Today's Stories

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

May 7, 2008

Winslow T. Wheeler
Drowning in Dollars

Joanne Mariner
Torture After Dark

Col. Dan Smith
It's Lying and It's Murder: How KBR Electrocuted US Troops

Brian M. Downing
Reports From Foreign Provinces

Andy Worthington
Who are the Prisoners Released with Sami al-Haj?

John Stauber
Pentagon Propaganda Documents Go Online, But Will the Media Ever Report on Them?

Christopher Brauchli
Outsourcing Tax Collection

Nelson P. Valdés
Cinco de Mayo and Cinco de Agosto: Mexican History and Manufactured Identities

Rep. Keith Ellison
High Court Deals Blow to Voting Rights

Dan Bacher
Undam the Klamath, Mr. Buffett!

Website of the Day
Green Porno

May 6, 2008

Pam Martens
The Obama Bubble Agenda

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. is Promoting Secession in Bolivia

Marjorie Cohn
Under U.S. Law Torture is Always Illegal

Ralph Nader
America's Pay-or-Die Health Care System

Yigal Bronner
Archaeologists for Hire

Brian Cloughley
No Laws for Bush America

Jacob Hornberger
Killing Enemies Without Trial

Walter Brasch
People Who Don't Need People

Paul Krassner
An Open Letter to Michael Moore

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Running Mates from the Imaginary Plane

Website of the Day
Some People

May 5, 2008

Pam Martens
Obama's Money Cartel

Conn Hallinan
The Syrian Affair

Corey D. B. Walker
The End of Politics

Uri Avnery
Crusader Anxiety: Israel at 60

Dave Zirin
Refocusing Olympic Protest

Corporate Crime Reporter
Wiist's Crusade Against Corporations

Robert Jensen
The Selling and Shaping of Our Souls

Daniel White
What People Want to Hear About in Austin, Texas

Benjamin Dangl
May Day Raid on General Dynamics

Website of the Day
McCain's Pastor of Hate: "Starve. I Don't Care. Starve."

May 3 / 4, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Has Rev. Wright Cost Obama the Presidency?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Shameful Failure of the Black Congressional Caucus

Diane Farsetta
What the Pentagon Pundits Were Selling on the Side

Tariq Ali
New Labour is Dead

Harry Browne
The USA's Other Island: Irish Leaders and the War on Terror

Wajahat Ali
Pakistan's New Daughter of Destiny? An Exclusive Interview with Fatima Bhutto

David Yearsley
A Challenge to Jeffrey Eugenides

Greg Moses
Salamat, Riad Hamad

William Blum
Rev. Wright, the CIA and the AIDS Thing

Robert Fantina
The Rhetoric of John McCain

Fred Gardner
The Greatest Story Never Told

Dave Lindorff
Blame It On Paraguay: The Bush Family's Bad Real Estate Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Standardizing Learning

Binoy Kampmark
Brown, Boris and the British Council Elections

Howard Lisnoff
The Lost First Amendment

Daniel Cassidy
Slanguage: Paddy Works on the Erie

Bill Moyers
Shrink-Wrapping the Theology of Rev. Wright

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
John Holt / Akbar Khan

Website of the Weekend
Ed Abbey, Patron Saint of the Walker's Rights Movement

May 2, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
Secret Bush "Finding" Widens Covert War on Iran

David Isenberg
The Return of Limited Nuclear War?

Vijay Prashad
Driven to Terror: the Case of the Lackawana Six

William Blum
Spies Without Borders

David Macaray
Shutting Down the West Coast Ports: the ILWU's May Day Strike

Rannie Amiri
Is Sadr City Becoming the Next Gaza?

William James Martin
The Carter Coup

Stephanie Westbrook
As Italy Lurches Rightward, a Ray of Hope from Vicenza

Linn Washington, Jr.
A Battle Over Murals in Parisian Ghettos

Anthony Papa
How the Byrne Fund Corrupts Cops and Destroys Lives

Website of the Day
The Serota Petition

May 1, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Fed Sinks the Dollar

Behzad Yaghmaian
Blaming the Yuan for the Deficit with China

Wajahat Ali
The Dark Knight: the Real Rise of Obama

Dedrick Muhammad
Senator Obama, Please Come to Your Senses

Cynthia McKinney
Police in America Can Kill Some People With Impunity

Corporate Crime Reporter
Farm Broadcaster Fired After Ripping Monsanto's Goon Squads

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Speech That Might Have Been

Reza Fiyouzat
Stop Obliterating Yourself!

Leigh Saavedra
Suspending the Federal Gas Tax

Tom Semioli
Hollywood Hypocrite: an Open Letter to Michael Moore

Website of the Day
Why Won't McCain Release His Medical Records?

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McCain's Fairy Tales

The Double-Talk Express Derails

By ROBERT FANTINA

Arizona Senator and apparent Republican presidential nominee John McCain has been riding his so-called ‘Straight Talk Express’ for some time now, carting his frail, aging carcass about the countryside as he smilingly promises Americans four more years of misery. Yet his happy train was derailed this week, when he lapsed into fairy tales that no toddler would accept. Surely, after this speech, any child would long for the realism of Cinderella or Harry Potter. The following are some of the more noteworthy excerpts from Mr. McCain’s ‘happily ever after’ view of the conclusion of his first potential administration.

The Iraq War has been won, Iraq is a functioning democracy, violence is much reduced, and America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure.

This puzzling statement leads the parade. What ‘winning’ the Iraq War means has been changed and altered so many times that what Mr. McCain now means is unclear. The world was once told that it meant the end of the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction. Then we were told that, oh, by the way, they never existed. But the war would be won when Saddam Hussein was overthrown. Yes, ‘Mission Accomplished,’ said President George Bush, only he neglected to notify the Iraqi freedom fighters. Five years later, the ‘mission,’ whatever that is, continues. Perhaps Mr. McCain will enlighten us on his idea of ‘winning’ in Iraq.

Next we are told that Iraq, in four short years, will be a functioning democracy. Yes, they had a vote, but it doesn’t seem to have accomplished all that much, regardless of how Mr. Bush celebrated it. In order for Iraq to have a ‘functioning democracy,’ that nation’s citizens, who closely associate government with religion due to widely held religious beliefs, will have to convert to some other belief system, as they shun in four years centuries of deeply held traditions. Perhaps Mr. McCain intends to start ‘democracy proselytizing’ on Inauguration Day.

“Violence,” we are told by Mr. McCain, “is much reduced.” One wonders how that will be accomplished. Possibly with an escalation of violence until such point that enough Iraqis are dead that the freedom movement is completely crushed by the U.S. military.

Mr. McCain saved his most bizarre point of that one statement for last: “America,” he promises, will have “welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure.”

Why is it that a U.S. senator, and one who aspires to be president, either cannot or simply refuses to accept the reality that Iraq posed no threat to the U.S., and that the only thing this immoral and obscene war was meant to secure was oil? U.S. service men and women have sacrificed with the best of intentions for the worst of reasons.

Mr. McCain continued.

The threat from a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced.

One looks in vain to determine what it is Mr. McCain has done thus far to reduce whatever threat he seems to see from a resurgent Taliban. Is there particular legislation he has sponsored, or is his mindless agreement to every costly war funding proposal enough? We won’t even bother to ask here what the threat is. One does not want to hear whatever excuse covers up the U.S.’s need to use Afghanistan as a corridor for oil exportation.

"I know from experience, you set a day for surrender - which is basically what you do when you say you are withdrawing - and you will pay a much a heavier price later on."

Could Mr. McCain possibly expand on this statement? What experience is he talking about? Please do not tell us that he is trotting out once again his story as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He has beaten that dead horse long enough, especially since more recent information seems to indicate that, while being a prisoner of war is certainly an horrific experience (just look at the way the U.S. treats its prisoners of war), Mr. McCain’s experience was not among the most difficult; certainly it seems almost benign next to that of those held by the U.S.

So how, one longs to learn, does Mr. McCain know ‘from experience’ that if a withdrawal date is set, ‘a much heavier price’ is paid later on? Perhaps he believes that all he has to do is make a war-related statement, tie it to his prisoner-of-war experience, and it will be accepted by the general populace.

The Associated Press reported that Mr. McCain “envisioned an era of bipartisanship driven by weekly news conferences and British-style question periods with joint meetings of Congress.” As we all join hands and sing Kumbaya. Mr. McCain would have us believe that after eight years of a president who lost the popular vote and was appointed to office by the Supreme Court; after the rule of a man who disdained bipartisanship and rode roughshod over all opponents; who called massive opposition to his wars the words of a ‘focus group;’ who has condoned the rendition and torture of prisoners captured and held by the U.S., that he, as a knight in shining armor, will come to the rescue of the nation, and unite a bitterly divided populace in four short years. And he proposed to accomplish this without Harry Potter’s magic wand!

Mr. McCain continued his fairy tale.

"The increase in actionable intelligence that the counterinsurgency produced led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, and his chief lieutenants. ... There still has not been a major terrorist attack in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001."

Perhaps now is not the time to discuss U.S. intelligence; you know, the kind that enabled Mr. Bush, then Secretary of State Colin Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney to look the world in its doubting eye and state categorically that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction aimed at the U.S. and was only awaiting word from Mr. Hussein to pull the trigger. Based on this ‘intelligence’ (a one-word oxymoron when used in this particular context), Mr. Bush started a war that has killed a million innocent Iraqis and over 4,000 U.S. soldiers; has caused international hatred of the United States and destabilized an already volatile part of the world. In the fairy-tale world of Mr. McCain, this same ‘intelligence’ will lead to the ‘capture or death of Osama bin Laden,’ who somehow has been able to elude capture for nearly seven years, despite the fact that two wars have been launched in his name since the attacks on the U.S. which he is accused of masterminding.

Mr. McCain’s fairy tale continued: expanded health care, worker retraining programs, a robust economy. All this will be in his sack as Santa McCain climbs down America’s chimney on November 4, 2008. Perhaps he can use some of his wife’s fortune to finance it all.

So there we have it: the world in 2013 after the first term of a President John McCain in the view of candidate John McCain. We must be forgiven if we ask how and why Mr. McCain overlooked the fact that, should he be victorious in November, he will in all likelihood face a Congress controlled by the Democrats. And while the members of the current Congress have inexplicably been cowed by Mr. Bush, they may be less willing to give Mr. McCain the same free pass.

And does Mr. McCain believe that Iraq’s neighbors will simply sit passively by as he escalates the war? Does he believe that a 100-year occupation of Iraq will be acceptable to Iran, Syria and other nations in the area?

Does Mr. McCain believe that, once he is elected (one shudders to even consider the possibility), Americans will rally around him, forgetting the hard-fought election campaign and simply decide to buy whatever it is he happens to be selling? Does he take no thought to how endorsing and continuing the policies of a president with a 30% approval rating might dissuade 70% of American’s from falling in line behind him?

When hijacked airliners were slamming into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Mr. Bush was busy reading ‘My Pet Goat’ to a class of elementary school children. One must wonder if Mr. McCain’s reading material is on the same level; he seems to have little grasp of the international realities or domestic challenges that will face the next U.S. president. Or perhaps he simply doesn’t care about them; perhaps he is content to continue Mr. Bush’s policies, disdaining the poor while pampering the rich and ignoring the resulting consequences both at home and abroad.

Senator Barrack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, cannot be seen by those opposed to Mr. McCain as America’s savior, descending from his lofty throne in Illinois to rescue the poor and destitute from the clutches of the Republican nominee. Rather, he must be viewed as the most reasonable choice in an election that threatens four more years of the disasters Mr. Bush has rendered. Mr. Obama at least promises a change from eight years of war-mongering and pampering of the rich to the neglect of everyone else. What little a President Obama might be able to accomplish will at least be far better than the disasters of a President McCain.

It’s time for the ‘Straight Talk Express’ to retire, along with its engineer, to a place where they can do far less damage than can be done from the White House. Let’s hope the U.S. voters are listening carefully to Mr. McCain’s words, and send him back to Arizona in November.

Robert Fantina is author of 'Desertion and the American Soldier: 1776--2006.   

 

 

 

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