New York's Foot Soldiers (our only real hope) by MIKE WHITNEY There's been precious little from the Kerry camp about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Maybe that's something Kerry "could do better" too. To his credit, the Massachusetts senator did send out an e mail to supporters in the Democratic Party calling for Donald Rumsfeld's... Read More

The Republican National Convention ended with a fine stirring speech by George W. Bush. The whole convention was, it seems to me, a roaring success. If I were John Kerry, I'd be feeling very worried right now. As always with an acceptance speech, the President had to do two things simultaneously: fire up his own... Read More

Having finally figured out the security-pass system, I thought I'd spend the third evening of the Convention watching it live, so I set off for the main hall. There was a brief detour on the way. Someone called my name as I walked through the lobby at the Garden. It was Ed Capano, National Review's... Read More

"Right Wing Sees Betrayals," the headline in the Washington Timesshouted last week, and it's about time the right wing did. This particular headline referred to what had been going on inside the Republican Convention's platform committee, where conservatives were given the run-around by the party establishment on several issues dear to them. One such issue... Read More

Now I know what a modern party convention is for. I sat down to last night's big speeches with low expectations, ready to squirm in fact. Arnold Schwarzenegger's fun to watch in movies, but not my kind of Republican. (You couldn't call Arnie anything "lite," but I think of him as a sort of George... Read More

"This battle will take time and resolve. But make no mistake about it: we will win." - George W Bush, September 12, 2001 "Can we win the war on terror? I don't think you can win it." - Bush, August 31, 2004 The war in Iraq is part of the "war on terra". You're either... Read More

Even the people who tell me they will vote for Kerry take pains to stress that they don't like him. CounterPuncher JoAnn Wsypijewski, who marched against Bush in New York Sunday phoned me to say that though she didn't like Kerry but would vote for the man ," I know now he's definitely going to... Read More

After several weeks of fulminating about John Kerry's war record and the medals he presumably awarded to himself, Republicans finally got down to the real point about the man who would be president. Amazingly it was none other than the forgotten Robert Dole, himself something of a war hero from World War II, who seems... Read More

For the first presidential election since 1988, Pat Buchanan is not on the ballot this year, but his soul goes marching on in a new book just released on the eve of the Republican National Convention. Where the Right Went Wrong is not, as it is already being billed, an"attack" on George W. Bush, but... Read More

Kerry goes from bad to worse. Last week he dropped Saddam's non-existent WMDs as a campaign issue. He did this huge favor to Bush via his (Kerry's) foreign affairs spokesman, the insufferable Jamie Rubin, formerly the top State Department flack in the Clinton years. Rubin told the Washington Post last weekend that knowing then what... Read More

Can someone win the presidency entirely on the basis of a negative asset? I wouldn't have thought so, but here's John Kerry, just about 90 days shy of election day, promoting himself as a man of presidential caliber entirely on the basis that he's the Anyone in "Anyone But Bush". Aside from the flag wagging... Read More

On Tuesday night in Boston, the United States was hit by a weapon of mass enlightenment. The name of the weapon is Barack Obama. He's not even a US senator - yet: but he will almost certainly be one in November. Not a uniter, not a divider: the ultimate transcender. Some day, some say, he... Read More

If you'd like to cast a ballot for a conservative this year, forget George W. Bush and don't even blink an eye at the liberal drip from Massachusetts who's the hero of the week. Ralph Nader, believe it or not, actually has some interesting (not necessarily good or right) things to say, but it would... Read More

The moment he came out swinging into the Hollywood set of Fleet Center in Boston on Monday, to the trademark sound of Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop", self-described "foot soldier" Bill Clinton was on a roll. As superstar entrances go, this would defy anything pulled off by Mick Jagger or David Bowie. And then, in a... Read More

I've tried shouting "Kerry-Edwards" on the step out to my garden. The cat yawned and the flowers drooped. Democrats know this in their hearts. Twit them about Kerry's dreariness, reminiscent of thin cold chowder or Weeping Ed Muskie and one gets the upraised hand and petulant cry, "I don't want to hear a word against... Read More

Always partial to monopolies, the Democrats think they should hold the exclusive concession on any electoral challenge to Bush and the Republicans. The Nader campaign prompts them to hysterical tirades. Republicans are more relaxed. Ross Perot and his Reform Party actually cost George Bush Sr his reelection in 1992, yet Perot never drew a tenth... Read More

At convention time, in years gone by, pundits would decry with patronizing chuckles the supposed proclivity of the Democratic Party to "tear itself apart". Auto-rupture is actually a good thing. As Hegel once said, "a political party only truly exists when it is divided against itself". In Hegel's sense, the Democratic Party has ceased to... Read More

Freshets of creativity and excitement pulsing into the nation’s bloodstream, improvements in the general quality of life, have nothing to do with the presidential elections rolling around every four years, which rouse expectations far in excess of what they actually deserve. As registers of liberal or conservative political potency, American presidential elections seldom coincide with... Read More

With 90 percent of black voters and 65 percent of Hispanics supporting Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 election, Mr. Gore's successor as the Democratic presidential candidate has to understand that he can't possibly win this year without similar support from both groups. Indeed, John Kerry, as recent polls suggest, will win just such... Read More

Writing at CounterPunch, Gabriel Kolko, the left-wing historian and critic of U.S. imperialism, makes the astute observation that John Kerry's multilateralism would be more effective in advancing imperial interests than Bush's unilateralism. ("The U.S. Must Be Isolated and Constrained: The Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power," March 12, 2004) That is because... Read More

Aristotle defined an oligarchy as a polity in which the few elect the rulers to govern over the many. That formula fits exactly the description of US primaries and general elections. In New York State where only 15% of the party members voted in the recent Democratic primaries, Kerry won with 8% of the registered... Read More

Listening to Democrats screaming about Ralph Nader's entry into the presidential race we finally understand the mindset of those Communist dictatorships that used to take such trouble to ensure that the final count showed a 99 percent Yes vote for the CP candidate. It's a totalitarian logic. "Anybody But Bush" chorus the Democrats. But they... Read More

The Establishment media essentially removed Howard Dean from the presidential race. As Sam Smith puts it in his article at CounterPunch, "Dean in Freefall: Howard's End?", the primary cause of Dean' demise was "the most excessive and gratuitous media assault on a presidential candidate in recent times." Dean has indeed received a bad press. For... Read More

Where do you begin to take apart the evasions, half-truths and outright lies that merrily danced from the lips of the President of the United States in his State of the Union address this week? One place to begin is to listen to the inanities uttered by his Democratic rivals in response. Interviewed by NBC... Read More