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Today's
Stories
September 1,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part Two: Mark His Words
August 31,
2004
Joseph Nevins
Escapism
and Global Apartheid: The Dominican Republic & the NYTs
Matt Vidal
Beyond
Bush's Rhetoric on the Economy
Neve Gordon
Kerry and the Middle East
Dave Lindorff
Bush
the Peace Candidate?
Mike Whitney
NPR Leads the Charge for War Against Iran
Jack Random
Opening Night: Playing the War Card
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: the Life and Crimes of George W. Bush (Part One)
CounterPunch Photo of the Day
Pete Seeger in NYC
August 30,
2004
Justin Podhur
The
Disappeared Mayor
Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites at TheNaderbasher.com
Mike Whitney
Israeli Moles in the Pentagon: What More Could They Possibly
Want?
Ron Jacobs
Live, From New York: the Majority of Protesters Claimed No Candidate
David Lindorff
Sunday in Manhattan: the Sound of Marchin', Chargin' Feet, Boy
Dave Zirin
USA Basketball: The Team White America Loved to Hate
Sam Husseini
Israeli Spying on the US: a Long History
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
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August 28 /
29, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
William S. Lind
The Desert Fox
Paul D'Amato
The Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
Joshua Frank
Greens at the Crossroads
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Justin E.H.
Smith
The New Age Racket and the Left
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
Ali Tonak
Help the NYPD?
Mark Engler
New York Says "No"
Justin Felux
Haiti: the Attica of the Americas
Poets' Basement
Gelman, Albert, Ford and Hamod
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
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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September 1,
2004
High
Plains Grifter
The
Life and Crimes of George W. Bush
By
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Part
Two: Mark His Words
Sex and politics often seem to conflate
in George W. Bush's mind. In 1975, young George, fresh out of
Harvard Business School, followed his father to China, where
he was keen testing the receptiveness of the Chinese to infusions
of Texas capital. Soon bored by detailed discussions of international
finance, Bush began hitting on his translators and other Chinese
women. One Yale coed who came into Bush's orbit recalled: "He
was always one of the fastest guys on campus in trying to get
his hands in your pants." This friskiness didn't set well
with the decorous crowd then running China and he was discreetly
directed to evacuate the country in order to save his father,
the new ambassador to Peking, further embarrassment.
During the 1988 Republican
convention, David Fink, a reporter with the Hartford Courant,
asked Bush what he talked about with his father when they weren't
jawing about politics. "Pussy," George W. quipped.
Take that mom.
In 1992, W. famously offered
his services to his father's moribund re-election campaign. The
younger Bush counseled the president to hire private investigators
to rummage through the bedtrails of Clinton's sex life, hoping
to ignite "bimbo eruptions." This advice coming from
a man who, according to one of his friends, spent the 1970s "sleeping
with every bimbo in West Texas, married or not." George
Sr. (who was himself desperately trying to suppress talk of an
affair with a State Department employee) demurred, patted Jr.
on the head and followed the more tactful advice of Robert Teeter,
with fatal results.
George W. vowed not to make
the same political miscalculations as his father in his own 1994
run for governor of Texas. With the sepulchural Karl Rove as
his political Svengali, Bush set his sights on Ann Richards,
the gruff Democrat who ridiculed Bush's sense of privilege, "Little
George was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple."
It was a campaign marked by unbridled viciousness, backroom slanders
and outright lies. Bush didn't attack frontally; he sent surrogates
to hurl the mud for him. Naturally, he won in a romp.
Bush's six-year tenure as governor
of Texas was unremarkable by almost any standard. He was kept
on a short leash by his handlers, Rove and Karen Hughes, and
generally turned over policy-making to the yahoos in the Texas
legislature. His resume of those days is familiar by now: he
slashed taxes for the rich, injected religion into public schools
and social welfare programs, signed a law permitting the carrying
of concealed weapons in public buildings and churches, privatized
public parks, turned Texas into the nation's most toxic state,
sent children to adult prisons and supervised the execution of
152 death row inmates. During an interview with Larry King, Bush
chortled about sending Karla Faye Tucker to her fatal encounter
with death's needle, saying he had no regrets. Later he joked
about the execution with his CNN doppleganger Tucker Carlson.
Bush mimiced Karla Faye's pleas for mercy, whining in a shrill
falsetto: "Oh please don't kill me." Somebody give
Bushtail a shot of Jack Daniels before he kills again.
The big change in Bush was
his dramatic conversion to a messianic form of Christian fundamentalism.
The happy-go-lucky cad of the 60s and 70s had withered away,
replaced by a doltish and vindictive votary. His rebirth as a
Christian zealot was famously midwifed by Billy Graham, who considered
young George "almost like a son." According to Bush
during a walk on the beach at Kinnebunkport, "Billy planted
a mustard seed in my soul." The man has a felicity with
metaphor.
The seed sprouted a few months
later. In the notorious scene in the bathroom of a Colorado resort,
Bush, head pounding from a night of drinking in celebration of
his 40th birthday, plunged to his knees before the mirror and
pleaded with the Almighty for a heavenly intervention. Lightning
struck that morning. Bush, so the family legend goes, kicked
the bottle and emerged as a fanatical believer in what he called
"the intercessory power of prayer."
A few years later Bush, by
then governor of Texas, offered readers of the Houston Chronicle
a peek into the stern nature of his faith. "Only those who
have accepted Jesus as their personal savoir will be permitted
entry into heaven," Bush prophesied. Ten years down the
road, Bush would do his best to send thousands of heathens to
eternal damnation. Of course, Bush, having been granted the moral
amnesty of being born-again, rarely attends formal church services.
* *
*
Bush wasn't the early favorite
of the Texas king makers to retake the presidency for the Republicans.
That role fell to the newt-faced senator Phil Gramm, who had
amassed a majestic campaign warchest. But no amount of money
could soften Gramm's grotesque image and foul tongue. He was
the hissing personification of the Republican ultras, an unrepentant
whore for industry who seemed to take delight in savaging the
poor, blacks and gays. Here's a taste of the Gramm technique:
"Has anyone ever noticed that we live in a country where
all of the poor people are fat?"
Gramm's dismal showing in 1996
told the Republican powerbrokers that they needed an image makeover,
a candidate with Christian sex appeal coating a hard core philosophy.
John McCain was too grouchy, carried the whiff of scandal and
might prove uncontrollable. Jack Kemp was perceived as soft on
blacks and perhaps even was a real libertarian at heart. So they
settled on Bush, the smirking governor with the lofty Q-rating
among white middle-aged women who'd been devoted watchers of
Dallas and Knots Landing.
As for Bush, he didn't recall
being coaxed to run by the RNC power elite. Instead, the green
light fell upon him from a celestial source. "I feel like
God wants me to run for president," Bush confided to James
Robison, the Texas evangelist. "I can't explain it, but
I sense my country is going to need me. I know it won't be easy
on me or my family, but God wants me to do it."
In a flashy feat of political
transvestitism, Bush marketed himself as a "compassionate
conservative," a feathery reprise of his father's kinder
and gentler Reaganism. It was a ploy to distance himself from
the foamy rhetoric of the Republican pit bulls who had nearly
self-destructed in their manic pursuit of Clinton. Bush was tight
with Tom DeLay, Trent Lott and Phil Gramm, but he didn't want
to be tarred with their radioactive baggage while he courted
soccer moms. During the 2000 campaign, this grand hoax was rivaled
only by Al Gore's outlandish masquerade as an economic populist.
Still Bush, under the lash
of Karl Rove, didn't shirk from playing mean, particularly in
the bruising inter-squad battle for the Republican nomination.
During the crucial South Carolina primary, Bush's campaign goons
intimated that his chief rival, John McCain, had fathered an
illegitimate child with a black woman. Of course, a more dexterous
politician than McCain could have turned this slur to his advantage.
After all, Strom Thurmond ruled the Palmetto State for decades
and he was widely known to have sired at least one child with
his black mistress. The Bush attack dogs also made ungentlemanly
whispers about McCain's wife, Cindy, suggesting that she might
be a neurotic and a drug addict. Of course, it was McCain himself
who was slightly unhinged and he wilted under the fire of the
Bush sniper teams, which also included an attack on McCain's
war record by the same by claque of mad dog vets who would later
fling mud at Max Cleland and John Kerry.
The 2000 campaign itself was
unremittingly dull until the final debate, when Gore sealed his
fate as he stalked Bush across the stage like he had overdosed
on testosterone. As Gore glowered over the governor badgering
him with the names of obscure pieces of legislation, Bush merely
turned his head to the camera and shrugged his shoulders, as
if to say, "What's this guy's problem?" It was the
first real moment of the campaign and probably kept Bush close
enough so that the Supremes could hand him the presidency.
Bush's 534-vote triumph in
Florida is an old and tiresome story by now, but it's worth recalling
some of the low points. The stolen election was an inside job,
although greatly abetted by Gore's incompetence. The state may
very well have been secured before a single vote was cast. That's
because Jeb, the Bush who always wanted to be president, ordered
Katherine Harris to purge the voter rolls of more than 90,000
registered voters, mostly in Democratic precincts.
Then, with the recount underway,
the Bush junta sprang into action. Using $13.8 million in campaign
funds, they recuited an A-list of Republican fixers, tough guys
and lawyers. Roger Stone, the former Republican fixer and body
builder of Reagan time who fled to Florida following a DC sex
scandal, was summoned to orchestrate gangs of rightwing Cubans
to harass election officials in Dade and Palm Beach counties.
Marc Racicot, later to be elevated by Bush to chair of the RNC,
staged similar white-collar riots, all designed to impede the
counting of ballots. Jeb and the haughty Harris did their parts
as institutional monkeywrenchers.
Meanwhile, the legal strategy
designed by Theodore Olson to fast track the case to the Supreme
Court. When Scalia and Thomas refused to recuse themselves from
the case despite glaring conflicts of interest (family members
worked for the Bush campaign), the electoral theft was legitimized.
The ringmaster of this affair
was Bush Sr.'s old hand, James Baker. Baker later boasted to
a group of Russian tycoons mustered in London, "I fixed
the election in Florida for George Bush." And Gore laid
down and took it like a dazed Sonny Liston. He didn't raise a
peep about the disenfranchisement of thousands of black voters,
as if to say, "If have to be elected by blacks, I don't
want the job."
Bush, the Selected One, was
anxious to consolidate his power. "If this were a dictatorship,
it would be a heck of a lot easier-- just so long as I'm the
dictator," Bush snickered on December 18, 2000, as the Supreme
Court prepared to deliver the presidency to his sweaty hands.
Mark those words.
* * *
The contours of the Bush agenda
were established by his transition team. This shadowy group picked
the cabinet, outlined the budget, sketched the foreign policy,
dreamed up the size of the tax cuts and scouted across the sprawl
of the bureaucracy for opportunities for self-dealing contracts.
None had a sharper nose for
scenting opportunities to cash in on federal contracts than Dick
Cheney, the man who recruited himself as Bush's running mate.
Although Cheney flunked out of Yale (he was a working class kid
without the academic passes afforded the legacy admittees), he
shares several other traits with Bush. Twice Cheney has been
arrested for drunk driving. And, although he fervantly supported
the war, he had no desire to actually go to Vietnam and do battle.
Saying he "had other priorities," Cheney sought and
received five draft deferments. See Dick run. And so it came
to pass: others died so that he might prosper. Don't tell Cheney
he doesn't understand the meaning of sacrifice.
As a congressman from Wyoming,
Cheney established himself as a hardcore rightwinger, gnashing
away at everything from abortion to Head Start. Bush Sr. picked
this top-flight chickenhawk as Defense Secretary in 1989. He
managed the first Gulf War, amassing through bribery and bullying
international support like a CEO on a consolidation binge, and
later rationalized the decision not to depose Saddam or support
uprisings by Iraqi and Kurdish rebels, predicting that the fall
of the Ba'athists would destabilize the entire region. How right
you were, Dick.
After Clinton steamrolled Bush,
Cheney cashed in, landing a top executive position at Halliburton,
the Houston-based oil services and military construction giant.
Cheney knew all about Halliburton and they knew Dick. In fact,
as Defense Secretary, Cheney had devised the privatization scheme
which turned over much of the Pentagon's logistical programs
(base construction, food and fuel services, infrastructure, mortuaries)
to corporations. He also steered some of the biggest early contracts
to Halliburton, including lucrative deals for reconstructing
Kuwait's oil fields and logistical support for the doomed venture
into Somalia.
At Halliburton, Cheney exploited
his government and international contacts to boost Halliburton's
government-guaranteed loans from $100 million to $1.5 billion
in less than five years. He also created 35 off-shore tax free
subsidiaries, a feat of accounting prestitigidation that would
soon be aped by Kenny Boy Lay and the corporate highwaymen at
Enron. The grateful board of Halliburton soon rewarded Cheney
by making him CEO and compensating him to the tune of $25 million
a year in salary and lavish stock options. By the time he left
Halliburton for the White House, he owned $45 million in the
company's stock.
Of course, the question presents
itself as to whether Cheney ever really left Halliburton. The
company had been bruised a bit in Clinton. In 1997, it lost a
multi-billion dollar logistics contract with the Army. Yet, soon
after Cheney ascended to the Veep's office Halliburton seized
the contract back and stood poised to become the prime provisioner
for the Pentagon as it embarked on operations in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Uzbekistan, Qatar, Korea, and the Philippines. Within two
short years under Cheney, Halliburton cashed in on $1.7 billion
in Pentagon contracts. Then, naturally, Halliburton decided to
gouge the government, overcharging for everything from gas deliveries
to food services.
Then came the big reward: a
two-year contract worth $7 billion for rebulding Iraq's oil infrastructure,
bombed to smithereens by the Pentagon. The no bid contract was
awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers, who apparently never
even considered another company. No surprise here. Halliburton
had drafted the Corps' reconstruction plan for Iraq. "They
were the company best positioned to execute the oil field work
because of their involvement in the planning," explained
Lt. Col. Gene Pawlick, a PR flack for the Army.
All the while, Cheney continues
to personally benefit from Halliburton's government contracts.
He still holds options for 400,000 shares of Halliburton stock
and continues to receive $150,000 a year in deferred compensation
from his former company.
* *
*
Cheney was not a lone emissary
from crude cartel. Of the 41 members of that Bush transition
team, 34 came from the oil industry. The mask had slipped off
the beast. Not since the days of Warren Harding has big oil enjoyed
a firmer stranglehold on the controls of the federal government.
Bush's inner circle is dominated by oil men, starting with Bush
and Cheney and including 6 cabinet members and 28 top political
appointees. Recall that Condoleezza Rice has an oil tanker named
after her and that Stephen Griles, the number two man at the
Interior Department, was the oil industry's top lobbyist and
continued to be paid $285,000 a year by his former firm as he
handed out oil leases to his former clients. Griles is the Albert
Fall of our time. Fall, the architect of the Teapot Dome scandal,
where his crony's oil company was quitely handed the rights to
drill in on federal lands in Wyoming, pronounced: "All natural
resources should be made as easy of access as possible to the
present generation . Man cannot exhaust the resources of nature
and never will." More than 80 years later, this wreckless
nonsense could serve as a motto for the Bush administration.
But see how times have change. Fall went to jail for his self-dealing;
Griles got a bonus.
Then came the neo-cons: Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, Douglas Feith, Donald
Wurmser, Stephen Cambone and John Bolton. This coterie of hawks,
many of them veterans of Reagan/Bush I, were deeply marinated
in the writings of the darkly iconic Leo Strauss and schooled
in the art of political terror by Henry "Scoop" Jackson,
the Democratic senator from Boeing. After eight years on the
outside, they came in febrile for war from the get-go and charged
with an implacable loyalty to Israel, nation of the apartheid
wall and the 82 nukes. The neo-cons's devotion to Israel was
so profound that several of them hired themselves out as consultants
to the Israeli government. At the close of Bush's first term,
this same nest of neo-cons finds itself under investigation for
leaking top secret documents to Israel.
To complete the starting lineup,
Bush and Cheney also dredged up from the obscurity of far right
think tanks some of the most malodorous scoundrels of the Iran/contra
era: Eliot Abrams, John Poindexter, Otto Reich and John Negroponte.
Soon enough this merry band of brigands were up to their old
tricks. Poindexter, from his den at DARPA, devised a big brother
program under the name Total Information Awareness, branded with
an Illuminati logo, which sought to keep track of the movements
and credit card purchases of all Americans. Later Poindexter,
convicted of lying to congress in the 1980s, opened up a futures
market for terrorist attacks, where traders would be financially
rewarded by the Pentagon for accurately predicting suicide bombings.
Meanwhile, Abrams, another Iran/contra felon, was put in charge
of human rights in the Middle East-a curious brief for the man
who backed the butchers of Guatemala and El Salvador. Even Hunter
S. Thompson blazing away on blotter acid couldn't dream this
stuff up.
Tomorrow: Jesus Told Me
Who to Bomb
Part
One: The Ties That Blind
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been
Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature
and, with Alexander Cockburn, Dime's
Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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