Coming
in October
From Common Courage Press
Today's
Stories
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
August 28, 2003
Gilad Atzmon
The
Most Common Mistakes of Israelis
David Vest
Moore's
Monument: Cement Shoes for the Constitution
David Lindorff
Shooting Ali in the Back: Why the Pacification is Doomed
Chris Floyd
Cheap Thrills: Bush Lies to Push His War
Wayne Madsen
Restoring the Good, Old Term "Bum"
Elaine Cassel
Not Clueless in Chicago
Stan Goff
Nukes in the Dark
Tariq Ali
Occupied
Iraq Will Never Know Peace
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Behold, My Package
Website of the Day
Palestinian
Artists
Recent
Stories
August 27, 2003
Bruce Jackson
Little
Deaths: Hiding the Body Count in Iraq
John Feffer
Nuances and North Korea: Six Countries in Search of a Solution
Dave Riley
an Interview with Tariq Ali on the Iraq War
Lacey Phillabaum
Bush's Holy War in the Forests
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Website of the Day
The Dean Deception
August 26, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing the Dead
David Lindorff
The
Great Oil Gouge: Burning Up that Tax Rebate
Sarmad S. Ali
Baghdad is Deadlier Than Ever: the View of an Iraqi Coroner
Christopher Brauchli
Bush Administration Equates Medical Pot Smokers with Segregationists
Juliana Fredman
Collective Punishment on the West Bank: Dialysis, Checkpoints
and a Palestinian Madonna
Larry Siems
Ghosts of Regime Changes Past in Guatemala
Elaine Cassel
Onward, Ashcroft Soldiers!
Saul Landau
Bush:
a Modern Ahab or a Toy Action Figure?
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the
Iraq Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A Drug
for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will: the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity: Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now No
One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
is not an Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
Hot Stories
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
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
August
29, 2003
The Congressional
Jesus Freaks
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
By LENNI BRENNER
All right, Godless CounterPunchers,
we know that you are snickering about Alabama's Chief Justice
Roy Moore's 10 Commandments rock. Now his eight associate judges
have repudiated "Roy's Rock," and the state's Attorney
General removed it. So all is well. Or is it?
On July 22, the House
voted 307 to 119 for an amendment to an appropriations bill.
It prohibits the use of federal money to enforce the 9th Circuit
Court of Appeals previous ruling that "under God" has
no business in the Pledge of Allegiance. The next day it voted
260 to 161 to prohibit funding of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals
decision demanding the removal of Moore's monument.
Ninety-one of 199 Democrats
voted to prohibit funding the "under God" decision,
50 out of 197 voted to ban US money for enforcement of the order
against Moore. Cynics felt that this was just populist demagoguery,
that they knew that the bill wouldn't get past the Senate. Except
that the Senate had previously voted, 99 to 0 and 94 to 0, to
denounce the 9th's ruling in nonbinding statements.
With Alabama's court
and AG promising to get rid of the 10 Commandments stone, the
Senate won't have to vote on that, but "under God"
is still before the courts. As of now, no one has introduced
the 11th Circuit Court amendment into the Senate, and it is possible
that our Senators will cook up a parliamentary maneuver to evade
binding a vote on the House's handiwork. But if they do, that
only postpones the political day of reckoning for our secular
liberals until the 2004 elections.
Columnists in the New
York Times, the Nation and other liberal journals now agonize
over whether they are for Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich. None
of their ruminations mean a thing. Everyone familiar with those
publications' previous endorsements knows that they will tell
us to vote for anyone the Democrats nominate, even if they dig
up Attila and run him as a peace candidate. But for the Hun's
presidency to mean much, domestically, he's got to have a Democratic
Congress to back him up. Which means that our secular Democrats
will be on their knees the night before the election, alongside
Moore, praying that all the House Democrats who voted for him,
and all the Senators who stood up for "God" against
you heathens, get reelected.
Win or lose, liberalism
faces its terminal crisis. Secularist organizations are deeply
troubled. Secularism was invented by Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison, the Democratic Party's founders. Library shelves sag
under the weight of their warnings about mixing religion and
politics. But every hypocritical
Democrat's vote on behalf of Moore or "under God" was
a weapon of mass deception aimed at Jefferson's great "wall
of separation between Church and State."
God and the 10 Commandments
may be what Judaism is all about, but even the American Jewish
Congress, which wants continued support of both parties for Israel,
called the House votes "assaults on the rule of law."
Mock pious politicians may be 'good for Israel,' but their members
live here and they fear that politically 'shrewd' pandering to
the Christian right today can end us up with a Christian government
on some tomorrow.
Secularist Democrats
have fallen into a pit of their own digging. Ninety-eight, maybe
99 out of 100, share the cynicism of their party on other issues.
For example, many secularists are privately for legalizing recreational
pot. Yet they have no problem with Dean and Kucinich running
like thieves from the issue, which isn't central to the secular
world view. But they know that any Presidential candidate of
"the democratic wing of the Democratic Party," will
never denounce the congressional Democratic Jesus freaks and
panderers to the freaks, and that the reason for their silence
is exactly the same depraved vote counting reason they are quieter
than Jerusalem Slim's empty tomb re marijuana.
For all their populist
rhetoric, 'democratic wing' politicians operate on the basis
of a great unspoken truth: Poor people got poor ways. Foolish
voters outnumber the wise, not just in Alabama, but in every
state in the union. Their strategy is to pander to those fools,
black, white and otherwise, by commission or omission, by lying
to them, or keeping quite when their party colleagues do, all
in the fools' interests, you understand.
Wannabe leftist candidates
also must face that sobering reality. Pander or educate. But
if you pander, you never convert anyone into a thinking political
being.
Democrats are "crackpot
realists." They know that 47% of Americans, 57% of Blacks,
believe that God created the world about 10,000 years ago. They
court that religious Black vote and desperately pander to white
Protestant born-agains, pro-Zionist Orthodox Jewish believers
in the Great Ham-hater in the sky, and similar powerful minds.
They hem and they haw about gay marriage. But, in the 'real world'
which they babble about without really examining, one in seven
Americans now reject all religions, millions of sincere believers
also believe in keeping religion out of politics, there are now
over 19 million potheads, and tens of millions of straights accept
gay marriage.
To be sure, as of now,
no for-keeps revolutionary can get elected President. But a serious
radical candidate in 2004 most assuredly can recruit a massive
movement out of those already gigantic minorities. And always
remember that the Democrats lost to Nixon in 1968 and 1972, yet
Nixon lost the Vietnam war. That's because it wasn't Democrats
Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern who organized hundreds of
thousands into the antiwar movement. It was a few thousand Trotskyists
and Stalinists who called the demonstrations.
And today no sane person
expects Dean or Kucinich to call for an anti-war movement. Not
here, and certainly not within the military in Afghanistan and
Iraq and Saudi Arabia. That plain and simple truth automatically
disqualifies them as genuine 'peace candidates'.
James Madison
to Edward Livingston
July 10, 1822
Notwithstanding the general
progress made within the two last centuries in favour of this
branch of liberty, & the full establishment of it, in some
parts of our Country, there remains in others a strong bias towards
the old error, that without some sort of alliance or coalition
between Govt. & Religion neither can be duly supported. Such
indeed is the tendency to such a coalition, and such its corrupting
influence on both the parties, that the danger cannot be too
carefully guarded agst. And in a Govt. of opinion, like ours,
the only effectual guard must be found in the soundness and stability
of the general opinion on the subject. Every new & successful
example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical
and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that
every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done,
in shewing that religion & Govt. will both exist in greater
purity, the less they are mixed together. It was the belief of
all sects at one time that the establishment of Religion by law,
was right & necessary; that the true religion ought to be
established in exclusion of every other; And that the only question
to be decided was which was the true religion. The example of
Holland proved that a toleration of sects, dissenting from the
established sect, was safe & even useful. The example of
the Colonies, now States, which rejected religious establishments
altogether, proved that all Sects might be safely & advantageously
put on a footing of equal & entire freedom; and a continuance
of their example since the declaration of Independence, has shewn
that its success in Colonies was not to be ascribed to their
connection with the parent Country. If a further confirmation
of the truth could be wanted, it is to be found in the examples
furnished by the States, which have abolished their religious
establishments. I cannot speak particularly of any of the cases
excepting that of Virga. where it is impossible to deny that
Religion prevails with more zeal, and a more exemplary priesthood
than it ever did when established and patronised by Public authority.
We are teaching the world the great truth that Govts. do better
without Kings & Nobles than with them. The merit will be
doubled by the other lesson that Religion flourishes in greater
purity, without than with the aid of Govt.
Lenni Brenner
is the editor of 51
Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis and a
contributor to The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at BrennerL21@aol.com
Weekend
Edition Features for August 23 / 24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|