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Today's
Stories
December 6 / 7, 2003
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
December 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
November 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
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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December
6 / 7, 2003
Bartley's Reward
Bush Ministry of Disinformation
Editor Gets "Freedom" Medal
By KURT NIMMO
There are two departments in the Bush Ministry
of Disinformation: one for plebian lowbrows who don't like the
read -- the Fox News Channel -- and another for effete reactionary
highbrows who enjoy newspaper ink on their fingers -- the Wall
Street Journal, or more appropriately the War Street Journal
since the rag has repeatedly called for mass murder in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
It was no big surprise when Bush awarded
former War Street Journal editor and now editor emeritus Robert
Bartley with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which should,
for the sake of accuracy, be renamed the Dictator Medal of Mindfuck,
since that's what Bartley, a far rightwing ideologue, has done
to the American people, or those who read the War Street Journal,
anyway.
Bartley's hatred of everything progressive
and even mildly liberal stretches back to the 60s. In fact, as
David Walsh points out (apparently, these days, it takes a socialist
to notice these kind of things), Bartley "developed a pathological
hatred for the radicalism of the 1960s and lays virtually all
of the evils of the world at its door," including the murder
of abortion doctors.
"We think it is possible to identify
the date when the United States ... began to tip off the emotional
tracks," the War Street Journal editorialized. "The
date is August 1968 when the Democratic National Convention found
itself sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam
War movement."
In other words, Democrats and wizened
antiwar demonstrators are responsible for the murders committed
by the antiabortion lunatic fringe, as if the two groups were,
according to the shills at the War Street Journal, joined at
birth and shared the same ideology.
In truth, the demented people who gun
down abortion doctors are ideologically in sync with far right
Reaganite nutcases such as Bartley and their crackpot evangelical
Christian Zionist friends.
Thanks to this year's recipient of the
Dictator Medal of Mindfuck, dictionaries now carry the odious
term "supply-side economics."
Supply-side isn't really an economic
theory per se, unless you consider stealing money from the poor
to lavish the fat-ass rich with tax "breaks" an economic
theory.
The quasi-theory of supply-side economics
can accurately be considered Bartley's baby. "Without Bartley
and his  newspaper, supply-side economics
would have been stillborn," right-winger Robert Novak proclaimed
from the pages of the neocon house organ, the Murdoch-financed
Weekly Standard. Murdoch, of course, also owns the lowbrow neocon
propaganda mouthpiece, Fox News.
Due in large part to Bartley and other
so-called conservatives, supply-side thievery created not only
the worst income inequality in the developed world, but also
skyrocketing rates of child poverty and misery. Bartley knows
tax cuts do not inspire the stinking rich to invest in the economy,
but quite the opposite -- instead, they "invest" in
their shamelessly affluent lifestyles. But then self-aggrandizement
and pilfering the social till is what the Reaganite far right
is all about.
As Bartley likely understands, more money
in the hands of less people encourages the concentration of political
power, a good deal for the stinking rich. "Even if aggregate
income and wealth are growing, as they become more unequally
distributed, those few in whose hands economic means are being
concentrated gain greater relative potential political influence,"
explains Prof. Lloyd J. Dumas of the University of Texas.
In other words, supply-side economics
eventually abrogates democracy and leads to a plutocratic form
of government, i.e., the rich bastards lording over those of
lesser means.
Madison understood this swindle and that's
why he argued for the establishment of checks and balances to
offset the "aggregate interests of the community,"
in other words those folks who Adam Smith realized would conspire
against humanity at large for financial gain, in short predatory
animals that engage in criminal behavior, i.e., sociopaths.
Moreover, as David Walsh explains, supply-side
is a "right-wing political perspective and a rationale for
deepening social inequality. The emergence and sudden respectability
of supply-side economics in the 1980s betokened the rejection
by a substantial part of the establishment of the social reformist
consensus that had dominated American politics since World War
II."
So, not only does supply-side allow the
rich to greedily stack money up like cordwood, it is also warfare
directed squarely against social programs Bush's former Reaganite
controllers loathe and are determined to completely eliminate.
They will do this by running up a trillion-dollar deficit each
year for the next five years. They will tell you they are doing
this to protect you from "terr'ism," as our unelected
president would have it, but this is yet another Straussian deception.
According to a Brookings Institution
study, Dubya's militarism will necessitate 40 percent cut in
spending on discretionary programs over the next decade. Add
to this $1.6 trillion in tax giveaways to the stinking rich through
2010 and, as Bush has promised, close to $2 trillion by 2013,
according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and
you have a recipe for whittling down the middle class permanently.
Bartley and the "more extreme Republicans,"
as London's Financial Times calls them -- over on this side of
the political spectrum we call them what they are, fascists --
want what New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls a "fiscal
train wreck," in other words the crash and burn of hated
federal social programs once and for all.
"It's no secret that right-wing
ideologues want to abolish programs Americans take for granted,"
Krugman wrote in the New York Times, not exactly a haven for
left-wing types. "But not long ago, to suggest that the
Bush administration's policies might actually be driven by those
ideologues -- that the administration was deliberately setting
the country up for a fiscal crisis in which popular social programs
could be sharply cut -- was to be accused of spouting conspiracy
theories... Yet by pushing through another huge tax cut in the
face of record deficits, the administration clearly demonstrates
either that it is completely feckless, or that it actually wants
a fiscal crisis. (Or maybe both.)"
Beyond trumpeting the call to feudalize
America, the War Street Journal and its supply-side neoliberal
neocons are among Bush's most faithful warmongers, chickenhawks,
and bloodletting cheerleaders.
Bartley's "opinion pieces"
are fastidious in their call for war against the people of Iraq,
repeating Bushite lies ad nauseam: Saddam had weapons of mass
destruction and was itching to use them, Saddam is the top banana
of international terrorism, Saddam and Osama are in cahoots,
Saddam was behind the anthrax attacks in America, Saddam would
unleash a fatal poxvirus attack on America in response to an
invasion of Iraq. All of this, of course, turned out to be pure
and unadulterated bullshit. Regardless, Bartley has served his
neocon masters well, abusing his influential position as "editor
emeritus" of a prestigious newspaper in order to spread
Bush's lies.
Leaving these parroted lies behind, Bartley
has recently moved on to disseminate new deceptions.
On September 8, in the wake of a Dubya
speech crammed like a stinking sardine can full of pathological
lies, Bartley addressed the "rough patch" the US is
encountering "four months after military victory in Iraq."
Even though the immensity of Bush's lies was more than obvious
in September, Bartley continued to insist, "Iraq and September
11 are inseparable."
Once again demonstrating that lies and
deception are indigenous to the moral character of Straussian
neocons, Bartley went on to state that no "serious observer
can believe that we would have invaded Iraq if there had been
no hijackings." In other words, Bartley believes the readers
of the War Street Journal editorial pages are morons.
As the Independent reported way back
in September of 2002, the Bushites, consisting of Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, Dubya's younger brother Jeb, and Scooter Libby drew
up plans for an Iraq invasion in a document entitled "Rebuilding
America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New
Century" well before Bush was appointed to the presidency.
"Fuck Saddam," our Christian Zionist Caesar allegedly
snarled in March 2002, a full year before his criminal invasion.
"We're taking him out."
Considering Robert Bartley's slavish
willingness to revise history and herald the outrageous lies
of the Bushite neocons, it should hardly come as a surprise that
Bush would "honor" him with the Presidential Medal
of Freedom, aka the Dictator Medal of Mindfuck. Bartley has served
his master well, so it only stands to reason.
Said Jim Naureckas of FAIR after Bartley's
enshrinement, "[I]f decades of producing partisan propaganda
is a service to freedom, then I guess [Bartley] deserves a medal."
Bartley's screeds in the name of Empire,
however, go well beyond simple partisan propaganda -- they provide
the intellectual underpinnings (along with the whacked out exhortations
of fellow neocon "thinkers" William Kristol, William
Safire, Charles Krauthammer Elliot Cohen, Max Boot, Daniel Pipes,
and others) required for the interminable war on Islam in the
name of Greater Israel, the rabid Likudites in Tel Aviv and Washington,
and the neoliberal agenda determined to privatize, i.e., steal,
the natural resources and wealth of the Third World.
For Bartley's undeviating service I'm
sure Bush is immensely thankful -- or, at least, his neocon puppeteers
are immensely thankful.
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html
. Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's,
The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays
for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, will soon be published
by Dandelion Books.
He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
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