Category: Uncategorized

Female Circumcision Surfaces in IraqIt’s just before 2:00 a.m. on the east coast, and the fifth headline from the top on Antiwar.com – immediately after the report about nine more U.S. military deaths – announces that female circumcision has, ah, "surfaced" in Iraq. If there’s one thing that puzzles me more than how one would … Continue reading “Backtalk, August 12, 2005”

In January of this year, Rep. Curt Weldon made a speech to the House of Representatives – a speech which no one took notice of, and which hardly anyone heard, except maybe inveterate C-SPAN watchers – in which he made a number of extraordinary assertions: “Mr. Speaker, I rise because information has come to my … Continue reading “9/11 Revisionism, Revisited”

Rumors and leaks continue to swirl around the case of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame and the various journalists and Bush "senior administration officials" believed to be involved in some fashion in her outing. Whole forests have undoubtedly been pulped for the endless flood of summer stories about the Plame case and yet something has … Continue reading “How to Prosecute the Plame Case”

Mitchell B. Lerner, editor, Looking Back at LBJ: White House Politics in a New Light (University Press of Kansas, 2005). In Mitchell Lerner’s informative and worthwhile collection of essays by a group of historians scrutinizing LBJ’s domestic and foreign policies (Lerner teaches history at Ohio State University in Newark, Ohio and is the author of … Continue reading “Presidential Aggressor”

Mid-August 2005 may be remembered as a moment in U.S. history when the president could no longer get away with the media trick of solemnly patting death on its head. Unreality is a hallmark of media coverage for war. Yet – most of all – war is about death and suffering. Warmakers thrive on abstractions. … Continue reading “Rage Against the Killing of the Light”

For my radio show on August 6th I interviewed Jacob Hornberger, the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation. [stream] [download] The man was upset. Why? Because, he says, the Bush regime, which has already acted contrary to every one of the first ten amendments, is now poised to destroy the Bill of … Continue reading “Tyranny’s Gate”

A career diplomat and foreign policy operative, Eric S. Edelman has just replaced the controversial Douglas Feith at the Pentagon as the new undersecretary of defense for policy, having been appointed by President Bush during a congressional recess. Many observers had wrongly assumed that Edelman would become Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s top deputy. Instead … Continue reading “Cheney’s Man Slated to Replace Feith”

What I have noticed about conservatives and Republicans is that they are no longer conservative and Republican. They believe in the efficacy of force. If we are losing in Iraq, it is because we are not using enough force. All we have to do to win in Iraq, they maintain, is to nuke the towel-heads. … Continue reading “Nuclear China Good, Nuclear Iran Bad?”

"Sheehan has been involved in protests against Bush since last year. She founded Gold Star Families for Peace…She said she decided to seek another audience with Bush when she heard his comments about the war last week, after a spike in American deaths. The fallen men and women "died in a noble cause," Bush said … Continue reading “Angry Mothers and Trembling Grizzlies: The Sheehan Effect”

The news that the Rolling Stones are coming out with a song called “Sweet Neocon” that takes the administration to task for its Iraq war policy is … music to my ears: “You call yourself a Christian, I call you a hypocrite/ You call yourself a patriot. Well, I think your are full of sh*t!… … Continue reading “No Sympathy for the Neocons”