website of the Day Boot Hill   December 12, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts The Defenders of Torture Lawrence R. Velvel George the Disconnected Jessica Stewart My Husband is at the Gates of Gitmo George Bisharat Busharon: a Fusion of Like Minds Nate Mezmer Killing Tookie Williams: If a Black Man Dies in America, Does It Make a Sound? Earl Ofari Hutchinson Richard Pryor Wasn't Crazy Alison Weir My Bethlehem Experience Seth Sandronsky Thank You, Richard Pryor Patrick Cockburn Iraq: the Beginning of the End Website of the Day Wrestling for Peace December 10 / 11, 2005 Alexander Cockburn All the News That's Fit to Buy Landau / Hassen The Condemned of Nablus Ralph Nader The Widening Wasteland of American Media Linn Washington, Jr The Philly Media and Mumia: When They Don't Bash, They Ignore Bill Christison Apathy, US Culpability and Human Rights Day Mike Ferner The Courage of Jim Loney Elizabeth Schulte Abortion and the Bush Court Neve Gordon / Yigal Bronner Murder in Jerusalem Linda S. Heard Saddam's Trial: Grandstanding in the Theater of the Absurd Ingmar Lee A Kayak Journey to Vancouver Island's Wildest Forest Ray McGovern Lies, Torture and the Six Blind Mice John Chuckman Torture and White Phosphorous: the Moral Hell of Condi Rice John Ryan An Honorary Degree in Child Sacrifice?: Madeleine Albright and US Foreign Policy Dick J. Reavis From Waco to Baghdad Christopher Brauchli Bush's Hired Pens Behzad Yaghmaian Trapped at the Gates of the European Union Aseem Shrivastava The Winter in Delhi, 1984 John Ross Bushlandia in Black and White Ben Tripp War, What is It Good For? St. Clair / Pollack / Vest / Despair Playlist: What We're Listening to This Week Poets' Basement Hassen, Bear Dog, Ford, Mickey Z, Albert & Engel Website of the Week Burn a Brick for Bush   December 9, 2005 Linn Washington, Jr. Roots of Gitmo Torture Lie Close to Home Dave Zirin / Mike Stark On Seeing Wesley Baker Die Patrick Cockburn Blair Tries to Cover Up $1.3 Billion Iraqi Theft Alexander Cockburn Murtha Returns to Attack; Flays Bush Lila Rajiva Shooting the Mentally Ill Gary Leupp White House Liars on the Defensive Jason Leopold Rove Running Out of Answers, Time Bruce K. Gagnon So These Are the Democrats? Andrew Cockburn Meet Rahm Emmanuel, the Democrats' New Gatekeeper Website of the Day "X-mas Time for Visa"   December 8, 2005 Kathy Kelly Blessed are the Merciful in Baghdad James Petras The Venezuelan Election: Chavez Wins, Bush Loses (Again) William S. Lind Questionable Assumptions: Dissecting the Stategy for Victory Laura Carlsen The Strange Mission of Vicente Fox: Free Trade and Mexico Justin Akers Bush's Border War Thomas Graham, Jr A Nuclear Pearl Harbor in Outer Space? Norman Solomon Rumsfeld's Handshake Deal with Saddam Tariq Ali / Robin Blackburn The Lost John Lennon Interview Website of the Day Pigs at the Trough of War   December 7, 2005 John Ryan Dershowitz vs. Chomsky: a Review of the Harvard Debate Gary Leupp Suicide Before Dishonor in Occupied Iraq Fran Quigley How the ACLU Didn't Steal Christmas Jeremy Brecher / Brendan Smith Bush War Crimes: the Posse Gathers Joshua Frank Bird Dogging Hillary William W. Morgan Rendition, Torture and Democracy Dave Lindorff A Stunning Win for Mumia Abu Jamal Patrick Cockburn Saddam: "Come Visit My Cage" Harold Pinter Art, Truth and Politics: the Nobel Lecture Website of the Day Witnesses to Torture   December 6, 2005 Ron Jacobs No One is Illegal; No One is an Infidel Patrick Cockburn Inside Saddam's Trial: Tales of the Human Meat Grinder Yifat Susskind Death, Politics and the Condom: African Women Confront Bush's AIDS Policy Mike Whitney How Greenspan Skewered America Pat Williams Public Land Should Stay Public Paul Craig Roberts Condi to Europe: Trust Us Website of the Day Debunking Woodward   December 5, 2005 John Walsh The Lies of John Edwards: What Did the Democrats Know and When Did They Know It? Brian Cloughley The Poor Dead: the Relative Value of Human Lives Mokhiber / Weissman The Corporate Crime Quiz Robert Jensen How Big Money Eviscerates the First Amendment Norman Solomon Hidden in Plane Sight: US Media Ignores Iraq Air War Plan Peter Rost, MD An Open Letter to the Justice Department: Pfizer May Have Violated Federal Laws When They Fired Me Lila Rajiva The Torture-Go-Round: CIA's Rendition Flights to Secret Prisons Website of the Day National Day of Counter-Recruitment December 3 / 4, 2005 Alexander Cockburn The Revolt of the Generals Lawrence R. Velvel Iraq, Brains and Lies Rev. William Alberts The Forgotten Christmas Story: Saying No to King Herod Saul Landau Latino Troops Have Parents Ralph Nader Consumerama Paul Craig Roberts Don't Confuse the Jobs Hype with the Facts Mike Whitney Blood Feast: Celebrating Executions in America Allan Lichtman The DeLay Scheme: Blatantly Buying Our Government Dave Lindorff A Sudden Rush for the Exits? Brian Concannon, Jr. Haiti's Elections Fred Gardner Oregon NORML Honors Growers Manuel Garcia, Jr. On Freeing the CPT Carol Wolman Remembering the 60s St. Clair / Vest / Walker / Pollack Playlist: What We're Listening to This Week Poets' Basement Albert, Engel and Orloski Website of the Weekend Free the CPT   December 2, 2005 Stan Goff An Open Letter to Congress from a Veteran and Military Dad Mike Ferner Beware Iraqization: Melvin Laird, Vietnam and Christmas Bombings Over Baghdad? Christopher Brauchli Bush's Constitutional Kamikazes: Padilla's No-Win Dilemma Niranjan Ramakrishnan Questions for the President Manuel Talens The Chávez Theorem Peter Phillips Death By Torture: Media Ignores the Hard Evidence J.L. Chestnut, Jr. Alabama's Taliban: Judge Roy Moore, Preachers and Dixie Hypocrisy Website of the Day Support the Hampton University Peace Activists!   December 1, 2005 John Walsh, MD The God Gaps Ron Jacobs Hard Rain: Toward a Greater Air War in Iraq? Jenna Orkin EPA's Latest Betrayal at Ground Zero Joshua Frank Howard Dean's Blunt Message: Forget Palestine Tiffany Ten Eyck Rank and File Resistance to Delphi Missy Comley Beattie Home on the Range: Where the Fear and the Animus Play Eli Stephens The Reed and Kerry Show Elaine Cassel A Government Game of "Gotcha" with Jose Padilla Website of the Day Rare Erotica   November 30, 2005 Allen / D'Amato Incident at Oglala 30 Years Later: the Long Struggle of Leonard Peltier Mike Whitney The Cheerleader at Annapolis Kevin Zeese The Hallucinations of Joe Lieberman Norman Solomon Colin Powell: Still Craven After All These Years Ramzy Baroud Sharon's New Party Dave Lindorff What Happened to All Those Bush/Cheney Bumperstickers? Stephen Soldz Mental Health Workers in Iraq   November 29, 2005 Phil Gasper Live from Death Row: an Interview with Tookie Williams Behzad Yaghmaian The Ghost of Sangatte Joshua Frank Jack Abramoff's Bi-partisan Sleaze Walter A. Davis Life on Death Row: a Monologue Gary Leupp Bush the Dupe? Len Colodny Woodwardgate: Still Protecting the Rightwing Jeffrey St. Clair The Duke and the Enterprise: Randy Cunningham's Crash Landing Bill Quigley Human Rights Leaders Call for Release of Haiti's Political Prisoners Website of the Day Watch Chomsky vs. Dershowitz Live, Tonight at 7PM, EST!   November 28, 2005 Chris Reed The "Bomb Al Jazeera" Documents Trial David Isenberg Cooked Intelligence: the Dog that Didn't Bark Ron Jacobs Contraindications: a Review of Blood on the Border Norman Solomon The Woodward Scandal Must Not Blow Over Justin E.H. Smith Schwarzenegger's Curious Power Mickey Z. Abbie Hoffman at 70: Steal This City Mike Whitney The Pentagon's Domestic Spying Operation David Swanson Is Impeachment an Election Issue? Paul Craig Roberts The Grave Threat of the Bush Administration Website of the Day "Don't Bomb Us!": a Blog by Al Jazeera Staffers   November 26 / 27, 2005 Alexander Cockburn How the Democrats Undercut John Murtha Saul Landau Who We Are: Torture and the Empire Ralph Nader Junk Television: Excluding Voices That Save Lives Brian Cloughley What Are They Dying For? John Ross When a Language Dies Gary Leupp The Nepal Pact Fred Gardner Dr. Denney Goes to Arkansas Christopher Brauchli Compassion for Corporations: Northrup Grumman and Katrina's Victims Dave Lindorff US War Crimes List Keeps Growing P. Sainath See, Neoliberalism Really Works: Net Worth of India's Billionaires Soars! Timothy J. Freeman The Price of Freedom Lila Rajiva Of Mice, Men and GM Peas Eric Ruder Beat the Needle: Saving Tookie Williams Seth Sandronsky Working Toward Whiteness: an Interview with David Roediger Joaquin Bustelo What Really Happened at Mar del Plata Lewis Alper Is the President's Soul in Jeopardy?: an Evangelical Christian Looks at Bush's Skull and Bones Initiation Will Youmans In Search of Paradise Phyllis Pollack The Stones' Rough Justice in Bush Time St. Clair / Vest Playlists: What We're Listening to This Week Barbara LaMorticella Poetry and the City of Ideas Poets' Basement LaMorticella, Buknatski, Engel, Albert and Davies Website of the Weekend NLR: The Chequered Rainbow     November 25, 2005 David Price How US Anthropologists Planned "Race-Specific" Weapons Against the Japanese Brian McKenna Will Bush Miss the Next Bhopal? Jeff Halper Peretz or Bust? Ray McGovern Will the US Seize the Opportunity for Troop Withdrawal? Leigh Saavedra Thanksgiving at Camp Casey Ingmar Lee How Have the Mighty Fallen? Website of the Day Saving Cathedral Grove   November 24, 2005 James Petras How to Think About War and Peace Bob Shirley Thanksgiving Torture: What the Puritans Fled Mike Fox Torture Survivors Speak for Themselves Niranjan Ramakrishnan Adrift? Perhaps. A Draft? Never! Greg Moses Thanksgiving Delayed: TX High Court Blesses Inequality Alexander Cockburn Turkeys in the Larger Scheme of Things   November 23, 2005 Ramzy Baroud The Great Gaza Border Deal: What Does It Mean? Mike Whitney Bush, Padilla and Thomas More Stan Cox Red, White and Blue Dawn: What a Bad Hollywood Film Can Teach Americans About Life Under Occupation Linda S. Heard Targeting Al Jazeera November 22, 2005 Kevin Gray / Mike Hersh Maxine Waters, the Real Leader of the Anti-War Caucus Ralph Nader What Do Dems Stand For? Michael Donnelly The "Vetting" of Bernard Kerik Mike Ferner The CIA's "Torture Taxi" in the Spotlight Pierre Tristam The Justice Deficit Marshall Auerback Bush's "Compassionate Conservativism": Neither Compassionate Nor Conservative Website of the Day I Don't Like Geldof   November 21, 2005 Mike Marqusee Clinton's Hypocrisies on Iraq Josh Frank Democratic Hawks: the Avian Flu of the Antiwar Movement Mike Whitney Hugo Chavez vs. the King of Vacations Norman Solomon Getting Out of Iraq Russ Baker Woodward's Weakness Robert Jensen A National Day of Atonement Paul Craig Roberts Lies and Official Secrets   November 19 / 20, 2005 Fred Gardner The Raid on MendoHealing Rep. Cynthia McKinney The House GOP Has Done a Heinous Thing: Stop Playing Politics; Get the Troops Out Now Ron Jacobs A Pathetic Congress: If It Walks and Talks Like a Withdrawal Resolution, Why Won't You Vote For It? David Vest The Politics of Surrender: It's as American as Robert E. Lee J.L. Chestnut, Jr. Condi Rice's Disdain for the Civil Rights Movement John R. Bomar Staying the Course on "Freedom's Frontier": a Vietnam Vet on Iraq John Ross The Dragon Flies High, But Not Over Mexico Phillip Cryan Colombia: "Political Kidnapping" and Murder in Cauca Dave Lindorff RIP In These Times Dick J. Reavis The Future of the Daily Press Jeremy Scahill Vegetarian Between Meals: This War Can't Be Stopped by a Loyal Opposition Dan Wright Cleaning Up Alaska's Scan Bay John Stanton Scowcroft Talks Turkey; Edmounds Fights Fascism St. Clair / Vest / Walker Playlist: What We're Listening to This Week Phyllis Pollack The Stones: Rarities Dr. Susan Block Our Night of Weimar Love Poets Basement Albert, Engel, Ford, Harley and Louise   November 18, 2005 Michael Neumann The Palestinians and the Party Line Dave Lindorff Murtha and the L Word Michael Donnelly Black November 15 Mark Chmiel / Andrew Wimmer Uncrucify Them Don Monkerud A Decent Workplace Tom Kerr Grant Clemency to Tookie Williams Trish Schuh Faking the Case Against Syria   November 17, 2005 John Walsh A Fractured Anti-War Movement Rep. John Murtha Iraq Must Be Freed from the US Occupation Brian J. Foley We Are All In GITMO Now CounterPunch News Service Guardian Apologizes to Chomsky; Publishes Total Retraction of Brockes' Slurs Dave Lindorff In Post-Saddam Iraq, There are No Civilians Mark T. Harris Coming Out in an Up-and-Coming Sport Cockburn / St. Clair From Reporter to Courtier: the Decline of Bob Woodward   November 16, 2005 John F. Sugg Al-Arian Speaks: In His First Interview Since the Trial Began, Al-Arian Talks About What the Jury Didn't Hear Noam Chomsky Putting Out the Englightenment Dave Lindorff Shake and Bake: Pentagon Admits Using Phosphorous Bombs on Fallujah Evelyn Pringle Laurie Mylroie's War Sam Husseini Trying to Look a Female Suicide Bomber in the Eye Pierre Tristam Toturers' Theater Greg Bates Waffling Alito Charms DiFi Farrah Hassen Moustapha AkkadDavid Lean of the Middle East Killed in Amman Blast Bill Christison Evidence Mounts That Bush Wants New Wars Website of the Day Violent Oscillations   November 15, 2005 Todd Chretien My Evening in the No Spin Zone; Or Why Bill O'Reilly Hates San Francisco Leah Caldwell Death of the Jailhouse Press Frederick Hudson Rosa's Wreath: Miss Parks and Robert Williams Harry Browne Bush-Linked Judge Bows Out: Another Mistrial in Irish Ploughshares Case Jason Leopold Secret CIA Testimony: Iraq Posed No Threat Ingmar Lee Logging Lackies vs. Canada's Most Endangered Species Diana Barahona Showdown on the Silver Coast Tom Andre New Orleans, Two Months Later Website of the Weekend Ernest Crichlow: 1914-2005   November 14, 2005 Diana Johnstone The Origins of the Guardian's Attack on Chomsky Paul Craig Roberts Power Over All: Unlimited Detentions and the End of Habeas Corpus Conn Hallinan Provoking Syria: Cambodia All Over Again? Joshua Frank Off She Goes: Hillary in Israel Christopher Reed The Persistence of Racism in Koizumi's Japan   November 11 / 13, 2005 Alexander Cockburn First the Lying, Then the Pardons Gwyneth Leech Cross Connections: a Painter Reimagines the Passion of Christ in the Wake of Abu Ghraib Elmas Mallo Chillin' in the Blazin' Texas Sun: Inside the Texas Prison System Michael Neumann The Rebel King of Bluegrass: Jimmy Martin, an Appreciation Saul Landau Leakgate: the Screenplay Sam Husseini Bush and Zarqawi Bomb Because We Let Them Brian Cloughley Sleaze, Deceit and Torture Ron Jacobs Rep. McGovern's Withdrawal Resolution: a Step in the Right Direction? Lila Rajiva Dover Bitch: the Curses of Pat Robertson Michael Donnelly Hypocrisy Watch Joe Allen Murder in El Salvador: Who Killed Gilberto Soto? Roland Sheppard Lessons from the Montgomery Bus Boycott Justin E.H. Smith Another Monkey Trial? Ben Tripp The Cost of War St. Clair / Vest Playlists: What We're Listening to This Week Poets' Basement Jones, Louise, Ford, Smith, Albert and Engel Website of the Weekend Iraq Vets and Against the War Need Your Help!     November 10, 2005 Peterside, Ogon, Watts and Zalik Delta Blues Again: Ken Saro-Wiwa, 10 Years Gone Pat Williams Will Alito Cost the Republicans the Senate? Steve Higgs Bush Crony Targets Indiana's Forests: 400% Hike in Logging Jimmy Massey Is Ron Harris Telling the Truth? Lucson Pierre-Charles Haiti: Insanity Takes Over Anthony Newkirk Syria in the Crosshairs Lawrence R. Velvel Why Did Libby Lie? Website of the Day Imperial Margarine November 9, 2005 Gary Leupp The Niger Deception / Plame Affair: an Incomplete Chronology Tariq Ali Blair Defeated on Terror Laws Chris Floyd The Philosopher's Stone Elaine Cassel The Shocking Trial of an American Citizen: the Case of Ahmed Abu Ali Joshua Frank Sen. Max Baucus's NASCAR Pay Day Alison Weir Memo to Jon Stewart: Glad You're Against Torture, So Why'd You Give Israel a Pass? Diana Johnstone Rage in the Banlieue November 8, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Still No Jobs Roger Burbach Bush v. Chavez: the Imperial President Meets the Bolivarian Democrat Ron Jacobs An Interview with Behzad Yaghmaian on the Paris Uprising Ralph Nader "The Worst Marketed Disease on the Planet" Jim McGrath Voter Beware: a Cautionary Tale for Election Day David Bloom McCain, Israel and Torture: Setting the Record Straight Stan Goff Jimmy Massey, Ron Harris, and Ambush Journalism         Subscribe Online

December 17, 2005 The Democrats: an Impotent & Tolerated Opposition Party The Whig Interpretation of Recent History By WERTHER It is said that the earth's magnetic field is about 10 percent weaker than it was when Carl Friedrich Gauss first measured it in 1845. At some point, the field will reverse poles and regenerate itself. Compasses will then point south. This process, which will no doubt confuse migratory birds, may or may not be an example of intelligent design. But as a metaphor for the life of political parties, the magnetic field theory has some merit. As the issues and controversies which motivate the formation of a party inevitably fade, the party's platform becomes hollow rodomontade, full of sound and fury signifying only jobs for the boys. Once the causes which formed the party pass out of human memory, the rituals weaken to the point where, at some unrecorded instant, the ideological platform may actually reverse, with no one understanding why. Unlike the earth's magnetic field, however, the party process is not necessarily a perpetuum mobile. Should the party no longer hold the allegiance of its followers, it collapses. Examples of this tendency litter the detritus bin of history. The Whig Party of late 17th and early 18th century England consisted of a few score wealthy oligarchs and the commercial interests that supported them. Its central tenets were an unquenchable hatred of popery, Frenchmen, and Spaniards, and a seething inimicality towards its hapless Celtic wards in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. So averse was the Whig Ascendancy to anything that smacked of Romanism that it imported an entire royal line from Hanover rather than take a chance on the Pope-addicted Stuarts. Yet in time the Whigs became a more-or-less legitimate vehicle for expansion of the franchise, abolition of slavery and religious tests, home rule in Ireland, and do-goodism generally. By the early 20th century, English Whiggery (or the Liberal Party, as it then styled itself) had a radical strain which would appear positively Bolshevik today. Its Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George (a Welsh Methodist leading the successor party to the Whig Ascendancy was in itself a novel reversal) offered a budget whose confiscatory inheritance taxes would probably strike the Hon. Cynthia McKinney as too radical. Yet the contradictions between its platform and its lingering cultural inheritance of confessional politics doomed Liberal Whiggery during the great crisis of World War I. Caught between an authentic, blood-and-guts nationalist Conservative Party and a Labour Party that seemed (then) to more genuinely represent the interests of the working man, the Liberals shrank into a debating society of 19th century holdovers. Let us move to a more contemporary example of platform reversal in the form of the Republican Party of the United States. Born amid the uproar of abolitionism, Transcendental kookery, and industrial expansion, the Republican Party had a definite and comprehensible platform. Whatever the humanitarian motivation of some of its early abolitionist adherents, the Republicans were driven by a far more practical appreciation of the slavery issue. Lincoln understood that the spread of chattel slavery was a dagger pointed at the heart of free labor, of commercial development, and of the prospect that the United States would ever shed its industrial and financial dependence on Great Britain. Keep Britain (or proto-fascist France under Louis Napoleon) out of the Western Hemisphere, was Lincoln's strategy both to end the slavocracy and to avert a Balkanized United States. Slavery meant a debt-service economy; the Southern planters were as beholden to the City of London as Argentina is to Wall Street today. While the North and the South had similar per capita wealth, south of the Mason-Dixon Line it was overwhelmingly concentrated in the planter class. Non-slaveholding Southern whites had only half the income of their Northern counterparts. Antebellum travelers such as de Tocqueville noted that to cross the Ohio River was to regress in time. Common schools, funded by the community as a sensible measure of human improvement, were as rare in Dixie as shoes. The twin planks in the Republican platform, the tariff and exclusion of slavery from the territories, were two sides of the same coin. Strangling the slavocracy meant opposition to British finance imperialism. On the other hand, had the South maintained control of the executive, Congress, and the Supreme Court, territorial expansion would likely have moved south, into Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, rather than west. By 1890, America might have more nearly resembled King Leopold's Congo or Queen Vicky's India than an industrial power. The blue-coated line held at Little Round Top, and the reader knows the rest of the story. But what became of the party that professed to believe in internal development, constitutional liberties, the protective tariff, suspicion of international power politics, and support for the yeoman farmer and independent businessman? The magnetic field appears to have reversed. The Grand Old Party is now the premier exponent of "free trade" (actually a kind of reverse mercantilism whereby financiers profit from gutting industry) [1]. Like their polar opposites of 1860, the Republicans have fervently embraced equatorial imperialism, substituting the oil-bearing strata of the Middle East for the Sugar Islands of the Caribbean. Similarly long gone are the old nativist-isolationist suspicions of foreign entanglement. Perfidious Albion of yore receives far more solicitude from the Presidential Palace than, say, large tracts of the United States proper. [2] The voter base of the GOP has likewise inverted. Formerly a party of the middling sort of Mainline Protestant shopkeepers, farmers, clerks, and Rotarians in the Northeast and Midwest (the latter being the infamous Jell-O Salad Belt), the Republicans have latterly made their greatest electoral gains in the Old Confederacy, the territory of their old mortal slavocratic nemesis. Find a vocal exponent of the Lost Cause, and nine chances in ten he votes for the party of Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman. The military of the former Yankee invader is now the object of considerable reverence by the denizens of the South, as well as a popular career track. Robert LaFollette, make way for NASCAR, the Reverend Moon, and the Baghdad airport road. The United States under Republican control is now the world's leading example of a debt-service economy. It is as if the nostrums of John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis took possession of the GOP in the manner of demons possessing a soul. During the last five years' reign of the incumbent president, the national debt has almost doubled. The dignity of free labor, once a pillar of Lincoln's program, has given way to a more sophisticated version of the plantation system: a rootless, global system of downward wage arbitrage. Just as the shoeless antebellum Poor White Trash was conditioned to hate the slave rather than the slave system which reduced him to penury, so has the modern equivalent been propagandized by talk radio to blame foreign labor, or immigrant labor, or homosexual marriage, or stem cell research, or evolution, or the next bugaboo, rather than the system which arbitrages labor. The capacity for abstract thought is not a defining mark of the present age. When Elisha Hunt Rhodes and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain tramped over the country whose constitutional principles they defended, theirs was an inward-looking, defensive patriotism. Patriotism, an attachment to a locality and its folkways, and a desire that one's children be brought up in the same mental atmosphere, has given way, particularly under the Republican Party, to aggressive nationalism, which is the opposite of patriotism. Nationalists, who seem to have found a home in the Republican Party, have very little knowledge or appreciation of the country, its traditions, or the essential inwardness of most of its people. For that very reason the most hyperbolic form of nationalism, neoconservatism, typically infects persons, like the Wall Street Journal's Max Boot, who have only the most tenuous connections to the physical United States. In their rootless, cosmopolitan way, these vagabonds have battened onto the United States in the same manner that foreign communists once made their hajj to Moscow. They may even be the same people as those moldering communists, or their offspring. Where an American's eye might glimpse the Adirondacks, or Sioux Falls, or Oshkosh, or the Father of Waters flowing unvexed to the sea, the neoconservative sees only the shimmering mirage of Imperial Rome. Thus the Republican Party, anno 2005. In line with the manufactured Zeitgeist, the party elders have introduced a new catechism to snare the booboisie. Who would have thought the party of Charles Francis Adams and Thomas Alva Edison would declare war on science? Yet from stem cell research to evolution, from climate change to sociology, the Grand Old Party shows a cast of mind more appropriate to sour Wahhabite fanatics of the Arabian Peninsula than enlightened adults. But this catechism, given the natural human tropism to regress to the level of the lower phyla, is undeniably popular. Similarly popular in the dark areas off the state highways is the idea of torture. Since the abolition of the Star Chamber, Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence has uniformly condemned torture, and with good reason. It is a reversion to the Stone Age. Its practitioners, and those who authorize it, are, without exception, sadistic scoundrels unfit for civilized company. Its absolute prohibition is the firewall between decent society and savagery. Yet somehow, the GOP has tapped into the growing vicarious sadism of a large segment of the TV-addicted public. Perhaps it is the softness of modern life, with few thrills and little danger or physical strain, that allows people to imagine torture as yet another television play where the good guys win. A little assistance from Rupert Murdoch's thinly disguised advocacy pieces for torture, like 24, is all it takes. It is hardly coincidental that a political organization which shuns science would embrace torture. Ultimately, the contradictions may prove fatal: at some point, no one will be able to build the atomic bombs necessary to keeping an angry world sufficiently intimidated. But we would not bet that the Republican Party, having reversed all its founding tenets, will collapse anytime soon: after all, une idée fausse, mais claire et précise, aura toujours plus de puissance dans le monde qu'une idée vraie, mais complexe. This brings us to the other stooge in the great American dumb-show, the Democratic Party. The Democracy began, as the GOP has presently evolved, with une idée fausse, mais claire et précis. That idea was the defense of slavery, wrapped up in mumbo-jumbo of States' rights. [3] So strong were the Democrats that even being on the losing end of a bloody civil war did not extinguish the party; indeed, the party was competitive in the North during the Civil War, and even picked up Congressional seats in the "butternut" regions of the Ohio Valley in 1862. Despite the charges of "rum, Romanism, and rebellion," the party of Jefferson managed to avoid oblivion in the post-bellum years. As early as the 1870s, it could return a majority to Congress, and in the turbulent 1880s, even a president in the massive form of Grover Cleveland (who, in H.L. Mencken's words, "sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite"--a journey made undoubtedly easier by the Gold Democrat Cleveland's fealty to the House of Morgan). After an ill-fated flirtation with the populism of William Jennings Bryan [4] The Democratic Party reverted to upstanding corporate lawyers of the stamp of Alton B. Parker and John W. Davis. The Democrats actually grasped the brass ring in the constipated form of Princeton pedagogue Thomas Woodrow Wilson. His interpretation of "The New Freedom" consisted of segregating the federal workforce, debuting Birth of a Nation in a White House screening, piling up 115,000 Yank corpses on the Western Front, imposing prohibition, and imprisoning his political opponents for terms of up to ten years. [5] How was it, then, that a collection of reactionary Bourbons later came, during the Great Depression, to represent (even if in dream more than in reality) the aspirations of the Common Man? Perhaps it is once again the mystery of force field flipping. Similarly, it is one of the supreme ironies of history that the party of slavocracy forced the most comprehensive civil rights laws since Reconstruction through the legislative meat grinder in 1964 and 1965. Did the Democrats become a radical egalitarian party? Not exactly. The party has reversed force fields again, becoming a creature of the Democratic Leadership Council. This organization apparently aspires to be junior partners with the Republican Ascendancy, and for good and sufficient reason. It's not about America, it's about Israel, the Great Britain of the 21st century. The DLC was--and is--a creature of New York high roller Michael Steinhardt, son of Sol Steinhardt, a jewel fence for the Meyer Lansky mob. Like most of organized crime, Steinhardt fils decided to go upmarket and merge with Wall Street. His millions created the Hon. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT). Steinhardt is also notable for his loose interpretation of the law of possession. In the early 1990s, he attempted to corner the market on Treasury securities, an audacious strategy which resulted in his having to pay $70 million in civil penalties to the Securities and Exchange Commission--a record fine at the time. Weep not for Steinhardt, though: he made $600 million from the scam. Steinhardt, a certifiable pro-Israel fanatic, guarantees that the Democrats will not offer a genuine political alternative to the neoconservative-dominated Republicans. Should anyone wonder why the putatively limp-wristed Democrats vote for war in Iraq and for fiscally irresponsible military budgets, Steinhardt (and his AIPAC-connected confreres) offer a rationale: should Democratic Backbencher X vote against the next war in the Middle East or against the next Pentagon boondoggle, he will have shown himself insufficiently ready to protect Israel. Such transgressions must not go unpunished. Hence the tortuous fakery of the current proceedings in Washington. The alleged opposition party's candidate in 2004 declared that Iraq was a mistake that required 30,000 more troops. Hence the Hon. Joseph Biden's aneurystic outbursts at the administration's incompetent manner of prosecuting a war he voted to wage. Hence Madame Hillary's cosponsorship of a bill to increase the size of the army. Hence the party's decision to run away from the Hon. John Murtha, a Marine veteran who said enough is enough. Hence the asinine charade of the vote of 18 November in relation to H. Res. 571, expressing the sense of the House of Representatives "that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq [should] be terminated immediately." The Democrats had the strategic option of voting "present" if they thought the question was rigged. But under the leadership of the Hon. Nancy Pelosi, who is terrified of the Lobby, the overwhelming majority of Democrats joined Republicans in voting no. [6] What does this remind us of? The Democrats' pirouettes and tergiversations harken back to another failed party, the Whigs. No, not the English Whigs, who enjoyed a two-century run. A model for failure fully equal to the Democratic Party is the short, unhappy life of the American Whig Party. Formed in reaction to the exuberant (not to say unconstitutional) policies of Andrew Jackson, the Whigs met all issues by straddling them. Faced with the Mexican War which many of them viscerally opposed, the Whigs reacted by nominating generals like William Henry Harrison and Winfield Scott. Does this remind us of the candidacy of Wesley Clark and the absurdly militaristic display of the 2004 convention? Faced with the slavery issue, the Whigs resolutely decided not to decide. Some Northern Whigs opposed slavery, while other Northern "Cotton Whigs" attempted to profit from the South's agricultural output. Southern Whigs pretended not to notice the Peculiar Institution existed at all. And so, caught between Democratic pro-slavery fire-eaters and the Free Soil insurgency (soon to become the Republican Party), the Whigs faded into oblivion. They were not bad people: the Philadelphia industrialists and border state centrists who constituted its base sought compromise and conciliation. Slavery was an embarrassment that one might ignore out of existence. War and slavery are great evils. The Whig Party attempted to compromise on a matter of utmost principle, and paid the price. The Democratic Party of 2005, as bereft of principles as it is of strategy, could suffer an even worse fate: it will not disappear, but linger on for decades, playing its assigned role as a tolerated opposition party so as to maintain the illusion of democratic participation. Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst. [1] The author's recent tour of the Midwest, once the boast and pride of industrial America, uncovered a landscape of squalor unequalled except in the more putrid parts of post-industrial England and asset-stripped Russia. [2] American Dynasty, Kevin Phillips's perceptive laparotomy of the Bush clan, posits that Bush pere et fils, themselves distantly related to English monarchs, have attempted to construct an English-style oligarchy on the erstwhile constitutional republican soil of the United States. [3] The fact that the Supreme Court's ruling in DRED SCOTT, PLAINTIFF IN ERROR, v. JOHN FA SANDFORD. December Term, 1856, and the various fugitive slave statutes derived therefrom, completely invalidated States' rights principles did not trouble the Old Democracy. [4] As a point of personal privilege, it is now in order to respond to Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn's broadside against an earlier discussion of Bryan's personal qualities . Perhaps reader Fahey and editor Cockburn overreacted in objecting to our inclusion of William Jennings Bryan in an omnium gatherum of political evangelicals. First, we previously gave respectful consideration to Bryan's populist tendencies in an earlier piece, "The Peckerwood Pericles," a fricasseeing of the Hon. Zell Miller, wherein the author stated, "as candidate for president [Bryan] held economic views that today, a century later, Sean Hannity would denounce as socialist." That said, it is far from clear whether Bryan opposed evolution based on a progressive ethical revulsion against Social Darwinism (including the eugenics movement, which itself was "progressive," at the time, cf., Margaret Sanger); or, more likely, he was simply reacting on the basis of his evangelical religious dogma. The late, great Walter Karp has suggested that Bryan was less a progressive leader than something of a red herring. The Democrats chose him in the 1896 convention more for his ability to split (and destroy) the burgeoning Progressive Party than for his potential to beat the heavily-funded McKinley, according to Karp. Bryan's free-silver platform made a riveting nomination speech, but was just one in a long American tradition of monetary panaceas proposed by cranks. It also bears mentioning that it was Southern and Midwestern-based Bryanite Methodism and Baptism which battened on the American people the all-time worst Constitutional amendment and the worst law since the Fugitive Slave Act. Those readers of Counterpunch who wonder at the manifest imbecility of the Federal government's "war" on drugs can hardly be fans of the Volstead Act. That is one of the legacies of the movement Bryan brought into being. Accordingly, Bryan's role in American politics is far more muddled and ambiguous than Ms.Fahey and Mr. Cockburn suggested. Werther would stipulate that Bryan had redeeming qualities. To say that it is inappropriate to compare him to the current crop of politico-religious demagogues (a reasonable point if properly qualified), only shows how far the republic has slid. [5] Pursuant to the Espionage Act of 1917 (18 U.S.C., Secs. 793, 794). While Wilson's Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, has been saddled with the dubious credit for the governmental 18 Brumaire, Wilson was in fact the guiding light and inspirer of the oppression. [6] The Republicans only scheduled the vote because some alert staffer noticed that Ms. Pelosi had cancelled a press conference in support of Mr. Murtha earlier the same day. Someone had apparently sensed that the Democratic leadership was not supporting Murtha, and accordingly put a resolution on the House calendar designed to drive a wedge between Murtha and Democrats beholden to Israel.

Coming in the Fall from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Click Here to Advance Order Philosopher Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz WHAT'S INSIDE Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair CounterPunch Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.