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Today's
Stories
March 24, 2004
Steve Niva
Israel's Assassinations will Only
Fuel More Suicide Bombings
March 23, 2004
Phillip Cryan
The
Drug War's Next Casualty: Colombia's National Parks
Ron Jacobs
They Shoot Men in Wheelchairs, Too?
Dave Lindorff
A Spanish Parallel: Scare Tactics and Elections
Mike Whitney
Richard Clarke and Teflon George
Brian McKinlay
Bush's Lil' Buddy in Trouble: John Howard Starts to Wobble
JG
Driving Mr. Koon: "Jim Crow Lives Next Door"
Phyllis Pollack
Gettin' Jigga with Metallica: the Battle Over the Double Black
CD
Ahmed Bouzid
Sharon's One-Way Track
Sean Carter
The G-Word Goes to Court: One Nation Under [Your Logo Here]
M. Shahid Alam
World's Greatest Country: Do the Facts Lie
March 22, 2004
Mazin Qumsiyeh
On Extrajudicial
Executions
Uri Avnery
The
Assassination of Sheikh Yassin is Worse Than a Crime
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon's Rampage
Mike Whitney
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: the Story of Captain James Yee
Jason Leopold
Firm With Ties to Cheney Faces Criminal Indictment in Cal Energy
Scam
Greg Moses
Stop
Walling and Stalling: a Report from Houston's Peace March
Phil Gasper
San Francisco: 25,000 March for an End to the Occupation
Lenni Brenner
Report
from NYC: Old and Young Parade for Peace
Julian Borger
The Clarke Revelations
Steve Perry
Karl Rove's Moment
Website of the Day
Enviros Against War
March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
March 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Zapatero
to Kerry: Back Off, Senator, Our Troops are Coming Home
Ann Harrison
So
Protesters, How Well Do You Know Your Rights?
William MacDougall
Fortress Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
Greg Moses
Sold American: Cowboy Nation Gets Ready to Vote
Cynthia McKinney
Haiti and the Impotence of Black America: Roll Back This Coup,
Mr. Bush
Norman Solomon
Spinning the Past; Threatening the Future
John L. Hess
"Missing" Evidence and the NYTs
Vicente Navarro
The
End of Aznar, Bush's Best Friend
Website of the War
Naming the Dead
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
March 11, 2004
Ron Jacobs
Bedtime
for Democracy
Bill Kauffman
Hey,
Ralph! Why Not Another Party of the People?
James Hollander
Slaughter
in Madrid: Consolidating an Ally?
Norman Solomon
They
Shoot Journalists, Don't They?
Patrick Gavin
The Salvation of Dan Quayle: Family Values Return
Becky Burgwin
You're
Messing with the Wrong Generation
John Sugg
The FBI is on My Trail
March 10, 2004
Hammond Guthrie
Read
This Book!: "Who the Hell is Stew Albert?"
Chris Floyd
Operation Enduring Sweatshop: Another
Bush Brings Hell to Haiti
Elizabeth Corrie
Remembering the Death of Rachel Corrie
Mike Whitney
US Press Torpedoes Aristide
M. Junaid Alam
An Anti-Civilizational War?
Bob Feldman
The Occupation of Haiti: Recalling 1915-1934
John L. Hess
An Overload of Crises
Gary Leupp
On Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi and the Uses of al-Qaeda "Links"
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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March
24, 2004
"We're Not as Bad as George"
Two
Cheers for Democrats
By GREG WEIHER
"We're not as bad as George and
the prevari-cons!"
It is under this beige banner that the
Democrats ride forth, their dingy pennants hanging limp in a
dank, fetid, fitful breeze generated by a rented fan. What a
rallying cry.
Their claims, though delivered with great
fanfare, are modest: not that they don't lie, but that they don't
lie as much; not that they don't have their snouts buried in
the trough, but that they don't root for the choice morsels as
well as the Poland-Chinas on the Republican side; not that they
would stop the rape of Iraq, but that they would pause to don
a rubber.
And woe on those who do not snap to attention
and salute this tawdry band. They taught Howard Dean a lesson,
and now they're going after Ralph Nader, too. The Bushies impugn
the patriotism of anyone who disagrees with them. Stealing a
page from the book of Rove, the DNC says that anyone who has
second thoughts about John Kerry is a traitor. "A vote for
Nader is a vote for Bush!"
How many times are they going to run
this scam? Nader was the object of their contumely last time
around, the son-of-a-bitch that put George Bush in office. The
funny thing is, I haven't heard the DNC say nearly as much about
the purge of the voting lists in Florida as they have about Nader's
candidacy. According to Greg Palast, the blatantly illegal Republican
tactic meant the loss of 22,000 Democratic votes-easily enough
to have put Al gore into the White House. Suspicion also surrounds
the use of electronic ballots in Georgia where victorious Republican
candidates were trailing by double-digits just before election
time. Democrats don't mention this, nor do they express much
concern over plans to use electronic voting in the elections
in November. They show all the conviction with regard to vote
theft that they showed when George tricked them into voting for
war in Iraq: "We was duped!" It's become their refrain.
Kerry was wrong on the war. Kerry was
wrong on the Patriot Act. Kerry has been the biggest pig at the
special interest trough in Congress.
And now comes John Kerry, Champion of
Israel. "Senator John Kerry told dozens of Jewish leaders
in New York on Sunday that he would continue the Bush administration
policy of vetoing any United Nations Security Council resolutions
seen as one-sided against Israel . . . that the barrier Israel
is erecting to separate Palestinian territories from Israeli
ones is a fence, not a wall . . . [he] sought to assure attendees
that he was as strong a supporter of Israel as Mr. Bush"
(New York Times 03/01/04).
You'll hear more dissent over Sharon's
ethnic cleansing from the Israeli Labor Party than you'll hear
from John Kerry. You'll hear more criticism of George Bush's
prostration before all things Israeli in an Israeli Defense Force
barracks. Kerry can't even muster up the chutzpah to call a wall
a wall, or, better yet, to say that semantics are irrelevant
in the face of the creation of Palestinian Bantustans.
Kerry's promise to Israel's most rabid
supporters is "You don't have to worry about Losing Perle
and Wolfowitz and Feith if Bush is defeated because you'll still
have me!" For those of us who see the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict as a root cause of Islamic hostility toward the United
States, Kerry offers no alternative to Bush at all.
At what point do the Democrats start
taking responsibility for their own nominees? My choices at the
outset were Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean. The difference between
the two was Dean's lofty status in the polls and his $40 million
war chest. So I threw my lot in with Howard. My choice was confirmed
when Dean had the candor to say that Americans were no safer
after the capture of Saddam Hussein than they were before. Of
course, this set off a cacophony among the mainline Democrats.
It became just another means of character assassination.
It takes a lot of nerve, after scuttling
the one viable candidate who expressed my point of view, to tell
me that if I don't vote for Kerry then George Bush is my fault.
On the other hand . . .
Given that we are presented with a stark
choice, conscience forces us to look beyond the fact that Kerry
is your prototypical political empty suit. Would the world be
better off with John Kerry as president or with George Bush?
It's like asking, "would you prefer weevilly cornbread for
dinner or a dirt ball?"
In spite of the fact that the Democratic
Party is in the process of nominating its next-to-worst candidate
(no offense Senator Lieberman), we have to hope that he will
win the election. There are three reasons for this: the environment,
health care, and judicial appointments. There's not much difference
between Kerry and Bush on foreign policy, Israel, Iraq, campaign
finance, special interests, "homeland" security, etc.,
etc., etc. And God knows, Kerry has never taken a stand that
a sufficient amount of special interest money and some polling
data couldn't cause him to reverse. But the selection of George
Bush to be president by the Republican Supreme Court demonstrates
that it would be better to have Kerry appointing judges.
So what should a self-respecting person
do? I propose the creation of "The Society for the Tepid
Support of John Kerry." The first principle of the STSJK
is that we should under no circumstances actually cast a vote
for the junior senator from Massachusetts. There are things we
can do to help the cause, however.
I recently had a phone conversation with
my son. "You know, I'll probably vote for Kerry," he
said.
"I won't vote for him," I replied,
"but I'll give him money, compared to which, in our American
plutocracy, voting is like farting in a hurricane."
Any political scientist will tell you
that you have a much greater influence on elections when you
make a campaign contribution than you do when you cast your vote.
So there is an honorable compromise available to those of us
who deplore Kerry but feel duty bound to help unseat Bush. Don'
t vote for Kerry because that's too good for him. But it's OK
to send money, particularly since it's a form of intercourse
that he understands far better.
Well then, how much should you send?
That's up to you, of course, but let me make a suggestion. Whatever
you decide to contribute, send it to him in thirty-dollar bunches.
If you decide you want to give $300, send ten thirty-dollar checks,
or make ten individual charges of $30 on your credit card.
That's the way I plan to do it, except
that I'm not going to use checks or credit. I'm sending silver
dollars, thirty at a time.
In a previous CounterPunch article, "Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass" (02/18/04), I misrepresented the
position of Christopher Scheers and Robert Scheers. I said that
they apparently felt that John Kerry was not culpable in voting
for the Iraq War because he had been misled about its justification
by the Bush administration. In fact, this is not the Scheers'
position, and Christopher Scheers did hold Kerry to account in
remarks prior to the ones I heard. I regret not having portrayed
their position accurately.
Greg Weiher
is a political scientist and free-lance writer living in Houston,
Texas. He can be reached at gweiher@uh.edu.
Weekend
Edition Features for March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
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