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Today's
Stories
February 26, 2004
Virginia Tilly
The Deeper Meaning of the Wall
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
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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February
26, 2004
Bullets and Ballots
Bush's
Electoral Endgame?
By CHRIS FLOYD
Well, that's it then. The show is over. The scales
have fallen. The monstrous gears of the dark satanic mills that
spewed their poison fog across the land have ground to halt at
last.
George W. Bush's performance in his nationally
televised interview this week was so abysmal, so completely divorced
from the waking reality of the rest of the world, that even his
faithful spear-carriers in the far-right horde--not mention the
power-worshiping poltroons of the mainstream media--reacted as
if they'd been slapped upside the head with a particularly dank
and smelly mackerel. They're shocked--shocked!--to find incompetence
in this establishment!
As the delusion and dissembling tumbled
from Bush's nervously pursed lips, his stalwarts at the National
Review and the Wall Street Journal bemoaned his "bumbling,"
his strange "disconnection," and the "patently
dishonest" answers he offered to questions about the larcenous
boondoggle he calls a budget. The great gray goose of the New
York Times--which had notoriously stovepiped the lurid WMD fantasies
of would-be Iraqi strongman Ahmed Chalabi and his Pentagon paymasters
directly into the public discourse, fanning the fever for war--reeled
in disbelief at the president's "fuzziness and inconsistency"
on Iraq and his frightening inability "to distinguish real
threats from false alarms."
From hard right to soft center, the collective
lament arose: "What's happened to our hero? Why is he suddenly
shuffling, shifting, skulking, why is he telling such lies?"
The answer of course is that nothing has happened to Bush; he's
always shuffled, shifted, skulked and told lies, like some kind
of nightmare reanimation of Richard Nixon's corpse. (Indeed,
the main wormtongues at Bush's ear--Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld--learned
their dark arts in the Nixon White House.) That the media poltroons
themselves were guilty of "patently dishonest fuzziness
and inconsistency" in eagerly swallowing--nay, abetting--the
Stalinist manipulations of Bush's reekingly false public image
is a truth not likely to be universally acknowledged any time
soon by, er, the media.
But if speaking truth to power is not
exactly their bag, our poltroons do know a trend when they see
one. And the pack could hardly ignore a big hunk of red meat
like Bush's poll plunge--a 10-point drop after arms inspector
David Kay admitted that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass
destruction. Of course, Kay's declaration was hardly a revelation
to anyone who'd been paying attention; but with all them scary
black folk out there raising a profitable ruckus--Kobe! Michael!
Janet!--how could any decent poltroon be expected to focus on
trivia like the pointless slaughter of 10,000 innocent people
in Iraq? It's much easier to whip up some old-timey race-baiting
tabloid brew--"Black sex fiends on a rampage!" -- than
ask serious questions about White House warmongering.
Thus, at first, the media seemed content
to confine Kay's myth-shattering admission to the usual ghetto
of arcane political wonkery. But then a funny thing happened:
this one little flicker of truth burned through the poison fog
like the million-mile lash of a solar flare. The public, long
swaddled in Bushist propaganda and poltroonish diversions, suddenly
heard some hard, true, simple facts: There were no WMDs. There
were no WMD programs. There was nothing for Saddam to threaten
America with, nothing for him to pass on to al Qaeda. The case
for war was based on nothing.
From this, the public drew the only possible
conclusion: their president was either a murderous liar or a
dangerous fool. As neither attribute is especially beguiling
in a government official, Bush's poll numbers--already weak despite
the heroic media effort to maintain the fiction that he was a
"popular war leader"--went south in a big way. The
Oz-like Bush Machine has long maintained its illegitimate power
by projecting an illusion of invincibility; but when Bush sank
beneath the magic 50-percent approval threshold, even the poltroons
began to notice the ugly reality behind the Regime's bright sham.
So what next? The Bushists have only
ever had two methods of masking the rapacious truth of their
extremist ideology: sham and blood. Now that the sham is unraveling,
right and center, they have just one card left to play: the death's-head
joker--war.
The Regime has already announced a "major
spring offensive" in Afghanistan, with military brass and
Bushist operatives in Congress "guaranteeing" the capture
of Osama bin Laden, AP reports. It shouldn't be hard to do: his
hiding place in the mountains of Pakistan has been well-known
for more than two years. In fact, one might have rousted him
out before now, if one hadn't been too busy stuffing one's cronies
with boodle from Babylon. Of course, the breathtaking stupidity
of announcing the attack months beforehand will give bin Laden
plenty of time to prepare; the likely result will be the unnecessary
deaths of hundreds of American soldiers--and thousands of local
civilians--in a cynical ploy to goose Bush's poll numbers before
the election.
But an "Osama bounce" could
prove as fleeting as the "Saddam spike." So there's
more mischief afoot. The American military is now engaged in
its largest troop rotation since World War II. Bush has also
forcibly extended the service terms of thousands of reserves
and National Guard forces--a stealth draft to feed fresh meat
into the Iraqi maw. The upshot, as analyst James Conachy notes,
is that by late summer, Bush will have 120,000 battle-hardened
troops back in the Homeland, ready for new adventures.
The road to Damascus? Code Red and martial
law? The possibilities are endless--for this gang of grifters
will certainly not go gentle into that electoral good night.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. His CounterPunch piece on Rumsfeld's
plan to provoke terrorist attacks came in at Number 4
on Project Censored's final tally of the Most Censored stories
of 2002. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
Weekend
Edition Features for February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
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