A note to my readers: I have a number of medical appointments today (Tuesday) and not enough time left to write a column, unfortunately. I’ll be back on Friday. The death of Alexander Cockburn, columnist for the Nation and author of many books, is an irreplaceable loss not only personally, for those who knew him, …
Continue reading “Alexander Cockburn, RIP”
John Tyner triggered a wave of protest against the Transportation Security Administration when he recorded himself saying, “If you touch my junk, I’m gonna have you arrested,” pithily paraphrased as “Don’t touch my junk!” But this protest was anathema to the thought police at The Nation, because after all it is now Obama’s TSA, and …
Continue reading “Mutiny Is in Order at The Nation“
Note: The following is the text of a talk given Oct. 25 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Whatever happened to the antiwar movement? Remember all those marches, all those placards, those giant puppets and loud displays of moral outrage? It’s vanished! Gone! Evaporated like morning mist! At one point, millions were marching in …
Continue reading “Whatever Happened to the Antiwar Movement?”
It’s amazing, really, how much of a pass the left is giving President Obama as he sells out every single major platform plank that got them pumped up to begin with. Aside from his sellout on the domestic policy front, which I’ll leave to others to cavil about, on the civil liberties and foreign policy …
Continue reading “Obama vs. the Left”
Every government lives in fear of its own citizens. The fear waxes and wanes, as the tides of public opinion and economic ups and downs crest and wash over the political landscape. In good times, the fear is somewhat subtle: discontent, albeit ever-present, is masked by prosperity and contained; in bad times, the fear overflows …
Continue reading “Rachel Maddow, McCarthyite”
The first nationwide antiwar protests in quite a while were held this past Saturday, held in part to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, with a few thousands marching in Washington – I’ve seen estimates ranging from two to ten thousand – with scattered events in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and …
Continue reading “Springtime for Obama”
Like Rip van Winkle, it seems that the American antiwar movement is – finally – waking up, although, like the original Rip, it doesn’t seem to have changed its idle ways. "A restive antiwar movement," avers the New York Times, "largely dormant since the election of Barack Obama, is preparing a nationwide campaign this fall …
Continue reading “Is the Antiwar Movement Waking Up?”
There was a time when Cindy Sheehan couldn’t go anywhere without having a microphone and a TV camera stuck in front of her. As she camped out in front of George W. Bush’s Crawford ranch, mourning the death of her son Casey in Iraq and calling attention to an unjust, unnecessary, and unwinnable war, the …
Continue reading “War Coverage and the Obama Cult”
Justin Raimondo on the left’s war amnesia
The last futile, expensive, and grotesquely immoral war launched by the United States was authored by those ideological shape-shifters and creatures of legend, the neoconservatives (neocons for short), whose storied history has been the subject of endless books, articles, and memoirs. There’s even a documentary film in which the aforesaid neocons tout their own intellectual …
Continue reading “The New Neocons” 
