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Today's
Stories
October 28, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Kerrycrats and the War
October
27, 2004
Jules
Rabin
Crammed with Distressful Politics
Dave
Lindorff
Bulgegate: the Lies Continue
Katherine
Van Tassel
On the Home Front: Both Parties
Ignore Working Parents
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Bi-Partisan Politics of Oil
October
26, 2004
Brian
Cloughley
Three
Weddings and Lots of Funerals: Atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan
William
Blum
Fear
Factors
Lenni
Brenner
The
1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Lessons for 2004
Ben
Tripp
The
Chicken Salad Election
Fidel Castro
After the Fall
Greg
Bates
The Nation's Flawed Calculus
Walter Brasch
Gag the Public: the War on Dissent
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
An Open Letter to Pat Buchanan
Mickey Z.
Rumble in the Jungle at 30: Ali, Foreman and the Congo
Amir
Taheri
The Boom in Conspiracy Theories
Alexander Billet
Say It Ain't So, Bruce!: the Boss Endorses Kerry
Doug
Giebel
The Religion of G.W. Bush
Kathleen
Christison
Why
I Liked Thomas Friedman's Latest Column Before I Didn't
October
25, 2004
Ralph
Nader
Letter
from a Minnesota Highway
Werther
West
Texas Wahabbism
Dave
Zirin
Boston's Killer Cops: Death of a Fan
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: Oregon Revokes Dr. Leveque's License
Omar
Barghouti
Executing Another Child in Rafah
William J. Nottingham
Lori Berenson's Story
John Chuckman
A Foolish Consistency
Uri
Avnery
On
the Road to Civil War
October
22 / 24, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
You
Can't Blame Nader for This
Rev. William Alberts
On Bended Knee: Faith-Based Deceptions
Willliam
A. Cook
Killing for Christ
Saul Landau
George W. Bush: a Man of His Words?
Bill
Quigley
I Held the Bullet in My Palm: Masked Haitian Police Shoot Children
While Arresting Priest
Christopher Brauchli
Seal It With a Frown: What Compassionate Conservativism Really
Means
William
S. Lind
Fallujah and the Moral Level of War
Sharon Smith
Guilt Trippers for Kerry
Greg
Bates
Kerrynomics: "Hurt the Ones Who Vote for Us"
Justin E.H. Smith
Is Lesser Evilism a Compromise with Evil?
Rebecca
Evans
Tarnished Legacy: Pinochet and the Chilean Military
Mike Whitney
Al Hurra TV: the Second Invasion
M.
Junaid Alam
Purchasing Individuality in America
David Krieger
Nuclear Non-Proliferation: Examining the Policies of Bush and
Kerry
David
J. Ledermann
The Emperor's New Crumbs
Lawrence Reichard
Same Old FBI Story
Website
of the Weekend
Lie Girls: the Real Coalition of the Willling
October
21, 2004
Ben
Tripp
The
Undecided Voter Examined
Joshua
Frank
Kerry
and the Environment:
It's Not Easy Pretending to be Green
Stan
Cox
What
the Left Doesn't Get About Small Businesses
Bill
Martinez
State
Depart and Cuban Visas: Only Anti-Castro Agitators Need Apply
Mark Engler
The War and Globalization
Lina
Britto and Lucia Suarez
Bolivia:
a Year After the October Insurrection
Website of the
Day
Two Pampered Children of Wealth
October
20, 2004
Yitzhak
Laor
"Did
You Two Squabble?": a Bullet Fired for Every Palestinian
Child
Jason
Leopold
Sinclair
Broadcasting's Air War: a Long History of Journalistic Deception
Jesse
Sharkey
A
Teacher's Account of How Military Recruiters Prey on High School
Students
Col.
Dan Smith
Choking
Free Speech About the Draft
Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
Using My Religion
David
Vest
If
Bush Wins, Blame Me
Jack Random
The Jackson 17: Reflections on a Mutiny
Ron
Jacobs
Time
to Kick It Up a Notch
James Brittain
Plan Patriota and the FARC: a Change in the Countryside?
Christopher
Dols
Bombing Madison: Michael Moore's Fright Fest
Dave Lindorff
First They Came for the Nurses...
Website
of the Day
Banana Republican Catalogue
October
19, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Party
Favors: the Political Business of Terry McAuliffe
Jeff
Taylor
Confessions
of a Swing State Voter
Matt
Vidal
American
Myopia: "More Money in Your Pocket"
Victor Kattan
"It's Not Who You're Against; It's Who You're For":
Palestine Takes Center Stage At Euro Social Forum
William
Loren Katz
What Goes Around Comes Around
Sean Carter
O'Reilly Should Shut Up About Extortion Claiims
CounterPunch Wire
Who's Really in Bed with Republican Funders: Kerry or Nader?
|
October 28, 2004
The
Great Delusion
Kerrycrats
and the War
By
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
I
asked one usually radical friend of mine, now a Kerrycrat, how
she could support a fellow who pledges a “better”,
wider war in Iraq and then a march on Teheran. “Oh”
she said airily, “you can’t believe anything a candidate
will say.”
From
where we sit, here at mission control, CounterPunch hq, (currently
a facility known as the Claremont Inn off Interstate 10 east of
LA, where Jeffrey St Clair is watching three inches of rain sluicing
down on the San Gabriel mountains) voting for John Kerry now is
like voting for LBJ in 1964 with full precognition of what he
was going to do in Vietnam for the next four years. By all means
vote for the guy if you think your ballot will really count in
keeping Ralph Nader out of the White House, but don’t do
so with the notion that all along John Kerry has been holding
a secret withdrawal plan close to his chest and that his first
three months in office will see the US Marines haul down the colors
from the US embassy in Baghdad, scoop Ambassador Negroponte off
the roof and head for home.
That’s
not what Democrats do when they get into office. When they settle
down in the White House and put up the portraits of Teddy Roosevelt
and Harry Truman in the Oval Office, they settle down to fight
the usual good fight of all Democratic presidents, which is battling
the slur that they are wimps, and less than real men.
Like
Jimmy Carter back in the 1970s, President Kerry will be well aware
that what shoe-horned him into the White House was an entirely
negative public emotion, hostility to George Bush. Just as Kerry
consistently disdained his eager and all-forgiving left supporters
before November 2, he’ll redouble his public and private
displays of rejection thereafter, contemptuously wiping Michael
Moore’s moist kisses from all his cheeks. The constituencies
President Kerry will be eager to placate and to satisfy will be
exactly the ones he has courted the whole of this election year:
the Neocons in Washington, and the bankers in Wall St.
You
doubt this, Kerrycrats? Take a look at what realistic right-wingers
are saying. Here for example is Edward Luttwak, no fool. Last
weekend Luttwak, currently ensconced at Washington’s Center
for Strategic and International Studies, had an article in Britain’s
conservative Sunday Telegraph, whose editors gave his piece the
headline, “John Kerry will make his adoring anti-war groupies
look like fools”.
Luttwak
reckons that Kerry is credible in those pledges to Wall Street
and the bankers to cut the deficit. (So much for any hopes of
any job creation at home.) But “to support him in the hope
that he would make American military policy more doveish is absurd.
All the evidence is that he will do the exact opposite.”
Luttwak rolls out his case:
“He
has declared that he wants to increase the US Army by two divisions,
more than the total of Continental Europe's intervention troops.
That too is a credible promise, in part because Iraq has exposed
an acute shortage of ground forces and an excess of navy and
air force personnel. But beyond any specific policy positions,
there is Kerry, the very combative man.
“In
the televised debates, when President Bush spoke of ‘defeating
terrorism’, Kerry invariably spoke of ‘killing the
terrorists’. This was not just an electoral pose: the
words accurately reflect the character of the man. … he
is a fighter, and a ferocious one. I am quite certain that if
Kerry had been president on September 11 he would have reacted
more violently than Bush, sending bombers into Afghanistan,
not just Special Forces scouts, and demanding immediate co-operation
- or else - from Saudi Arabia, not just Pakistan. European anti-militarists
have really picked the wrong guy as their hero.
“It
is true that Kerry opposed the 1991 Gulf War (as did Senator
Nunn, among other certified hawks) but he urged the use of force
in Bosnia, regretted the failure to invade Rwanda before that,
approved the Panama intervention of the first President Bush
and was an enthusiast for the 1999 Kosovo war, before voting
in favor of the war in Iraq. If Kerry is elected next month,
he will certainly not act out his apparently clear-cut opposition
to the war by immediately withdrawing US forces from Iraq -
although even the Bush Administration is pursuing a form of
disengagement, striving to add to the number of Iraqi police
and National Guard as quickly as possible rather than sending
more US troops…The only difference - and here is the greatest
irony - is that Kerry would almost certainly disengage more
slowly than Bush simply as a matter of political positioning:
he is the one more vulnerable to accusations of abandoning Iraq
to Islamic fanatics, warlord-priests and Saddam loyalists.
“It
is not just over Iraq that the hawkish Kerry will confound European
liberals. He has harshly criticized Bush for not being tough
enough with Iran - another irony, because it implies a preference
for unilateral action rather than the multilateral diplomacy
he supposedly espouses.”
Luttwak
concludes: “Unless Kerry really does ask Congress for the
money to add two Army divisions, one will need a microscope to tell
the difference in military policy if Kerry wins the election. Perhaps
The Guardian and its readers should take a close look at those pictures
of Kerry with his shotgun after last week's goose shoot: there goes
a genuine American hawk, red in tooth and policy.”
Of
course Kerrycrats mostly eschew any analysis of what President
Kerry might do, probably because they know that to do so would
be to open Pandora’s Box. CounterPuncher Joe Paff just called
me to say that before him on his breakfast table is a begging
letter from Peace Action (the merger of Sane and The Nuclear Weapons
Freeze Campaign). The letter discloses that “for the first
time in its 47 years” the group is advocating the defeat
of an incumbent president. Joe says he’s read the letter
three times but nowhere could espy the name Kerry. So he’s
writing back assuring Peace Action he’s sending money to
Nader.
From
Chicago Suzanne Erfurth writes: “ Look what came over my
electronic transom from the local ‘Peace Calendar’
of the American Friends Service Committee. In 35 years, will they
be hawking invitations to movies glorifying the torturers at Abu
Ghraib in an attempt to help defeat whoever is running against
the Democrat?
Here’s
what the AFSC featured on its calendar: “Event: Brothers
in Arms: The Story of the Crew of Patrol Craft Fast 194 Description:
Acclaimed author and first-time filmmaker Paul Alexander (Man
of the People: The Life of John McCain) began his Vietnam war-era
documentary on John Kerry and his crewmates of the patrol boat
in the Mekong Delta long before Kerry became the Democratic presidential
nominee. In the context of a smear campaign casting doubt on Kerry's
military service, the film takes on new meaning as it uses interviews,
photographs, and archival footage to examine the bond formed by
six men of diverse backgrounds under combat conditions.“
In
Oregon, we hear from Michael Donnelly, Oregon Peaceworks is supporting
a war candidate, Kerry. This is the same group that back in the
Nineties possibly helped Republican Senator Mark Hatfield over
the top in a desperately close race against Democratic challenger
Harry Lonsdale. Oregon Peaceworks endorsed Hatfield, saying he’d
been a staunch antiwar senator. Today Oregon Peaceworks supports
a prowar candidate, rather than the vehemently antiwar Ralph Nader.
No
deed or slur is too dirty for the Kerrycrats, in their frenzy
to
have a Democrat back in the White House. In years to come the
list of liberals and leftists renouncing their support of Nader
in 2000 and urging support this time for Kerry even in safe states
will, I think, be correctly brandished as a shameful advertisement
of political hysteria and even prostitution (often enforced by
big foundations threatening to cut funding from any outfit not
bending the knee to Kerry.) Until this year I don’t think
I’d ever fully understood the inner psycho-political dynamic
of the cold-war liberals, eagerly signing on to, and often leading,
the witch-hunts of the late 1940s and 1950s.
Seeing
the ABB-ers and Kerrycrats in action now, I am a wiser man.
Today's
Stories
October
28, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Kerrycrats and the War
|