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Today's
Stories
November
1 / 2, 2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne
Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick
Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine
Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
October 30, 2003
Forrest
Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip
Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert
Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander
Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October
29, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence
Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine
Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October
28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane
Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert
Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason
Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris
White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27, 2003
William
A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David
Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine
Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert
Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October
25 / 26, 2003
Robert
Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James
Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher
Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane
Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin
Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn
Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey
Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets'
Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October
24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David
Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry
Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
October
23, 2003
Diane
Christian
Ruthlessness
Kurt Nimmo
Criticizing Zionism
David Lindorff
A General Theory of Theology
Alan Maass
The Future of the Anti-War Movement
William
Blum
Imperial
Indifference
Stew Albert
A Memo
October
22, 2003
Wayne
Madsen
Religious
Insanity Runs Rampant
Ray McGovern
Holding
Leaders Accountable for Lies
Christopher
Brauchli
There's
No Civilizing the Death Penalty
Elaine
Cassel
Legislators
and Women's Bodies
Bill Glahn
RIAA
Watch: the New Morality of Capitalism
Anthony Arnove
An Interview with Tariq Ali
October 21, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Beilin Agreement
Robert Jensen
The Fundamentalist General
David
Lindorff
War Dispatch from the NYT: God is on Our Side!
William S. Lind
Bremer is Deaf to History
Bridget
Gibson
Fatal Vision
Alan Haber
A Human Chain for Peace in Ann Arbor
Peter
Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Hanging of Thomas Russell
October
20, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Chile's
Failed Economy: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Chris
Floyd
Circus Maximus: Arnie, Enron and Bush Maul California
Mark Hand
Democrats Seek to Disappear Chomsky
& Nader
John &
Elaine Mellencamp
Peaceful
World
Elaine
Cassel
God's
General Unmuzzled
October
18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
October
17, 2003
Stan Goff
Piss
On My Leg: Perception Control and the Stage Management of War
Newton
Garver
Bolivia
in Turmoil
Standard
Schaefer
Grocery Unions Under Attack
Ben Terrall
The Ordeal of the Lockheed 52
Ron Jacobs
First Syria, Then Iran
David
Lindorff
Michael
Moore Proclaims Mumia Guilty
October
16, 2003
Marjorie
Cohn
Bush
Gunning for Regime Change in Cuba
Gary Leupp
"Getting Better" in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
The US Press and Israel: Brand Loyalty and the Absence of Remorse
Rush Limbaugh
The 10 Most Overrated Athletes of All Time
Lenni
Brenner
I
Didn't Meet Huey Newton. He Met Me
Website of the Day
Time Tested Books
October
15, 2003
Sunil
Sharma / Josh Frank
The
General and the Governor: Two Measures of American Desperation
Forrest
Hylton
Dispatch
from the Bolivian War: "Like Animals They Kill Us"
Brian
Cloughley
Those
Phony Letters: How Bush Uses GIs to Spread Propaganda About Iraq
Ahmad
Faruqui
Lessons
of the October War
Uri Avnery
Three
Days as a Living Shield
Website
of the Day
Rank and File: the New Unity Partnership Document
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
October 14, 2003
Eric Ridenour
Qibya
& Sharon: Anniversary of a Massacre
Elaine
Cassel
The
Disgrace That is Guantanamo
Robert
Jensen
What the "Fighting Sioux" Tells Us About White People
David Lindorff
Talking Turkey About Iraq
Patrick
Cockburn
US Troops Bulldoze Crops
VIPS
One Person Can Make a Difference
Toni Solo
The CAFTA Thumbscrews
Peter
Linebaugh
"Remember
Orr!"
Website
of the Day
BRIDGES
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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Weekend
Edition
November 1 / 2, 2003
The Brown Paste on
Bush's Shoes
It's an Ill Wind
By BEN TRIPP
Like the zephyrs blowing through my underpants,
there is a new breeze ruffling the assorted toupees and comb-overs
in our nation's capitol. It is the fresh wind of change, eddying
through the pall over the Mall, bringing with it a faint fresh
smell: the scent of true righteousness, which is like the aroma
of a cherry blossom in a roomful of decaying badger carcasses.
This change is drifting over Washington with an agonizing slowness,
results achieved by subtle but inexorable erosive process like
dust grinding down a marble edifice over millennia--results that
really ought to be achieved in a long weekend by sixty thousand
intoxicated Visigoths wielding mallets. What is this desirable
result, the first whiff of which we are now catching? It is
the collapse of the Bush maladministration's credibility, and
with it its operatives' dreams of a Thousand-Year Right.
Surely, as my numerous detractors on
the right-hand end of the speculum will point out, it is wrong
to make mock of a president struggling so manfully against such
dire evils as are abroad in the world? Surely we, the American
people, should get behind him and support our troops? There's
a silly frigging idea. Bush is surrounded by concrete barriers
and electric razor wire in Washington, DC. Our troops are sucking
dirt in some hellhole on the other side of the world, overworked,
underpaid, and going swiftly insane slaughtering the locals.
You want to support our troops, get Bush in front of them.
They'll be home on the first transport out of Kuwait. Bush
has had all the support he could ever ask for, and six trillion
times more support than he ever deserved (I'm rounding the number
to the nearest trillion for ease of reading). I for one am well
pleased that the noisome brown paste is finally clinging to his
shoes and ankles, and Rumsfeld's, and Condi's pumps, and on down
the line of them, the whole vile, varicose, villainous gang of
them embrindled with poo at last. O schadenfreude, O schadenfreude,
Du kannst mir sehr gefallen!
The ruination of Bush's utterly spurious
credibility has been a long, slow process, entirely unaided by
such old fallbacks as the free press and Congress, two entities
that (in the good old days when a bottle of pop cost a nickel
and you could purchase cocaine over the counter to alleviate
toothache) Americans used to rely upon to moderate the behavior
of even the most madcap Executive troupe. For two years no action
by the Bush junta, be it ever so perfidious, got the slightest
rise out of any of the traditional watchdogs. They were sunk
in some kind of narcoleptic trance. Trample the Bill of Rights!
Destroy our common weal! Wage unprovoked wars on the wrong
moustache! Throw firecrackers at our fission-capable enemies!
Capering like maniacs across the national and world stages,
not an eyelid could the Bush operatives cause to bat, watchdog-wise.
But Bush, or properly the Buffalo Bob types operating the monofilaments
attached to his limbs, have finally started to get results.
Through constant diligence, Bush and his gaggle of suck-buttock
familiars have managed to force the slumbering Chihuahuas to
react, however slightly. And it looks like there's more to come.
One can only assume that all of the men
and women in the Bush Precision Marching Corps were the same
precocious brats as children, always pushing and pushing to get
the attention of their distant progenitors (important people
with other things on their beautiful minds). No matter what
they did--drowning siblings in the maid's bathroom, torturing
cats on the lawn, setting the stables afire--they got no reaction.
Then, while smashing a priceless Sung Dynasty vase in the music
room, these attention-starved poppets were interrupted by the
sudden entrance of the red-faced whiskey-scented father and subsequent
application of a thorough, cathartic beating. How else to explain
their behavior as adults? The Bush cabal has committed treasonous
outrages against country, against mankind, against the very God
they smirkingly adore. The word 'naughty' barely begins to describe
it.
Over and over again they have been caught
with hands red as a mandrill's pootie, then lied about everything
and denied whatever could not possibly be lied about. Weapons
of Mass Destruction? Iraqi terrorists? Diplomat's wives? Take
it on home, Reverend. How about that global warming? It's just
a coincidence- throw some more coal on the fire, Gracie. A job
market sagging like the tits of an ancient dowager under the
gravitational influence of Jupiter? Try tax cuts for the wealthy!
A brilliant solution to the problem of out-of-work millionaires.
What about the matter of America's wildernesses, those great
sacred lands held in common trust? Fuck you, hippie. Get off
my mineral rights. The same could be said of our nation's airwaves,
which have been clearcut--or Clear Channeled--if I may be permitted
a little pun. We so enjoy these little games with words, don't
we, Mopsy? I may be a crab in high dudgeon or Dungeoness, but
at last payback is coming for these insatiable world-pillaging
piratical gawwads, and I'm starting to enjoy myself.
This little shiver of delight is at the
expense of everything, of course. Our nation has lost every
last vestige of its honor and prestige in the gathering of nations,
like a belligerent vomit-soaked drunk that started a fistfight
on the dance floor with an unattractive midget. We Americans
are now looked upon as bloodthirsty, ignorant, and intolerant.
The very world we live in is rebelling against our predations
as the climate bends to human will and serves us with hurricanes
and fires and droughts of record-breaking proportions. America
is not the first nation to disgrace itself in this manner, but
then again America ain't Germany or Imperial Rome. You expect
those cats to misbehave, and back in those days the end of our
species wasn't such a big concern. For America (the last best
hope of this world, they used to say) to fall so low is like
catching Superman in bed with the Vienna Boy's Choir, a bunch
of bananas, and a quart bucket of lard. And what with all the
angry extremists swarming around taking one-way flying lessons
and strapping on Gelignite fanny packs, this is a piss-poor time
to extinguish the beacon of Truth, Justice, and Liberty we used
to shine around these parts. We are well and truly yfuckt.
Things can only get worse before they
get better. It makes me sad. But then I remember there's a
presidential campaign getting into full swing, and I think about
how very much lipstick the Boy Emperor's people are daubing on
the pig, and how very often they contradict themselves, and now
they're starting to squabble, and I catch another faint whiff
coming from Washington. It's the scent of fear, as refreshing
in its way as a sea breeze (one measure vodka, two measures grapefruit
and cranberry juice). Mission Accomplished, indeed. Bush threw
a press conference recently, and one of the half-awakened members
of the press asked him about the 'Mission Accomplished' banner
that flew from the poopdeck of the aircraft carrier he so bravely
arrived on. Bush denied his people had anything to do with the
banner--apparently modern aircraft carriers have banner printing
services onboard these days, and probably one-hour photo processing
as well. In denying responsibility for this banner, El Residente
said, and I quote, "I know it [the banner] was attributed
somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff--they weren't
that ingenious, by the way." Senior Navy officials confirm
the banner did in fact come from the White House, not the Navy.
Either Bush or the US Navy is lying. In at least one respect,
Bush did tell the truth, however: his advance men aren't that
ingenious. They have squandered everything--all the money, all
the goodwill, all the freedoms, all the accumulated IOU's of
generations of bold diplomacy and the riches of our legacy for
the future--in half a term of office.
But as it says in Congreve's play, "'Tis
an ill wind that blows nobody good. Well, you may rejoice over
my ill fortune, since it paid the price of your ransom."
We've been ransomed, all right, and there's ill fortune aplenty;
we'll be paying the price for centuries to come. Yet still we
may hope the ill wind gathering in Washington blows nobody good
into the Potomac, where the concrete overshoes of hubris will
sink them into the ignominious mud. Then it's sea breezes all
around.
Ben Tripp
is a screenwriter and cartoonist. Ben also has a
lot of outrageously priced crap for sale here. If his
writing starts to grate on your nerves, buy some and maybe he'll
flee to Mexico. If all else fails, he can be reached at: credel@earthlink.net
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Robert
Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James
Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher
Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane
Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin
Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn
Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey
Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets'
Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
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