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Today's
Stories
February
2, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Hollow Candidate:
The Trouble with Howard Dean
Jan.
31 / Feb 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
January 30, 2004
Saul
Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List
Michael
Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in
the Woods
Elaine
Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo
David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton
Mike
Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression
David
Miller
The Hutton Whitewash
Sam
Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake",
Senator Kerry?
January 29, 2004
Patricia
Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist
Ron
Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized"
Immigration
Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq
Greg
Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on
Moon and Mars
Norman
Solomon
The State of the Media Union
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?
January
28, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of
Torture and Assassination
January
27, 2004
Steve
Philion
Ritter Was Right: My Exchange with
CNN's Aaron Brown
Daniel
Ellsberg
Leak Against This War: Expose the
Lies from the Inside
C.G.
Estabrook
Can George Ever Really be Elected
President?
Josh
Frank
Hot Coals in Vermont: Dean's Smoke
Screens
Greg
Moses
Racism 101 All Over Again
Gilad
Atzmon
Blood, Soil and Art
Mike
Ferner
"We're All Lied To": an
Interview with Bruce Cockburn in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
General Disorders of the Day
January
26, 2004
Sean
Donahue
The Toxic Career of Rand Beers: Kerry's
Drug War Zealot
Gary
Leupp
David Kay's Admission
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has
Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in
Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10,
Morris 0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan
Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's
Revelations and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the
Mafia
January 19, 2004
Justin E. H. Smith
Inside
America's Prisons: From Corrections to Retribution
Richard W. Behan
The GOP, Inc.
Ray McGovern
Bush's
State of the Union: Humility or More Hyperbole?
Werther
SOTUS:
the Stalin Moment of America's Nomenklatura
Phillip Cryan
Media Collusion in Colombia's War
Lee Sustar
A New Strategy to Reverse Labor's Decline?
Arthur Versluis
Great Lakes as Commodity: Privatizing Water
Uri Avnery
Anti-Semitism:
a Practical Manual
Steve Perry
Fresh Crack from Hawkeye State
January 17 / 18, 2004
Fadi Kiblawi and Will
Youmans
The
Use and Abuse of MLK Jr by Israel's Apologists
Joshua Muldavin
and Joseph Nevins
Blaming the Symptoms
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bad Days at Indian Point: Inside America's Most Dangerous Nuclear
Plant
Brian Cloughley
Iron Hammers in Iraq
Saul Landau
Fog of War: Vietnam and Iraq
M. Shahid Alam
Lerner, Said and the Palestinians
Richard Manning
Food Poisoning as Background Noise
Marjorie Cohn
The Guantanamo Concentration Camp
Mike Whitney
Scalia and Opus Dei: Radicals on the Court
Sadik Kassim
Meet Our New Saddam: Islam Karimov
Carol Norris
Arnold
and Bush's Numbers Don't Add Up
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
David Krieger
Imagining MLK Jr at 75
Bruce Jackson
Making War, Making Movies
Ron Jacobs
Revolution in the Air: a review
Richard Edmondson
Rupert Murdoch and My Sister
Richard Forno
Apologizing for Preemption: Evil, Perle and Frum
Poets' Basement
Holt, Mickey Z, Albert & Guthrie
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A Visit
to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How 2004
Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
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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February
2, 2004
The Hollow Candidate
The
Trouble with Howie
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
We find ourselves on the eroding down slope of
empire. The titans have fallen. We are now ruled by minor princelings:
Al Gore, George W. Bush, John Forbes Kerry, Howard Dean. These
are the days of the dauphins.
A republic in name, we now rigidly follow
the laws of political primogeniture. The slushy predictability
of our current politics may well be our unraveling. The world
awaits a change in fortune, betting on the collapse of the behemoth.
If this arthritic republic falls, it
will crumble from within, like so many other over-extended empires
of old. The cracks are already showing up, unmaskable fissures
in the foundations. The signs are abundant everywhere for those
who still know how to read: In our phony politics, in our outsourced
economy, in our looted and poisoned environment, in our corporatized
culture that offers us bikini-clad women eating worms for entertainment,
in our rotting schools, our burgeoning prison industry, our turnstile
hospitals, our irredeemable racism, our executioners' gibbets
where the most gruesome of political rituals are still played
out in hiding. We are anxious to shed blood, but we can't stand
to see it flow. Yet another birthmark of our perverted puritanism.
Scott Fitzgerald, our most prescient
writer, foretold it all in the novel he wanted to title Under
the Red White and Blue. The great wheel of fortune has come full
swing. The promise of the republic, the green light that lured
so many to these forested shores, has been squandered. Worse:
pilfered. The financial aristocrats, Jefferson and Franklin warned
us against at the very birth of this nation, are more powerful
than they have ever been. Jay Gould is a petty crook compared
to the likes of Ken Lay and Dick Cheney. The rich are different.
They crack things up and not only get away with it, but are glamorized
and idolized for the damage they've done and the billions they've
looted. We worship the beasts that devour us. The rest of us
are left to scavenge the rubble and our politics offer us false
choices and few true champions.
Where is the resistance to this ruination?
Don't look to the powerbrokers of the
Democratic Party. These days the creaky curators of the American
left paint its opponents as maniacal demons. Hitler is the reflexive
metaphor for any Republican. All the corroded left seems to know
is the politics of hysteria. The purpose of this ritualized threat
inflation is to make the pallid offerings of the Democratic Party
seem credible. But Bush is not a fanged creature out of Bosch.
He is stupid and dull, a banal frat boy, more Arendt's Eichmann
than Hitler. In the frank assessment of his former Treasury Secretary
Paul O'Neill, the President is blind, apathetic and mute. Just
a hearing aid shy of being our political version of Tommy, minus
the power chords. He doesn't or can't read the morning papers
or briefing books. Condi Rice, the gorgon of the NSC, spoon feeds
him what she feels he needs to know in small portions that can
be easily regurgitated. The real work is done by the coterie
of neo-cons that swirl round him: Cheney, Rummy, Rove, Wolfowitz
and Card. In medieval times the cretinous sons of the elites
were sent packing to the priesthood. These days they run for
president and everyone prays for the best.
So now we are presented with Howard Dean,
the latest incarnation of a maverick progressive. He is, of course,
neither. But you can't mention that in mixed company. The image
of Dean the pugilistic populist has already been manufactured
and implanted into the popular consciousness. And everyone plays
along, from the press to Dean's fellow Democrats, who yelp that
he is a dangerous outsider bent on smashing the delicate balance
of the Clinton years. Even Karl Rove slithers across the screen
hissing homilies about the authentic Dean.
To point out the obvious is to risk ridicule.
And ours is a society that fears ridicule as a mortal sin. But
Howard Dean is not as billed, by his supporters or his detractors.
The big trouble with Howard is that beneath the frothy veneer
he's pretty much just like all the rest. Only shorter.
A review of Howard Dean's career doesn't
reveal a resume of unparalleled mendacity, although Dean is a
gifted liar and craven politician untroubled by matters of conscience
even when it means betraying friends and allies. No. The fragrance
here is something worse. The smell of rot.
Dean is shown to be a run-of-the- mill
and mundane governor out of the Democratic mainstream. Beneath
the layers of greasepaint, the Dean Minstrelsy Show is a political
re-run underwritten by the same old sponsors. Not of George McGovern,
god forbid, but of the same neo-liberal troupe that has cloned
Gore, Lieberman, Kerry & Kerrey, Edwards, Breaux, Dodd and
the Clintons. Of course, Bill Clinton was freighted with a tragic
flaw, which at least made his tenure somewhat, if not redeemable,
at least diverting, though the play went on much too long. Clinton
could be hated. Dean, even in angry man mode, evokes only a dull
throbbing of the cortex. This is what entropy feels like.
He is sour and surly; grouchy and privileged.
Dean is the Democrats Bob Dole, sans the flinty Kansan's sense
of humor, war record and Viagra-fortified erections. Howard Dean
seems about as erotically-charged as Nixon.
Dean is a Yanqui, in the oldest and most
disreputable sense of the term--a true scion of Wall Street and
old money. It's one reason is was able to raise so much cash,
so quickly on the Internet. He's the Amazon.com of presidential
candidates: a lot of money poured in early for insubstantial
returns.
Dean ascended to power in the most self-consciously
progressive state in the republic. A word or two about Vermont.
I live in Oregon. Vermont could be our little sister state--only
more homogenous and more uptight. It is blindingly white, wealthy
and snugly cocooned from the fractious rhythms of the republic.
Ralph Nader could be elected governor in the Green Mountain state.
But Howard Dean is no Ralph Nader. Therein lies part of the truth
about Dr. Dean.
* * *
Howard Dean was raised on Park Avenue,
as the son of a Wall Street executive at the Dean/Witter securities
firm (though, no, his father was not the "Dean" in
the firm's name). As a youth, Dean spent his summers in East
Hampton and went to elite private academies, including a stint
at a boarding school in England. In 1967, Dean entered Yale.
By all accounts, his tenure there was as unremarkable as that
of George W. Bush. Unlike, say, Al Gore, then plotting the trajectory
of his political career with Martin Peretz at Harvard, neither
Dean nor Bush seem to have been particularly ambitious collegians.
Even at Yale in the late 60s Dean was
cautious, vaguely anti-war and pro civil rights. But he refused
to align himself with an particular movements on campus, saying
that he "instinctively distrusted ideologues." More
like, he knew that any kind of radical association might impede
the business career he was planning to pursue.
After Yale, Dean joined his father on
Wall Street. He tried his hand at stock trading for a couple
of years, made a bundle, got bored and then went to medical school.
Dean graduated from Albert Einstein Medical School in 1978 and
fled to Vermont to undertake his residency. There he met his
future wife, Judith Steinberg. They soon married and opened a
medical practice together in Shelburne, Vermont.
Soon Dean grew bored with medicine and
began to dabble in politics. In 1982, he was elected to the Vermont
House of Representatives. By all accounts, it was a tenure undistinguished
by any major accomplishment. Yet, four years later he ran for
the position of lieutenant governor and won. He was elected to
three consecutive terms of this largely ceremonial position.
Then fate intervened. On August 14, 1991, Vermont's governor,
Robert Snelling, was felled by a fatal heart attack. Dean sped
to Montpelier upon hearing the news and later that day he was
sworn in as the new governor.
Dean's first major initiative as governor
set the tone. The Vermont economy had been hobbled by recession
and Democrats in the state legislature were pushing a modest
tax increase for social programs. The tax increase seem ready
to pass, then Dean intervened, siding with Republicans. Instead
of raising taxes, Dean lowered them. It was a sign of things
to come.
* * *
Dean governed Vermont from the middle
right. He fetishized balance budgets, achieving the holy balance
on the backs of the needy and the powerless. He pandered to the
police, backing draconian drug laws and even lending support
to the death penalty. He sided with Monsanto against environmentalists,
organic farmers and consumers. He trumpeted his own welfare reform
plan that was as miserly as anything put forward by Tommy Thompson.
A friend of nuclear power, Dean conspired with New England's
other nuclear governors to unload the region's radioactive waste
on a small and impoverished Hispanic town in west Texas called
Sierra Blanca. And on and on.
Early in his campaign, his own mother
ridiculed his presidential aspirations as "preposterous."
Like George W., Dean was never his mother's favorite child, which
may explain his tendency to throw political tantrums. These are
the guys you really have to watch like a hawk.
After Dean vaulted to the front of a
lethargic and uninspiring pack of competitors, he began making
mistakes. It's so much easier to lope along as the underdog.
Dean deadened much of his rustic appeal when he began to court
the endorsements of party insiders, and losers at that: Al Gore,
Jimmy Carter, Bill Bradley, Tom Harkin.
Then he famously solicited the votes
of working class southern rednecks, but he offered them nothing
except a kind of thinly-coded race-baiting. Dean lacks even the
most basic rhetorical lingo to address the traumatic economic
dislocations of the Bush/Clinton/Bush era. His economic agenda
is scavenged from the wreckage of Tsongas and Bradley, offering
only a kind of stern Yankee paternalism.
Aside from the Iraq war, the Dean schema
is fetchingly elitist, gliding silently over the battered preterite
of American society. Instead, Dean pushes policies sharply attuned
to the appeasement of middle class anxieties, the nervy triangulated
center. Hence the familiar concern about crime, drugs, health
care costs (as opposed to universal care), education, budget
deficits. But with Dean the articulation of these centrist obsessions
comes out sounding brittle and vaguely threatening. Clintonism
shorn of empathy.
It's doubt that many of Dean's former
patients lament the fact that he abandoned his medical pratice
for politics. He has a stern bedside manner. This is a man, unlike
Clinton, who displays little compassion for those in pain. Take
medical pot. Despite Dean's confession of youthful enounters
with the divine weed, the doctor opposes giving cancer and AIDS
patients the right to smoke marijuana to ease their suffering.
His health care plan is almost as miserly, a brand of Hillary-lite.
* * *
Then came Iowa. The more exposure Dean
got, the less substance there was to his campaign. He made his
mark by opposing the Iraq war (although he supported the remote-control
bombing of Aghanistan), but supports the even bloodier occupation.
He hawks his plan to balance the budget, but swears that the
Pentagon's share will be sacrosanct. He claimed to be the "most
conservative" of the Democrats when it came to economic
policy and he was right.
First Dean lost the caucuses; then he
lost his mind. I'm not talking about his Dexedrine-infused outburst
following his defeat in the caucuses, an election that is rigged
by party bigwigs to tilt toward establishment favorites like
Kerry and Edwards.
After Iowa, the DNC powerbrokers snickered
at the antics of Dizzy Dean. The Dean threat was never ideological.
He is a pure neo-liberal. It came from the fact that he didn't
owe the Clinton establishment anything. He raised his own money
from the mysterious precincts of the virtual world. He was intemperate,
perhaps ungovernable.
Soon the carrion birds were circling,
stripping plank after plank of his campaign themes as if he were
the corpse of Marsyas.
The problem for Kerry and Clark and Edwards is that they are
manufactured candidates, as processed as a Monsanto soybean.
The vitality of Dean's campaign pulsed from its very unpredictability.
He is an eccentric centrist, given to unscripted outbursts like
a Prozac taker gone off his meds.
The plantation masters of the party fear
nothing more than unpredictability. That's one reason why they
were so desperate to, as one senior Democratic congressman put
it, "McGovern" him.
Yet, the election and its aftermath proved
Dean to be a hollow man. Aside from Joe Trippi's innovative campaign
strategy and Dean's hammering of Bush on the Iraq war, he did
not have much to offer. Dean didn't know how to speak to working
people, had little to say to greens and insulted blacks. He wasn't
all that angry and he didn't know how to fight. Finally, he even
surrendered his own signature issue, admitting that the war wasn't
really a paramount concern to Democratic voters. Sad, but true.
Then there was the pitiful spectacle
of Dean dragging his wife, Judith, across the snowy cornfields
and in the television studios. You could see how uncomfortable
she was at each venue. There was a look of disgust on her face
as she was pigeonholed into the role of dutiful wife by her own
desperate husband and hypocritical news celebrities like the
disgusting Dianne Sawyer Nichols, who had a dalliance with Henry
Kissinger when she was a debutante in the Nixon White House.
Dean lost the election (and his credibility) right there.
Then it went straight downhill. Rarely
has a frontrunning campaign, freighted with cash and an army
of devoted volunteers, capsized so suddenly with so little provocation
and not even the whiff of scandal. The dull demise of Howard
Dean makes one long for the salacious pleasures of Gary Hart,
Donna Rice and the Monkey Business.
Instead of running against the party
bosses who sabotaged his campaign and held his wife up to public
obloquy, Dean fired his maverick campaign manager and recruited
an arch insider, Roy Neel, to man the helm. Neel is a telecom
lobbyist who exploited his cachet with the Clinton White House
to maneuver the atrocious Telecommunications Act through congress
in 1996, one of the greatest corporate giveaways of the Clinton/Gore
era. Neel is the same Beltway savant who advised Gore not to
strenuously contest the fraudulent results of the 2000 election,
leading some to speculate that Neel's real function in the Dean
camp is to keep the doctor from skewering the party establishment.
Of course, Howard Dean may still win
the nomination and the White House. In the course of one week,
he betrayed his grassroots backers, humiliated his wife, and
surrendered the detritus of his campaign to Beltway puppetmasters.
Perhaps now Dean really is presidential material.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been
Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature,
just published by Common Courage Press.
This essay is the forward to Sound
and Fury: the Politics of Howard Dean by Josh Frank, forthcoming
from Common Courage Press.
Weekend
Edition Features for February 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
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