Today's Stories

October 10 / 12, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is McCain a Lot Sicker Than We Know?

Syed Saleem Shahzad
Why the Neo-Taliban is Winning

Patrick Cockburn
War in the Time of Cholera

Paul Craig Roberts
A Possible Solution to the Economic Crisis

Mike Whitney
Run on the System

Peter Morici
The Deficit and the Damage Done

Christopher Ketcham
The End of the Economy

Stephen Martin
Shock and Awe in Economic Warfare

Chellis Glendinning
Wireless Mind, Gullible Mind

Saul Landau
All Guns, No Butter

Ahmad Faruqui
21 Days to Baghdad

Serge Halimi
The Battle for the West

Anthony DiMaggio
Making a Killing: the Business of Elections

José M. Tirado
Meltdown in Iceland

David Macaray
Adventures in Unionism

Robert Fantina
Bankrupt and Belligerent

October 9, 2008

Robert Bryce
From Enron to the Current Meltdown

David Vest
The Great Rescue of 2008: Could Whatever Follows Bush Be Even Worse?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Meltdown at the Pentagon

Andy Worthington
The Ordeal of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama the Subhuman

Helga Serrano /
Hector Tamayo
Ecuador Charts the Way

Dave Lindorff
When Money Flies

Mats Svensson
At the Checkpoint on the Day of Atonement

Rannie Amiri
The Time for Mordechai Vanunu is Now

Website of the Day
The Palestine Chronicle Needs (and Deserves) Your Support

October 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Imbecilic Tedium

Linn Washington, Jr.
Palin's Racist Remark

Mike Whitney
To the Bunkers!

Deepak Tripathi
The West is Broke

George C. Wilson
Butter Over Guns? McCain and Obama on Defense Issues

Andy Worthington
Seized in Pakistan

Charles R. Larson
"I'm John McCain and I Approved This Lie"

Patrick Irelan
Ecuador's Choice

Matthew Koehler
Log, Baby, Log: Bailing Out the Timber Industry

Stanley Heller
Time to Design a New Economy

Daniel Gross
Working Class Hero: Alexandra Svoboda

Kimberly Hartke
Raw Milk and Civil Liberties

Website of the Day
Olivia Wilde Does It Early

October 7, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Obama and McCain's Goofy Afghan Bluster

Gary Leupp
Seven Years in Afghanistan:
From "War on Terror" to
"War of Terror"

Uri Avnery
Olmert's Final Divorce
From "All of Eretz Israel"

P. Sainath
The Cop-Out Election
Major Candidates, Congress, Press, All Fail in the Big Crisis

Peter Morici
The Dow Tanks as Bank Bailout Fails to Restore Confidence

Conn Hallinan
The Great Game in the Caucasus:
Bad Moves by Uncle Sam

Martha Rosenberg
Training America's Youth
Today a Pheasant, Tomorrow Osama

Binoy Kampmark
Let's Talk About Extinction:
CERN and Halo

October 6, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
A Futile Bailout as Darkness Falls on America

Mike Whitney
Still on the Edge of the Abyss

Tariq Ali
Goodbye to Grosvenor Square

Emily Horowitz
How People Tell Cops They're Guilty Even When They Aren't

Michael Hudson
What Did Jesus Say?
A Christian Perspective on the Paulson Bank Bailout

Ron Jacobs
Winter Soldiers and Washington's Wars

October 3 - 5, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Creatures of Capital

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Paulson's Plan is a Fraud

Saul Landau
The Chutzpah of Hank Paulson

Jonathan Cook
The Souring of a West Bank Romance: Israel's Army and Settlers Fall Out

Andy Worthington
The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials

Dave Marsh
Bono (Himself) Challenges Me to a Debate

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Using the IAEA to Spy on Iran

John Ross
Massacre in Morelia

Brian Cloughley
The Unacceptable Face of Capitalism

Wajahat Ali
Dueling Partners: an Interview with Tariq Ali on Pakistan

Robert Schwartz
A Serious Blow to the Rights of U.S. Workers: NLRB Limits Political Strikes

Alan Nasser
FDR's Response to the Plot to Overthrow Him: a Paradigm for Today's Democrats?

David Ker Thomson
The Case for Drunk Driving

Peter Morici
Gone in 30 Days: U.S. Loses 159,000 Jobs in September

William Blum
When is a Holocaust Not a Holocaust?

William S. Lind
War on Two Fronts: Without Railroads

Michael Donnelly
The Ghost of Gen. McClellan

Thom Rutledge
On Presidential "Rule"

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Science and the 2008 Presidential Elections: a Survey of the Candidates

Dave Lindorff
Calling the Problem Early

Cindy Ellen Hill
Waging a Sustainable Peace?

Paul Krassner
Dying to Get High: the Side Effects of Medical Marijuana

Daniel White
Vietnam's Masterspy

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Absher, Gibbons and Jenkins

Website of the Weekend
How We Lost Glen Canyon: a Legal Chronology

October 2, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Can a Bailout Succeed?

Joe Bageant
Speaking in the Tongues of Brokers: the Bailout in Plain English

Ralph Nader
Soulmates in Deregulation

Mike Whitney
Why the Bailout Stinks

Madis Senner
When Push Comes to Pull: How a Foreign Banker Invasion Sent the Markets Reeling

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congress as Usual:the Crisis Will Pass, But This Bunch Will Remain the Same

William Blum
A Boy's Game: the Origins of the Financial Crisis

P. Sainath
Wall Street Transforms Presidential Race

Website of the Day
McCain's Meltdown in Des Moines

October 1 , 2008

Glen Ford
The Last Hold Up

Steven Conn
Trashing Sarah Palin: the Boomerang Effect

Alan Maass / Lee Sustar
Why Not a Bailout for the Rest of Us?

Kenneth Couesbouc
The Blame Game: When Wall Street Pigs Sprout Wings

Stan Goff
How the Republicans Can Win (And Deserve It)

Adolfo Gilly
Racism, Domination and Bolivia

Rannie Amiri
Bombs in the Levant

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Recurring Myth of Peak Oil

Adam W. Parsons
Food and Markets

Dave Lindorff
Bums' Rush to the Bailout: Where are the Hearings?

Douglas Valentine
The Bush Continuity Plan?

Adrien Rain Burke
The Party's Over: an Open Letter to Nancy Pelosi

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Beauty Pageant

September 30, 2008

Pam Martens
What Wall Street Hoped to Win

Chris Floyd
The Shadow of the Pitchfork: Elite Panic on Wall Street

Stephen Martin
A Biological Walk Down Wall Street

Deepak Tripathi
A Bitter Harvest in Afghanistan

Mark Engler
Bad Money

Jonathan Cook
The Attack on Zeev Sternhell: Has Israel Become a Breeding Ground for Jewish Settler Terrorism?

Dave Lindorff
The Power of No

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Time for a General Strike?

Ahmad Faruqui
In Cold Blood: Buried Alive in Pakistan

John Chuckman
Will the Bride Wear White? As Rome Burns, Bristol Palin Prepares to Tie the Knot with Mr. "Sex on Skates"

David Macaray
Blaming the Labor Unions

Fatemeh Keshavarz
What Obama Could Have Said

Website of the Day
538: a Cognitive Map of American Politics

September 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
Black Monday

Jeff Gibbs
"Just Say No!" to Reverse Robin Hood

Paul Craig Roberts
Why America Should Listen to Ahmadinejad

Peter Morici
The Bailout and the Economy

Tim Wise
Racism as Reflex

John Walsh
Sarah Palin is a Rotten Mom

Uri Avnery
Israeli Fascism: Yes, It Can Happen Here

Alan Farago
Hell to Pay: the Financial Collapse and the Housing Market

Andy Worthington
Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials?

David Michael Green
Where's the Repudiation?

Carl Finamore
Capitalism on Steroids; Labor on Tranquilizers

Iris Keltz
Postcards from the DNC

Bill Hatch
Take This Shrimp Slayer!

Website of the Day
Tina Fey as Palin, Round Two

September 27 / 28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
How McCain Blew It

Linn Washington, Jr.
Alaska's Blacks and Palin: a Strained Relationship

Christopher Ketcham
An Israeli Trojan Horse

Mike Whitney
The People vs. the Banksters

Kevin Alexander Gray Race in the Race: Is Obama Shining Us On?

Anthony DiMaggio
The Unspoken War: Pakistan, the Media and Nuclear Weapons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Their Assets; Our Debts: How Economic Crises Are Overcome

Marc Levy /
Susan Erony
War Jokes Wanted: No Laughing Matter

Stan Cox
Livestock of Mass Destruction: Germ Labs in the Heartland

Saul Landau
Election Drizzle

Ali Khan
Meltdown in American Markets: an Islamic Perspective

David Rosen
The Great Fear: the Sexual Politics of Sarah Palin

Todd Alan Price
Bailing Out the Foes of Public Eduction

Matts Svensson
The Red and White Bird in Gaza

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan Through the Eyes of a Native Son

Robert Fantina
McCain and the Economy

Richard Rhames
Hank-ering for a Bailout

David Krieger
The U.S.-India Nuclear Proliferation Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Rethinking Charter Schools

Charles R. Larson
Dear Mrs. Abacha: a Nigerian Email Romance

Kim Nicolini
Sadism in the Desert

Poets' Basement
La Morticella, Holt, Moser and Buknatski

Website of the Day
The Great Schlep

September 26, 2008

Moshe Adler
Bailing Out Wall Street Won't Save Main Street

Bill Quigley
The U.S. War on Unarmed Working Mothers

Jonathan Cook
When Archaeology Becomes a Curse

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Visions of Pinpoint Control: the Romance of Laser Weapons

Madis Senner
Why the Bailout will Fail

Brian Cloughley
US Raids in Pakistan: Violations of Sovereignty

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Oh, Henry!

Joanne Mariner
Passport Fraud and Torture

Dan La Botz
The Financial Crisis: a View from the Left

David Macaray
Ralph's Management Indicted by Federal Grand Jury

Website of the Day
Nader and Obama Girl at the Office

September 25, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Insanity of the $700 Billion Giveaway

Sharon Smith
Democrats and Corporate Bailouts

Ralph Nader
Who Will Show Some Backbone Against the Bailout?

Christopher Ketcham
The Economy of Dead Sperm (or What I Learned From My Race-Car Grandpa Who Had No Bankers)

Eric Toussaint
Is Another Third World Debt Crisis in the Offing?

Robert Weissman
Getting Wall Street Pay Reform Right

David Estabrook
A Better Bailout Plan

Nikolas Kozloff
The Voyage of the SS Peter the Great

Steve Early
The High Price of Purple Dissent

Judith Scherr
Blue Helmets in Haiti

Laray Polk
South Ossetia and Abkhazia: Notes from the Inside

Website of the Day
Letterman Spanks McCain

September 24, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Bitter Fruits of Deregulation

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin at the UN: a Tutorial from Uribe

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis: How and Why Congress Should Play for Time

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Trials: Govt. Says Six Years Not Long Enough to Prepare Evidence

Steve Conn
Will Nader's Warning be Acknowledged in the Presidential Debates?

Karyn Strickler
The $700,000,000,000 Power Punch

Diane Farsetta
Stealth Marketers Gone Wild

Dennis Loo
Poisoned Legacy

John Halle
Wealth Tax Now!

Khalil Nakhleh
Palestinians Under the Occupation

Website of the Day
Nader: Debate Crasher

September 23, 2008

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr.
Bail Out on This Bailout

Michael Hudson
Henry Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal

Tariq Ali
Why was the Marriott Targeted?

Patrick Dyer
A Death Row Visit with Troy A. Davis

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah and the Palestinians

Joshua Frank
Oppose Barack Obama? How Dare Thee!

Alan Farago
Pushing the Referees: How the Financial Crisis Occurred

Dave Lindorff
The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

Tanya M. Kerssen /
Roger Burbach
Bolivia's Popular Upheaval

Harvey Wasserman
Nuclear Power Liabilities Dwarf Bush's Wall Street Bailout

Website of the Day
Hammered by the Irish: the Video

September 22, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Paulson-Bernanke Bank Bailout Plan: Will the Cure be Worse Than the Crisis?

Mike Whitney
Mushroom Clouds Over Wall Street

Christopher Ketcham
Let It Collapse!

Ron Jacobs
The Predators' Bailout

Anne-Marie McManus
Lost in the Rhetoric of Crisis

Robert Weitzel
The Twin Terrors of the Holy Land: a Sexy Fundamentalist and a White-Haired Zionist

Wajahat Ali
An Interview with Howard Dean

John Ross
A New Cold War Comes to Latin America

Steve Breyman
Does the U.S. Really Need Cluster Bombs?

Patrick Bond
On the Bellies of the Filth

Uri Avnery
Fly, Tzipora, Fly

Carl J. Mayer
An Open Letter to Michael Moore (AKA God's Pen Pal): Whatever Happened to Voting Your Conscience?

Website of the Day
Stop the Execution of Troy Anthony Davis

September 20 / 21, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Is This the Stake Through Neoliberalism's Heart?

Michael Hudson
America's Own Kleptocracy

Pam Martens
The Wall Street Model: Unintelligent Design

Lila Rajiva
Putting Lipstick on an AIG

Mike Whitney
Full-Spectrum Breakdown

Richard Rhames
A Bailout to Nowhere

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
The NY Yankees and the U.S. Economy

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies: a New Study of Neocon Influence

Susan Block
Palin as Venus in Furs: the Dominatrix Politics of Drilling and Killing

Robert Fantina
Republicans and Subpoenas: Never the Twain Shall Meet

Heidi Walters
Hung Up on Route 36: an 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask

David Yearsley
Germany's Lost Organs: When Bigger Was Better

Raymond J. Lawrence
The Politics of Tribulation: Sarah Palin and the Rapture

David Rosen
One Billion Pills Later: Viagra at 10

David Michael Green
Living in Sarah Palin's America

Anthony Papa
Imprisoned Voters and the Elections

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Freddie, Fannie, Daddy, Nanny

Howard Lisnoff
When We Notice the Homeless

John Goekler
Leaving Every Child Behind

Missy Beattie
Impalement

Dave Zirin
Leave Josh Howard Alone

Charles R. Larson
Holden Caulfield, Rest in Peace

Tim Matson
Too Big for His Birches: Woodlot Economics

Susie Day
Attack of the Angry Fetus

Poets' Basement
Corseri, Gibbons, Jenkins and Ford

Website of the Weekend
Dylan & Baez: Deportees

September 19, 2008

Steven T. Banko
McCain's Passion Play

Mike Whitney
The Point of No Return

Michael Hudson
The Dow Jones' Wonderfully Cheesy Addition

William Kaufman
Shattering the Glass-Steagall Act: the Bi-Partisan Origins of the Financial Crisis

Brenda Norrell
The Fall of Lehman Bros.: Blowback for Black Mesa?

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor
The New Rhetoric of Racism: Why Won't Obama Call It Out?

Clifton Ross
Bolivia: Cleaning Up the Bull Ring

Dave Lindorff
Hang On to Your Wallets: the Government's About to Rescue Us!

Cynthia McKinney
Seize the Time!

Susan Hurlich
Storm Survivors: a Dispatch from Cuba

Michael Donnelly
Let's Hand It All Over to the Democrats (They Helped Create This Mess)

Website of the Day
The Crisis Explained

September 18, 2008

Benjamin Dangl
The Machine Gun and the Meeting Table

Harvey Wasserman
The Senate's Drill, Drill, Drill Scam

Susan Abulhawa
The Lobby Has Spoken: Biden and Israel

Robert Weissman
After the Fall: the Financial Re-Regulatory Agenda

Anne-Marie McManus
McCain's Cinderella: the Fetishization of Sarah Palin

Corey D. B. Walker
The Poverty of 21st Century Progressivism

William S. Lind
Senator O'Bush: Why Obama is Wrong on Iran and Afghanistan

Ron Jacobs
Washington's False Logic of Torture

Dave Lindorff
American and China: Joined at the Hip

Binoy Kampmark
How Damien Hirst Got Away With It

Website of the Day
An Invisible Army

September 17, 2008

Stephen Conn
Palin and the Politics of Big Oil

Forrest Hylton
Reactionary Rampage in Bolivia

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus Leaves Iraq

Gregory Elich
Inside North Korea

Ralph Nader
How the U.S. Auto Industry Wrecked Itself

Franklin Lamb
The Palestinians of Shabra-Shatila

Pam Martens
The Gang's All Here: Bush, McCain and the Old Iran/Contra Team

Dave Lindorff
The End of the Blue Chip Economy

Peter Morici
The Damage Deepens

Stanley Heller
The Killing of Count Folke Bernadotte

Douglas Valentine
Rambling David Foster Wallace

Website of the Day
Free Cindy McCain!

September 16, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling from Direct Hits

Tiphaine Dickson
Citizen Palin: Why Sarah Palin Quoted Westbrook Pegler

Stan Goff
America is Now Rome: an Open Letter to Christian Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan

Uri Avnery
Tzipi's Choice

Michael Winship
Lipstick on Polar Bears

Jeff Halper
Warehousing Palestinians

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia Versus the Empire

Oscar Gonzalez
Who's Dumber? Ike's Refugees or Wall Street's?

Binoy Kampmark
Cheney and His Records

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Muslims are at Peace with You

Sen. Russ Feingold
Restoring the Rule of Law

Website of the Day
The Next Great Rock Band?

September 15, 2008

Mike Whitney
The Tumbrils Roll at Dawn

Peter Morici
Toxic Lehman

Patrick Cockburn
Take Another Look at the Surge

Charles R. Larson
The Maverick Has No Clothes

Jonathan Cook
The Expulsion of Palestinians from Jaffa

Nikolas Kozloff
Racist Rhetoric in Bolivia

Roger Burbach
Morales Confronts the Insurrection: Bolivia and the Echoes of Allende

Helen Redmond
Where's the Health Care Bailout?

David Michael Green
The Democrats Do Poland

David Macaray
The Boeing Strike

Ralph Nader
Remembering Peter Camejo

Website of the Day
The Ballad of Sarah Palin

Weekend Edition
October 10 / 12, 2008

Mission CREEP: From John Mitchell to John McCain

Strong Man, Straw Dog and the FoxNews Circus

By DOUGLAS VALENTINE

A lot of people believe, as Joe Biden recently said, that Sarah Palin and her running mate John McCain are going “over the edge” in a desperate attempt to assassinate Barack Obama’s character.  Biden and other critics specifically cite the frenzied calls at Palin-McCain rallies to “kill” the “terrorist” Obama – calls for violence that go unheard by the sleepy Secret Service.

In response, Palin and McCain cite Obama’s “attacks” on “hardworking middle class Americans,” code words that transform fascism, racism and religious fanaticism into righteousness.  Their allies in government (like the Secret Service) tacitly turn a blind eye; they commit no overt acts to further the Palin-McCain conspiracy but advance it through sins of omission.

Indeed, as America sinks deeper in the morass of the Wall Street meltdown, the Republican Party finds invisibility a virtue.  Look around their rabid rallies and nowhere will you see any sign of its amoral leader for the last eight years, the washed-up and universally despised George W Bush.

In the maelstrom of freewheeling capitalism and mass murder Bush engendered, mere mendacity, however, is a minor sin.  Palin-McCain exhortations that Obama is untruthful about his associations with “domestic terrorists” are repeated every day as “news” by the mainstream media, while the frothing mouthpiece of the Republican Party, Fox News, broadcasts 24/7 the Big Lie that Barack “Hussein” (Palinesque wink and wiggle) Obama is really a Communist Muslim born in Africa who seeks to destroy America.

Soon Fox will certainly unearth documentary evidence of his membership in Al Qaeda.

It’s pathetic the way the mindless Republican hordes fall prey to Palin-McCain fear-mongering.  But violence has its greatest appeal to “the silent majority” in hard times, and nothing is quite as American as visiting death and destruction upon the enemy within.

Back in the 1960s there will still signs that said, “Nigger, Don't Let the Sun Set on You in,” say, “Arizona,” where McCain opposed a national holiday for Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, ostensibly because King called the US government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” 

King got his holiday, after being assassinated, and McCain remains “a great purveyor.”

The murder and mayhem incited by Palin-McCain at their lynch mob rallies even has mainstream hack David Gergen saying, “There is a free-floating sort of whipping-around anger that could really lead to some violence.  And I think we’re not far from that.”

Duh.

David Brooks, Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, is “appalled” by Palin-McCain Black Shirt tactics and recently described Palin, a working class heroine in the minds of many deluded individuals, as a "fatal cancer to the Republican party.”

Maybe so.  Then again, maybe Palin will incite some James Earl Ray wanna-be to kill Obama, thus solving all the Republican part’s current problems?

In any case, Brooks’ use of the word “cancer” is no accident, and harkens back to March 1973, when President Nixon’s erstwhile legal counsel, John Dean, famously said, in reference to the brewing Watergate scandal, that there was a “cancer” growing within the White House.

Unlike cancer, the meaning of Watergate is open to interpretation.   For Dean, it means the June 1972 break-in and telephone bugging of Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.   In his 2004 book, Worse than Watergate, Dean claimed that when it comes to lies and cover-up, the Bush regime makes the Nixon administration look like amateurs.  Lies and cover-ups are still the Republican strong suit, he admits, but they are worse today because Nixon’s was a petty crime which pales in comparison to the Bush Regime deceiving the world about 9/11 and using it to justify an unnecessary war in Iraq.

This seems a very limited interpretation and many of us consider the Watergate scandal more than a petty crime.  We see it as a symbolic validation of the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements.  We cannot separate Watergate from racism and the Vietnam War, just as we cannot separate Bush and Iraq.  

Watergate, we know, led to the investigation and disgrace of the CIA, FBI and military, all of which conspired with the Nixon White House in an all-out right-wing assault (including murder) on the rights of all Americans.  Nothing like that ever came from the Left.

Ultimately, for anyone involved in the Anti-War or Civil Rights movements of the 1960’s, Watergate was the culmination of a culture war that has been revived by Bush, advanced by Fox News, and taken to its logical extreme by Palin and McCain.

The Straw Man

Working for Fox News is a curse, if you wish others to take you seriously.  To work for Fox is to condemn yourself to the sideshow in the carnival, along with Snake Boy, the Bearded Lady, Table Top Joe, and the famous mistakes of nature featured on Fox News: Bill “The Human Vibrator” O’Reilly, Sean “Hermaphrodite” Hannity, and Ann “Fly Trap” Coulter.

One such Fox freak, James Rosen, has written a book that purports to be a scholastic work about Watergate.  Titled The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, it is over 600 pages long – and reads like it were 10,000.  

I crossed paths with Rosen a few years ago while researching my new book on the CIA’s usurpation of federal drug law enforcement during the Watergate era.  Rosen and I were both speaking with E. Howard Hunt, the veteran CIA officer and pathological liar convicted of organizing the Watergate break-in.   During this period I learned that Rosen, in the early 1990s, had gotten a grant from William F. Buckley to begin working on the Mitchell biography.  Buckley, it should be noted, was Hunt’s CIA partner in Mexico in the early 1950s.

Although born and raised in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he apparently developed his fondness for sideshows and mutants, Rosen adopted Buckley’s class affectations and traded off his patron’s right wing contacts like Hunt.   The result is that Rosen is now Fox’s premier “war on terror” correspondent and Playboy’s resident scholar on Watergate.  Pretentious to a fault, like Buckley, Rosen even asserts that The Washington Post was “extraneous” to the outcome of Watergate, as were Woodward and Bernstein. 

If that doesn’t give you a sense of Rosen’s scholasticism, consider that he makes his money at Fox by painting Bush regime war criminals like Condoleezza Rice in flattering colors.  The geek has no shame at all, and in Strong Man he pours lipstick with a fire hose on Mitchell.  The result is nauseating.  Voted the funniest celebrity in Washington, Rosen had me holding my stomach and vomiting into a barf bag as he presented beady-eyed AG as a champion of civil rights and a super-hero fighting anti-war subversives.

Anyone who was alive and aware in the 1960’s knows that Mitchell was a Wall Street bond lawyer whom Nixon chose as his campaign manager in 1968.  (Written before the recent financial calamity, Strong Man argues that the denizens of Wall Street are paragons of virtue.)  Nixon was so grateful after stealing the election that he made Mitchell his first attorney general, a job Mitchell had no training or talent for.  In 1972 Nixon put Mitchell in charge of his re-election committee (CREEP) and set Mitchell as a collision course with the Watergate scandal.

Nixon loved Mitchell so much that he let him take the fall in the cover-up, and Mitchell has the distinction of being the highest US government official to serve prison time.

Rosen, like Nixon, is infatuated with Mitchell, and for equally perverse and exploitive reasons.  But Mitchell, a fat Wall Street lawyer, was too boring to rate a book to himself.  So Rosen’s bloated book isn’t really about Mitchell at all.  It’s about revising history. 

As Rosen once boasted, “Wilde said that our lone duty to history is to continually rewrite it.”  And Rosen does his re-writing by the shovel full. 

Those of who were there know that Mitchell led the domestic war against civil rights demonstrators and anti-war protestors.  Mitchell hated us with a vengeance and, according to Rosen, rightfully so!   You can feel Rosen trembling with glee as he quotes Mitchell comparing us to “another group of civilians who roamed the streets of Germany in the 1920s bullying people, shouting down those who disagreed with them and denying other people their civil rights.  They were called Hitler’s Brown Shirts.”

Talk about turning mortgage debt and junk bonds into gold!  As we all knew back then, Mitchell and his felonious minions at Justice were the proudest bald headed fascists of the day.  But Rosen is undeterred by fact and, by his account (hold your barf bag near) Mitchell also single-handedly desegregated the South’s public schools.  Negro and Negro-loving white community organizers played no significant role whatsoever.

Think that’s bad?  Well, it gets worse.

Revising Watergate for Modern Consumption

Although Rosen admits that Mitchell's role in the Watergate bugging and cover-up “is indisputable,” he claims that Mitchell was “framed” by a “wicked alliance” of co-conspirators “eager to tell lies."  Which brings us to Rosen’s “call girl” conspiracy theory, in which John Dean ordered the Watergate burglary and the CIA, under Democrat Richard Helms, assisted. 

What, inquiring people ask, is the “call girl” theory?

According to Rosen, it’s the fact that employees at the Democratic National Committee “were assisting in getting the Democrats connected with the prostitutes at the Columbia Plaza.”  And John Dean bugged the Watergate because his wife Maureen was one of the calls girls!

According to Rosen, “Dean’s unique knowledge of all the players and their complex interconnections…makes him the only logical answer in the three-decades-old mystery of …who among the president’s men pressured Jeb Magruder [Mitchell’s deputy at CREEP] to send [Howard Hunt’s partner, G. Gordon] Liddy and his team back into the DNC.”

“This is not your father’s Watergate,” Rosen quips.

No, it definitely is not.  It’s The X-Files meets Desperate Housewives.  Or, as John Dean says about Rosen, “I will probably deal with him in court.  His material, to put it mildly, is bullshit.” 

History as It Was

Rosen the Straw Man really hates John Dean and anything that smacks of civil rights or anti-war liberalism.  Then again, what else would one expect from a Fox News geek?

Rosen’s hatred of Dean and love of Mitchell is steadfast in the face of the awful truth.  The major fact being that Mitchell approved G. Gordon Liddy's Gemstone Plan to subvert George McGovern’s 1972 campaign through black bag jobs, assassination, kidnapping, rumor mongering and any other means necessary.  Liddy, who enjoyed eating the heads off of living rats (not to prove his strength, but because he liked the taste), presented Mitchell with his plan in January 1972.   As the top law enforcement officer in America, Mitchell had the legal imperative to Just Say No.  If he had been half the circus Strong Man Rosen pretends, fat flabby Mitchell would have kicked Liddy out of his office.

But Nixon’s moral compass showed his true colors and agreed to Liddy’s crazy plan, thus giving the world Watergate and Rosen something to re-write about.

The other sad fact is that Mitchell was unscrupulous and corrupt, and narrowly dodged a charge that he and Nixon’s Commerce Secretary helped Robert Vesco (a drug smuggler fugitive living under the DEA’s nose in Costa Rica) with the Securities and Exchange Commission, after Vesco made a secret $200,000 cash contribution to Nixon's 1972 presidential campaign. The SEC, notably, was then chaired by former OSS spy William Casey, later Reagan’s DCI.  (People rarely realize that the CIA is more closely allied with Wall Street than the it is to The White House.)  Vesco was acquainted with Nixon's brothers, Edward and Donald, and the latter's son worked as Vesco’s bagman to CREEP. After the payoff, Mitchell immediately connected Vesco’s emissary to Casey.

Rosen also fails to mention that Mitchell approved the CIA’s infiltration of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.  BNDD Director John Ingersoll told me that someone asked him to participate in the Watergate cover-up.  Ingersoll had two friends in the Nixon Administration – Mitchell and Dean – but he wouldn’t say which one it was.

Mitchell has also been linked to mobster Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters, wing nut Howard Hughes, and mob activities at the same Vegas casinos where McCain feels compelled to play craps. 

Truth be told, Mitchell got off easy when in the fall in 1974 he was indicted on charges of conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice.  He was convicted of suborning his CREEP deputy’s perjured testimony before the Watergate grand jury.   

Mitchell went to prison without complaining that he was framed.   He never corrected the false notion that he commanded John F. Kennedy during World War II, or the “bogus suggestion that he played hockey for the New York Rangers.”

It was as if he knew that a false Messiah like Rosen would one day come along and pretend that all the charges against him were Lies!  Damned Lies!

Like Nixon would say, “And Bush is not a war criminal.”
Rosen spent 17 years sifting through the evidence and carefully discarding anything that pointed at Mitchell.   What remains in Strong Man is as credible as the barrage of partisan distortions one hears daily, hourly, minute-by-endless minute on Fox News.  And by mutating John Mitchell from a villain into a victim, James Rosen has proven himself a carnival act worthy of inclusion in the right wing-nut hall of shame.

Douglas Valentine is the author of four books which are available at his websites http://www.members.authorsguild.net/valentine/ and http://www.douglasvalentine.com/index.html His fifth book, The Strength of the Pack: The Politics, Personalities and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped The DEA, will be published in September 2009 by Trine Day.

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont