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Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair dissect HRC in her White House years and conclude their series on the woman who may be the next president. PLUS Eva Liddell on the man who really set the course of the Bush presidency PLUS Andy Worthington on the battle for the rights of the Guantanamo detainees PLUS Debbie Nathan on what the border crackdown has done to the women crossing the Rio Grande. Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Remember contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now
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How the Press Led the US into War  Buy End Times Now! Today's Stories September 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Iain Boal Michael Dickinson Guerry Hoddersen Bill Hatch Gary Leupp K.G. Godel Website of the Day September 10, 2007 Uri Avnery Patrick Cockburn Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen David Michael Green Pius Adesanmi Betty Schneider September 8 / 9, 2007 Alexander
Cockburn Saul
Landau Ismael
Hossein-Zadeh Ray
McGovern Matthew
Abraham Alan
Farago Christopher
Brauchli Rannie
Amiri Fred
Gardner James
L. Secor Missy
Comley Beattie Ben
Tripp Francis
Boyle Joe
Allen and Paul D'Amato Website
of the Weekend
Robert
Fantina John
Ross James
Brooks Russell
Mokhiber Joshua
Frank John
Walsh Mark
Brenner Mike
Ferner Website
of the Day
September 6, 2007 Kathleen
and Bill Christison Allan
J. Lichtman Norman
Solomon Yifat
Susskind Catherine
Fenton Laura
Santina Farzana
Versey Yves
Engler Kelly
Overton Michael
Simmons Website
of the Day
September 5, 2007 Stan
Goff Michael
Dickinson Matthew
Abraham Patrick
Cockburn Dave
Lindorff Paul
Craig Roberts Clifton
Ross Elizabeth
Schulte Joseph
Grosso Ben
Terrall Website
of the Day
September 4, 2007 Jean
Bricmont Patrick
Cockburn Ron
Jacobs Tom
Kerr Gary
Leupp Sonja
Karkar Heather
Gray Fidel
Castro Jackie
Corr Sunsara
Taylor Website
of the Day
September 3, 2007 Patrick
Cockburn Eamon
McCann Joshua
Frank Chris
Floyd Marjorie
Cohn Walter
Brasch Matt
Reichel Website
of the Day
September 1 / 2, 2007 Alexander
Cockburn Andy
Worthington Saul
Landau David
Keen Patrick
Cockburn Diana
Johnstone George
Longstreth, MD Linda
M. Woolf Ralph
Nader Fred
Gardner Ben
Tripp David
Michael Green Missy
Comley Beattie Michael
Dickinson Paul
Krassner Ron
Jacobs Poets'
Basement
August 31, 2007 Jeff
Gibbs Paul
Craig Roberts Ray
McGovern Robert
Weissman Matt
Vidal Robin
Mittenthal Chris
Kutalik Richard
Forno Binoy
Kampmark Dave
Zirin Website
of the Day
August 30, 2007 Gary
Leupp John
Ross Anthony
DiMaggio Jordan
Flaherty Michael
Donnelly Russell
Mokhiber Dennis
Brutus William
S. Lind Martha
Rosenberg Jeff
Leys / Brian Terrell Website
of the Day
Patrick
Cockburn Winslow
T. Wheeler David
Rosen Dave
Zirin Paul
Craig Roberts Diane
Farsetta Ben
Davis Alan
Farago Jenna
Orkin Don
Monkerud Richard
Nasser Website
of the Day
August 28, 2007 Uri
Avnery Bill
Quigley Joshua
Frank China
Hand Firmin
DeBrabander Charles
Peña Andy
Worthington Ramzy
Baroud Anthony
Papa Ashley
Smith Website
of the Day
Jorge
Mariscal Bill
Christison Manuel
Garcia, Jr. Anthony
DiMaggio Bruce
A. Roth John
Walsh Dave
Lindorff Ron
Jacobs Binoy
Kampmark Russell
D. Hoffman Website
of the Day
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September 11, 2007 Love, Courage and Language:Irish Politics in Old Time CaliforniaBy BILL HATCH Daniel Cassidy’s How the Irish Invented Slang is a great gift, a revelation, a genuine invasion of one's speech patterns (I’ll be looking over my tongue's shoulder for the Irish from now on). Cassidy beautifully handles the problem of our unconsciousness of this, or as I used to put it in high school, my "street" rather than "home" (proper grammatical English) language. What a pain in the ass it was to have to speak only the one at college. It made working on peach-loading docks in the summers a deep relief. Ah, the pleasure of Okie lingo (shaggin’, whalloping, boozin’ ). My working college summers were slang shindigs, as far from the sound of the “C major of life” as one can get culling loads of brown rot peaches by the headlights of pickups on the banks of a Central Valley river here in California. Not to deny the admixture of Spanish slang – pinche guajolote, pues – but the dominant idiom of the time was still working stiff gringo. Anathema to UC was our own local expression, “boomdoggle,” that caught both the scam of the campus and all its induced development, now melting down in subprime catastrophe. The melodic sound of Irish words for violence – slugger, whale, mill, mayhem, Sunday or sucker (punch), swoon, etc. – remind me of a fellow who fought 40 years ago out of a Haight Street bar whose ring moniker was the “Battling Hippie” (he sported long green trunks and a pony tail). In college, while contemplating turning pro, he fell in love with a banker’s daughter, hung up the mawleys and got a PhD in English literature. A finer, gentler man you couldn’t fine, but the day we were demonstrating against the war and were being harassed by an aggressive knucklehead faction, it was a pleasure being at his side as he negotiated the rules with the opposition. The professor didn’t have a speck of yellow in his makeup, the chief knucklehead perceived the fact and order was restored for the duration of the demonstration. Pat Brown, running for Attorney General in 1950, came into the Topaz Room in Santa Rosa and worked the diners. “There’s that Pat Brown again,” my Republican grandmother said. “It’s getting so you can’t go out without meeting him. Oh, hello, Mr. Brown.” Pleasantries were exchanged, I shook the hand of my future employer for the first time, there was no sound bite and he seemed like a nice man, despite my grandmother’s carping. Politics was people you talked to in their bars and restaurants and especially on the telephone. For the phone, the Boss had a secret weapon known as “Cyr’s Rolodex.” (More on Cyr later.) It was the bee’s knees of private political telephone numbers in the state and nation. Mr. Bradley was the last statewide campaign manager who had a grassroots grasp of California, almost block-by-block. The numbers beat him. Three decades after his last campaign, the state has nearly twice as many people and the developers own the Legislature as completely as Southern Pacific owned it before the Reform movement. Possibly worse than the political corruption has been what’s happened to statewide campaigns. The hacks escaped from their cages into the head offices and turned campaigns into baloney factories. If someone were to say today that political campaigns organized communities at a grassroots level, you’d laugh in his mug and tell him to scram. Karl Rove is the reigning political big shot and his whole gig has been social destruction. Nobody I ever saw or heard of could calm and charm a hostile crowd better than Pat Brown, although last year Pete McCloskey changed a lot of righwinger views in Richard Pombo’s former district. I believe it is one of the rarest human talents (and in its masters it is genius), but it may simply have been driven off the podium in America at the moment. It is a highly complex quality, a mixture of genuine friendliness toward strangers, a respect for every man, woman and child regardless of class, creed, ideology or race, and an ability to listen under duress. It is a form of grace and Irish-American politicians seemed, at least once, to have cultivated it more highly than any other group. It is a secret mixture of love and courage, generally unknown to its possessor, producing an instinct composed of love of political battle, joy in punishing enemies, and compassion for the oppressed. Bobby Kennedy said it best, frequently in the spring of 1968, when touring some of the most impoverished regions of the nation: “This is unacceptable!” Pat Brown’s old Twainish speechwriter, a Texas radical by birth, brought it to my attention. Listen to him, he told me, he’s just saying this is unacceptable, period. In late August, 1974, I found myself in Sacramento with what Cassidy would correctly define as a political “crony” at Posey’s Brown Derby, where politicians who would dine later at Frank Fats went to lunch. We had lunch with the City and County of San Francisco lobbyist, Jack Shelley, SF congressman since 1949 and mayor in the tumultuous period of 1964-1968. We didn’t talk about the election much. Jerry Brown had made it clear in so many ways that he wasn’t his father, now was not then, that it was obvious anyone tainted with political work for his father would be doing something else for a living after he was elected. It was hard on younger men like ourselves, but there were sneaking suspicions buried inside us that he was right. I knew from relatives that Jack had been a courageous labor leader in the 1930s, he was good on civil rights and wasn’t insanely pro-development. Propping his walker against the wall, the waiter having already provided his first martini, Jack launched into the two-hour story about the cement contract for Candlestick Park, which explained everything anyone needed to know about postwar SF politics. I remember thinking it could have been written by James Joyce. The names, dates, deals, campaigns, and the monetary figures swirled through his story, dots mysteriously and compellingly connected, yet in the matter-of-fact telling of ordinary political chat, that it took me a long time to admit I couldn’t reconstruct it because I didn’t want to. The point of the story was that, “Fools names and fools faces are often found in public places.” Yet reading How the Irish Invented Slang, I was again reminded of Shelley’s tale. What Cassidy is calling "slang" in Shelley’s supreme command of the idiom became the choral voice of the people that fashioned a vocabulary for political analysis and action for taking of democratic power. Campaigning was a noble, heroic activity bringing out the best in a man. Governing, on the other hand, brought out the cement contract in the same man. Mr. Shelley died within two weeks of telling two young almost strangers that long, musing rumination on public life in San Francisco. A man in our childhood neighborhood of WWII veterans, their wives and us war babies, occasionally took us boys to a baseball diamond and to teach us how field grounders and shag flies to divert us from our weekend work: raiding the gang on the next block or defending our block against their raid. We little savages would not have understood what it meant that he’d shared a PT boat with John Kennedy, who would appoint him assistant secretary of the Navy when he became president. He was a fervent Kennedy rooter in town and a successful builder living in Pacific Heights by the 60’s. I am sure he, like most of Irish San Francisco, was devastated by the two assassinations. I know that after Bobby’s death, political headquarters in the city were halls of the walking dead all summer. Late that election season, I sat among a group of pols on a conference call with Larry O’Brien, who was managing Humphreys’ campaign in an attempt to shorten the wake for Bobby. O’Brien said that people were at last awakening and if the election were to be held at the end of November rather than on its first Tuesday, the Democrat would win. The lame SF district attorney, a dude from Escalon who’d passed through a few years of Carnuba wax-and-polish in DC, did not even try that case. His connections were mainly with John Tunney (the dumber son of Gene, who beat Jack Dempsey in the famous “long count” fight in 1927) a Riverside congressman who served a term as US Senator. So, White served five years of a seven-year sentence for manslaughter due to an excellent defense establishing diminished capacity – and due to the diminished capacity of the prosecution. White’s lawyers successfully portrayed him as too “depressed” to deal with the “dirty politics at city hall.” Interpretation: the one conservative supervisor elected betrays his supporters, voters in his district as well as funders, by quitting. The police chief himself urges White to ask for his job back. Meanwhile, liberal supervisors lobby liberal Moscone to appoint a liberal replacement. Detective Frank Falzon, one of two who took his confession, told the press in 1998 that he’d met with White shortly before he killed himself and White told him the murders were premeditated and that he’d planned to kill Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver as well, along with state Assemblyman Willie Brown, who White said was “masterminding the whole thing.” He killed a Sicilian, a fine liberal with radical edges, who had been a superb state Senate majority leader, and had been a USF basketball star. He killed a gay man who was one of the most decent supervisors the city ever had. He wanted to kill a female Jewish liberal and a Black assemblyman who became the longest serving assembly speaker in history on pure political ability. Willie wasn’t always an easy man to like but he made good deals and kept his word. How odd it was that White didn’t go gunning for Rep. Phil Burton, D-SF, whose faction had just taken near total control of City Hall by legal means after 20 years of hard political slogging against the elder Irish machine in town. It’s not that Willie couldn’t have finagled the whole thing, but he wouldn’t have without consultation with Mr. Burton. That was simply not done while Mr. Burton, a veteran of both WWII and Korea, was alive. If White had tried it, Burton would probably have paralyzed him with bursts of profane outrage to the effect that the little man could not seriously imagine doing such a thing, and crammed White’s little pistol down his throat, bellowing at him all the while: “What the f--- do you mean resigning your seat? You have no respect for the public offices people fought and died to create! You have no respect for the process, for government, for the people!” Extracting the pistol from White’s throat, Burton might have said, “Now, go back to your family, take care of them and never darken the door of government again for the rest of your life.” What was “the whole thing”? A conspiracy against good, clean Irish-American murderers, real life “Dirty Harry (1971)” Callahans like himself? There’s no connection between the following and the city’s Irish-American politics. It happened nine years before White killed Moscone and Milk and five years before Shelley told two young strangers the story that summed up his life. And besides, you would have had to have been there to see the rookie cop from Ireland in his new uniform and you would have had to have heard his voice and seen his face and his tears of frustration under the street light. In the old Indian Center on 16th Street near Valencia right across the street where they gunned down the painter’s union leader, Dow Wilson, three years earlier, a drunk from the Colville reservation attacked me for having personally stolen his language. Fleeing downstairs from the Center (torched a few months later), I stepped on the blood of a stabbed Indian, quietly dying on the sidewalk as this young cop, somebody's relative imported from the Emerald Isle, yelled at the Indians passing by: "Why don't you take care of him? He's one of your own!" No, buddy, it ain’t right. It doesn’t make much sense at all. But a river of Irish slang runs through it and without it, it’s possible we would not be able to tell tales about any parts of the whole ruckus that we live. Then there was Pete McCloskey, former Marine hero, former congressman, co-author of the Endangered Species Act, opponent of President Richard Nixon in the 1972 New Hampshire primary. McCloskey, in his mid-70s, came down to San Joaquin County in 2006 and, although he didn’t defeat Rep. Richard Pombo, then chair of the House Resources Committee, in the Republican primary, he beat him up so badly with an old-fashioned campaign of meeting, listening and talking, that a nobody Democrat from the Bay Area beat him in the general. This rookie congressman, Jerry McNerney, is also fierce and can be counted on to stand adamantly for absolutely nothing in order to maintain his seat. The words Cassidy brings up are mere flashes that restore the character and velocity of our history. Back when Shelley was mayor and Love’s summer occurred, followed by the Walpurgisnacht of Speed, many of us were attracted – like the old welterweight Battling Hippie –- to the Zen master Suzuki, his quiet meditation center in the middle of the Fillmore District, and to Dogen, the founder of his school of Zen, who described consciousness as we could understand it –- occasional lightning flashes in the night.
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CounterPunch Books of the Crossroads: HOW THE IRISH INVENTED SLANG By Daniel Cassidy  Click Here to Buy! Click Here for Dates & Venues Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz  Click Here to Buy! Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal  Click Here to Order! How They Made a Killing on the War on Terrorism           The Occupation by Patrick Cockburn    Humanitarian Imperialism By Jean Bricmont               CITY BEAUTIFUL By Tennessee Reed       Bruce Springsteen On Tour By Dave Marsh                   |
