Fairly early on, gay marriage lobbying groups realized that whatever else, they had a gigantic money-raising machine on their hands. Not long thereafter, the right wing realized the same thing. John Scagliotti, maker of Before Stonewall, says he reckons gay marriage is so potent a fundraising tool because whereas it’s hard to visualize anti-discrimination, it’s not at all hard to visualize two men or two women saying “We do.”

So Obama didn’t really have too much of a choice and it was essentially risk-free anyway. “Obama’s gay marriage stance sets off money rush” was the headline in the Chicago Tribune. According to Lawrence O’Donnell, one out of six of Obama’s fundraisers is gay. Now they’ll be toiling with tripled ardor, and Thursday’s huge Hollywood fundraiser hosted by George Clooney probably saw a last-minute surge in big contributions. Cynics suggest that the timing of Obama’s announcement that “I’ve just concluded that — for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that — I think same-sex couples should be able to get married” might have had something to do with that event.

I think gay marriage is an incredibly boring subject, though I do like to hear right-wingers say that it will bring the whole edifice of western civilization crashing down. It’s hard these days to find such messages of good cheer. I don’t yearn for such a union, so have no personal stake in the issue. Occasionally my gay friends tell me they’d got married, perhaps remembering my denunciations some years ago of the whole campaign for being essentially conservative.

So the liberal progressives glory in Obama’s “courage” and many a doubting heart about the President’s betrayals is lighter and more forgiving. Trashing the constitution, green-lighting torture, claiming the unilateral right to order the execution of anyone, anywhere on the planet… wiped clean off the windscreen.

Romney the Bully 

Start with the classic schoolbully, Flashman, of Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays:

“Flashman, be it said, was about 17 years old, and big and strong of his age. He played well at all games where pluck wasn’t much wanted, and managed generally to keep up appearances where it was; and having a bluff, off-hand manner, which passed for heartiness, and considerable powers of being pleasant when he liked, went down with the school in general for a good fellow enough. Even in the School-house, by dint of his command of money, the constant supply of good things which he kept up, and his adroit toadyism, he had managed to make himself not only tolerated, but rather popular amongst his own contemporaries; … Flashman was a formidable enemy for small boys. This soon became plain enough. Flashman left no slander unspoken, and no deed undone, which could in any way hurt his victims, or isolate them from the rest of the house.”

So now we find that while at Cranbrook, an elite prep school in Bloomfield Hills, Romney recruited a small gang to ambush a schoolboy called John Lauber who had died his hair bleached-blond. Led by Romney they threw him to the ground, and Romney forcibly trimmed his hair. Then, after this assault, they swaggered off in triumph to Romney’s room. Four of the ambushers contacted by the Washington Post remembered the episode with shame. Lauber died in 2004. In a chance encounter with another Cranbrook alumnus who had witnessed the ambush Lauber said, “It was horrible… It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.”

Romney’s campaign initially said that the Gov hadn’t a mean bone in his body and it didn’t sound like him. Later Romney said he didn’t remember the incident but apologized for pranks he helped orchestrate that he said “might have gone too far.” By bullying standards of the early 1960s in some British schools, the Lauber episode was par for the course. Romney seems to have had a thing about hair. Later he organized another prank at Stanford which involved kidnapping some UC students, shaving their heads and painting their skulls red. There is a nasty streak in the man. I’m not surprised one of his kids ratted him out on the dog episode, which won’t go away because it symbolizes so much about the Mormon millionaire.

Tumbril Time!

A tumbril (n.) a dung cart used for carrying manure, now associated with the transport of prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution

My brother Patrick sagely observes:

In the wake of the Hollande victory there may be excessive demand for tumbrils in Paris to cope with those partisans of the Sarkozy regime unwise enough to delay too long their flight across the Rhine or to the Channel ports. This is a frustrating time, of course, for Fouquier-Tinville, wishing to push ahead with his good work, but perhaps a moment also for reflection and even a more “nuanced” approach on his part. For instance, were all those condemned in the past equally guilty? The phrase “bottom line” is overused, but is there an alternative carrying the same meaning? “Please come to a conclusion” sounds too starchy and dull, “Get on with it” too rude. Perhaps there should be a separate category of words and phrases in danger of the fatal blade but might still be saved. There is “nuanced,” as used above, which was a perfectly good word until journalists started using it to suggest (with a slight touch of self-preening) that there might be more than one reason why something is happening. “Remnants” had been doing no harm until it was used in phrases like “the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime” or “al-Qaeda remnants” to explain why people whom Washington had claimed were dead and buried still seemed to be in business. For F-T, surely, not just a challenge but an opportunity.”

* * *

In our latest Newsletter we print Vijay Prashad’s terrific Libyan Diary. From the opening paragraphs:

“For over a week, the oil workers of the Arabian Gulf Oil Company (Agoco) have been on strike outside its offices in Benghazi, Libya. Fifty workers and unemployed youth brought their frustration with the new Libyan authorities to the gates of Agoco, a subsidiary of the National Oil Company. This is not the first protest in Benghazi. In January, protestors occupied the National Transitional Council’s headquarters, trapping its chairman, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, in the building. Last month, fighters from Zintan captured the Tripoli Airport to highlight their demand for jobs. The protests at Agoco have forced the oil company to cut back on oil production by almost 100,000 barrels per day. Indications are that if the protests continue, Agoco might be forced to shut down all production.

“Early in the rebellion, in March of last year, Agoco’s leadership hastened to the side of the rebels. They pledged to allow production to continue as quickly as possible and to use the oil revenues to finance the rebels. “Agoco is now part of the revolution,” an official told the Financial Times on March 10, 2011, “so, we are trying to get money from the oil.” A year later, the former rebels are back at the gates. This time their grouse is not with Tripoli but with Agoco itself. They have come to redeem the promises made by the oil bureaucracy to them. Unemployed youth and exploited workers believed that their blood would produce a new dispensation in Libya. It has not come to pass.”

Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian dissect arguments for the death penalty, old and new. Sample, from a political scientist of high reputation:

“In 1979, political scientist Walter Berns told us Mill needn’t have worried. The issue, Berns said, wasn’t whether or not the death penalty deterred crime or whether or not it could be administered fairly, but rather that the death penalty lends majesty to the law because it is the only punishment in the criminal justice armamentarium that is absolute and irreversible. The accidental execution of someone guilty of nothing, said Berns, is small price to pay the death penalty’s ratification of a procedure that demonstrates the majesty of the law so well.”

Carmelo Ruiz Marrero digs into one of the most deadly operations in the world in the past few years:

“Between June 2010 and June 2011 world grain prices almost doubled. Wheat went up 70 per cent between June and December 2010, and by June 2011 its price was 83 per cent higher than one year before. During the same 12-month period corn went up 91 per cent…

“This does not affect everyone in equal measure. The average American family spends no more than 10 per cent of its budget on food, whereas the world’s poorest two billion spend between 50 per cent and 70 per cent of their scarce income on food.

“The political consequences of these price hikes can be explosive. During the 2010-2011 period several governments around the world were overthrown, there were riots in cities from Kyrgyzstan to Kenya, and three wars started in the Middle East: Syria, Yemen and Libya.

“The ‘Arab spring’ has not been just about democracy, but also about access to food. The rise in wheat prices between 2010 and 2011 was simply devastating for Egyptian families, who on the average spend 40 per cent of their income on food.”

And finally, as a new French president takes over, Serge Halimi evokes the glorious and successful mutiny of Argentina against the world’s most powerful financial institutions.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

Jane Perlez and Michael Wines reported from Beijing on the deal that would get Chen and his family visas to the US, for him to take up a fellowship at NYU.

Andrew Jacobs weighed in with the news that “Once exiled, nettlesome prisoners of conscience, like Chen Guangcheng, almost invariably lose their ability to grab headlines in the West and to command widespread sympathy both in China and abroad.” The op-ed page carried Wang Dan reflecting that, “It’s the right decision for Chen Guangcheng to study in the United States. Democracy and human rights are of great importance, but so are a family’s love and affection.”

A mop-up NYT editorial declared that “What seems to have been forgotten in all the political roiling here is that this episode is first and foremost an embarrassment for China and a glaring reminder of its abysmal mistreatment of its own citizens.”

Let’s suppose that Chen remains spunky once he’s settled in at NYU, and decides some time during the summer to join an Occupy demonstration, along with his wife.

Here’s what they might reasonably expect by way of treatment from the NYPD, if we are to believe — which I do — a report on new police strategies against protestors by David Graeber, anthropologist and creative force in the Occupy movement, on the Naked Capitalism site for May 3.

Graeber begins with a conversation with an old friend:

“A few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend — I’ll call her Eileen — passed through, her hand in a cast. ‘What happened to you?’ I asked. ‘Oh, this?’ she held it up. ‘I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the Six Month Anniversary of the Occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast.’ ‘Again?’ someone said. We had all been hearing stories like this. In fact, there had been continual reports of police officers groping women during the nightly evictions from Union Square itself over the previous two weeks.

“‘Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, “you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?” So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.’ Actually, she quickly clarified, only one wrist was literally broken….Police dragged her, partly by the hair, behind their lines and threw her to the ground, periodically shouting ‘stop resisting!’ as she shouted back ‘I’m not resisting!’ At one point though, she said, she did tell them her glasses had fallen to the sidewalk next to her, and announced she was going to reach over to retrieve them. That apparently gave them all the excuse they needed. One seized her right arm and bent her wrist backwards in what she said appeared to be some kind of marshal-arts move, leaving it not broken, but seriously damaged. ‘I don’t know exactly what they did to my left wrist — at that point I was too busy screaming at the top of my lungs in pain. But they broke it’.”

This happened on March 17, when several hundred members of Occupy Wall Street celebrated the six month anniversary of their first camp at Zuccotti Park by a peaceful reoccupation of the park — a reoccupation broken up within hours by police with 32 arrests. … Many of these arrests are carried out in such a way to guarantee physical injury… Graeber’s friend Eileen’s wrists were broken; others suffered broken fingers, concussions, and broken ribs.

Graeber says “the apparently systematic use of sexual assault against women protestors is new.” On March 17 there were numerous reported cases, and in later nightly evictions from Union Square, the practice became so systematic that at least one woman told Graeber her breasts were grabbed by five different police officers on a single night (in one case, while another one was blowing kisses.) The tactic appeared so abruptly, is so obviously a violation of any sort of police protocol or standard of legality, that it is hard to imagine it is anything but an intentional policy.

“Why is all this not a national story?” Graeber asks.

Back in September, when the infamous Tony Bologna arbitrarily maced several young women engaged in peaceful protest, the event became a national news story. Now there’s nothing. Graeber:

“I suspect one reason so many shy away from confronting the obvious is because it raises extremely troubling questions about the role of police in American society…. The commander of the First Precinct, successor to the disgraced Tony Bologna, is Captain Edward J. Winski, whose officers patrol the Financial District (that is, when those very same officers are not being paid directly by Wall Street firms to provide security, which they regularly do, replete with badges, uniforms, and weapons). Winski often personally directs groups of police attacking protestors: Winsky’s superior is Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, former director of global security of the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns:

“And Kelly’s superior, in turn, is Mayor Michael Bloomberg — the well-known former investment banker and Wall Street magnate. The 11th richest man in America, he has referred to the New York City Police Department as his own personal army.”

Graeber added an update to his story: “In comments, a reader asked why I did not go to the media. My response: “To be honest my first impulse was to call a sympathetic Times reporter. He said he was going to see if he could spin a story out of it. Apparently his editors told him it wasn’t news.”

It won’t be long before the NYPD kills a demonstrator. It will take that to force the issue of methodical police violence back onto the news pages.

Big city police chiefs are transferring their skills to the international theater. Leonard Leavitt reports on his NYPD Confidential site that if Kelly embarks on a bid to be Bloomberg’s successor in City Hall, Bloomberg could ask him to quit as police chief and then appoint as Kelly’s successor someone with national experience such as Bratton, or someone with both national and international experience such as Bratton’s First Deputy John Timoney. Timoney, who subsequently ran police departments in Philadelphia and Miami, is now advising Bahrain’s Ministry of Interior in that country’s internal religious war.

“Internal religious war” is a tactful way of describing the Khalifa dynasty’s methodical, lethal savagery against the Shi’a’s demand for elementary political rights.

Goodbye to the Great Charles Higham

Charles Higham died last week at the age of 81. He wrote many books, among them a spectacular expose of Erroll Flynn as a Nazi agent and the brilliant Trading With The Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949. Both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times ran snooty obits. (Higham worked as a stringer for the NYT for many years.) Both obituarists energetically attacked his work on Erroll Flynn, but kept quiet about Trading with the Enemy, a devastating investigation of how many of the top US corporations and American super-rich collaborated with the Third Reich before and during the Second World War.

Jeffrey St Clair and I had a most entertaining lunch in Los Angeles some years ago, interviewing Higham, at that time promoting a book he had just published on the murder of Lincoln. Recollections poured forth for a couple of hours. We’ll be running some in the next CounterPunch newsletter. Here’s a few minutes he gave us on Orson Welles:

“One of my first detective successes is that I found Orson Welles’ last film, that he’d made in South America. Briefly, he’d been sent by Nelson Rockefeller of the InterAmerican Affairs committee to cement North and South American relations by making a film about the North and South American associations to prevent Nazi incursions. The result of it is that he broke North/South America relations because he drowned a national hero of Brazil. Not an inconsiderable feat.

“What happened was that he was recreating a raft voyage of the Chingaderras who were the raft fisherman who sailed to Rio from Belem to bring word of their plight to President Vargas. They became the toasts of all of Brazil. They were hailed through the streets. There were 10,000 craft in the harbor to greet them. Orson Wells thought, a cinch for North/South American relations. So 10,000 people were paid a dollar a head, or whatever it was to recreate the scene. There were planes flying over with messages ‘Welcome to the Chingaderras.’ Unfortunately for Orson Welles, a shark and an octopus came out of the water in a death struggle at the wrong moment, the raft turned over and the national hero of Brazil disappeared into the shark. Five days later the remains were washed up. It’s not exactly what he was looking for. Welles had to escape the hotel as a washer woman with a large wicker basket when an angry mob was waiting, but the disguise worked. He got away with it.”

Tumbril Time!

A tumbril (n.) a dung cart used for carrying manure, now associated with the transport of prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Phyllis Guest writes, from Dallas: “In case you have not yet consigned these to the dung carts: Game-change and game-changer: Apparently favored by those who work in Washington; I have heard it from lobbyists, TV ‘personalities,’ NPR reporters. Back in the day: Apparently African American street lingo, now adopted as above, too far and too wide.”

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

SCENE ONE

Antechamber to Heaven, a large reception room in the Baroque style. A door opens and an angel ushers in Christopher Hitchens, dressed in hospital clothing. The angel gestures for CH to take a seat. He is about to do so when he espies a familiar figure reading some newspapers.

CH Dr. Kissinger! The very last person I would have expected to encounter here. All the more so, since I don’t recall any recent reports of your demise.

HK You will no doubt be cast down by the news that I am indeed alive. This is a secret trip, to spy out the terrain diplomatically, assess the odds.

CH You think you have the slightest chance of entering the celestial sphere?

HK Everything is open to negotiation.

CH Have you threatened to bomb Heaven — secretly of course?

HK Very funny. As a matter of fact, Woytila — Pope John Paul II, I should say — has kindly offered to intercede at the highest level. And talking of negotiation, perhaps we could have a quiet word.

CH What about?

HK That worthless book you wrote about me — The Trial of Henry Kissinger . John Paul says that the prosecutors here have been using it in drawing up preliminary drafts of their case against me. Now, he also says it would be extraordinarily helpful if you would sign this affidavit — my lawyers have already prepared it — saying that you unconditionally withdraw the slurs and allegations, the baseless charges of war criminality, and attest under eternal pain of perjury that these were forced on you by your Harper’s editors.

CH Dr Kissinger! Your idea is outrageous. I stand behind every word I wrote!

HK Hmm. Too bad. After all, you certainly have experience in, how shall we say, adjusting sworn affidavits to changing circumstance. I believe Mr. Sidney Blumenthal could comment harshly on the matter.

CH Dr. Kissinger, let me reiterate…

HK My dear fellow, spare me your protestations. Let us consider the matter as mature adults — both of us, if I may say, now in potentially challenging circumstances.

CH Speak for yourself, Dr. Kissinger. I do not recognize this as Heaven’s gate, or you as a genuine physical presence. I do not believe in the afterlife and therefore regard this as some last-second hallucination engendered in my brain in my room in M.D. Anderson hospital in Houston, Texas. I may be dying, but I am not dead yet. I have not dropped off the perch.

HK Off the perch… How very English. You will dismiss these as a mere last-second hallucination, a terminal orgy of self-flattery on your part, but (flourishes bundle of newspapers) The New York Times certainly thinks you’re dead. The Washington Post thinks you’re dead.

CH Let me look at those… (snatches the papers from HK’s hand; skims them intently)

HK Rather too flattering, if I may be frank. But, of course, as you say, all fantasy.

CH They’re very concrete. Far more amiable than I would have dared to imagine…. I… I… (passes hand over brow) Is it possible to get a drink in this anteroom?

HK Ah, after the soaring eagle of certainty, the fluttering magpie of doubt. I think we can bend the sumptuary laws a little (pulls a large flask from his pocket). Some schnapps?

CH I would have preferred Johnnie Walker Black, but any port in a storm. (drinks)

HK Bishop Berkeley, a philosopher, claimed, like you, that the world could be all in one’s imagination. It was your Doctor Samuel Johnson who sought to rebut Berkeley’s idealist theories by kicking a stone. And what did Dr. Johnson say when he kicked that stone?

CH He said, “Sir, I refute it thus.”

HK Precisely. Let the schnapps be your empirical stone. Now, if I may, let me continue with my proposition. As you know, you wrote another pamphlet, equally stuffed with lies and foul abuse, called The Missionary Position .

CH Yes, a fine piece of work about that old slag, Mother Teresa.

HK The “old slagm” as you ungallantly term the woman, is now part of an extremely influential faction in Heaven, including Pope John Paul II. Mother Teresa remains vexed by your portrait. She says it is in libraries and all over the Internet. She, like me, would dearly love to see you make an unqualified retraction of your slurs.

CH And that, of course, I will not do!

HK You’re aware of the fate of Giordano Bruno?

CH Certainly. One of reason’s noblest martyrs. Burned at the stake in the Campo de Fiore in Rome in 1600 for heresy. He insisted, with Copernicus, that the earth revolves around the sun and that the universe is infinite.

HK Quite so. A noble end, but an extremely painful one. Perhaps, with Satanic assistance, I can remind you of it.

He claps his hands, and two fallen angels in black robes draw open a pair of heavy red velvet curtains at the far end of the room. HK makes a theatrical bow and motions CH forward. The latter edges near the space are now suffused with leaping flames. For a brief moment there’s a ghastly wailing, and CH leaps back into the room.

CH Great God!

HK You seem to have reverted to religious belief with startling speed.

CH No, no. It was purely a façon de parler. Not a pretty sight.

HK But in your view, a pure hallucination, nein? No need to kick the stone, like Dr. Johnson.

Before CH can answer, the fallen angels seize him and start dragging him toward the open curtains. They are about to hurl him into the pit, when…

ST. MICHAEL (suddenly appearing through the gates of Heaven) Stop!

He hands CH and HK tickets.

These are one-day passes to Heaven. In Mr. Hitchens’ case, for purposes of interrogation by the Board of Inquiry and Final Judgment.

Exeunt St. Michael, HK and CH through ornate gilded doors to Heaven.

SCENE TWO

Heaven. A vast Baroque gallery, in which an animated throng is enjoying itself in something closely resembling a cocktail party.

ST. MICHAEL We’ve just remodeled. Before, we had something in the Gothic style, but the feeling was that in keeping with the times there should be more gold, more sense of extravagant illusion. And that of course brought us to the Baroque. You will no doubt detect many echoes of the Palazzo Colonna in Rome.

HK I think I see His Holiness John Paul II, over there. With your permission, I might have a word?

ST. MICHAEL Of course. And Mr. Hitchens, before we get to the Board of Inquiry, I’m sure there are some immortals you’d like to tip your hat to.

CH The hat is all very well, but….

ST. MICHAEL How forgetful of me! In general we’re an abstemious crowd here, but there’s no ban on moderate enjoyment.

A cherub swoops down, proffering a well-stocked tray.

CH (gulping down one glass quickly and taking another) Angel!

POPE PIUS V (joining the group) Michael, I couldn’t help overhearing your reference to the Palazzo Colonna, built in the late 17th century, and of course memorable for the marvelous depictions on the ceiling of its Grand Gallery of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, our Holy League’s historic defeat of the Ottomans.

CH Ha! The wily Turk, lurking like a cobra ’midst the fairest flowers of God’s creation, lies ever ready to pounce upon the unsuspecting traveler and bugg…

PIUS V I don’t believe I’ve had the honor.

ST. MICHAEL This is Mr. Hitchens, a British-American writer here on a possibly brief visit. And (to CH) this is St. Pius V, who indeed occupied the Holy See at the time of Lepanto.

CH (theatrical bow) The honor is mine.

PIUS V Those were the days, when the wind was truly at our backs! 210 ships of the Ottoman armada — almost their entire fleet — sent to the bottom of the Gulf of Patras; the Counter Reformation in full spate; the Council of Trent a magnificent success; heresy confronted and extirpated by our Inquisitors.

CH The screams of their victims no doubt inaudible amid the general brays of triumph.

PIUS V Speaking as a former Inquisitor, let me say that by modern standards of bloodshed consequent upon religious or ideological conflicts, the number of those who perished by reason of their adamant heresy was startlingly small. Have you kept up with recent scholarship on the topic? I thought not. Out of 62,000 cases judged by the Inquisition in Italy after 1542, only 1,250 ended with death sentences. The Spanish Inquisition held an average of 350 trials a year between 1560-1700 and executed between 3,000 and 5,000 people.

CH (snatching two more glasses from the tray of a passing cherub) I do not propose to stand silently here, your so-called Holiness, and endure from a dotard in a white petticoat filthy apologias for atrocious barbarism in the name of his so-called God.

ST. MICHAEL Mr. Hitchens! I suggest you moderate your language immediately.

PIUS V (walking away) Brutto insolente, ignorante, ubriacone pieno di merda!

MOTHER TERESA (approaching, with Pope John Paul II; HK lurking discreetly) Brutto insolente, indeed! Mr. Hitchens, I understand from Dr. Kissinger that you are prepared to repudiate your libels upon me.

CH Certainly not.

JOHN PAUL II But why not? After all, your arguments against the Blessed Teresa were either trivial or absurd, and in all instances morally odious. To focus on the latter: by 1996, the Blessed Teresa was operating 517 missions in more than 100 countries. And you, what were you doing for the poor? Would a starving person near death be more likely to get a bowl of soup or shelter from the Blessed Teresa or from Christopher Hitchens?

CH I have never had pretensions to be in the professional charity business.

MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE If I may intrude. Of course, as a great admirer of Mother Teresa, I was in receipt of Mr. Hitchens’ barbs, so I do speak as a biased witness. I regard it as truly extraordinary that while Mr. Hitchens was blithely ladling his sewage over our heads, he was — as a sometime US correspondent, I have followed these matters closely from here in Heaven — a fierce and influential advocate of one of the most violent onslaughts on the poor in recent historical memory: first, the sanctions on Iraq, which caused untold misery to Iraq’s poorest citizens; then the actual attack of 2003, which eventually prompted the deaths of over a million Iraqis and a crisis that still virtually paralyses that wretched nation.

CH I would not change a syllable of what I wrote.

MM Worse still — I speak also as someone who reported from the Soviet Union during Stalin’s rule — Mr. Hitchens displayed himself as a craven apparatchik of the Bush White House, actually going to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the night before the invasion to give a pep talk to the President’s staff about their noble mission.

Since Beatrice Webb was my wife’s aunt, I am intimately familiar with the follies of socialists. You, in your contempt for “lesser” cultures, remind me of the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein, who argued that to oppose Rhodes’s suppression of the Matabele uprising was to oppose “the spread of civilization,” and that “the higher culture always has the greater right on its side over the lower; if necessary it has the historical right, yea, the duty, to subjugate it.”

CH The mission to Baghdad was noble: the eviction of a filthy tyrant…

MM …was worth the denial of medicine and medical equipment for babies, the forcing of hundreds of thousands of poor Iraqis into near starvation, the creation of millions of internal refugees plus those who managed to flee the country, the unleashing of sectarian bloodshed on an unparalleled scale? Just so that your hero, Tony Blair, and your supreme leader, Mr. Bush, could boast, “Mission Accomplished”?

CH Since His Holiness St. Pius V, who has departed the field of disputation, was invoking the Battle of Lepanto, I’m surprised not to hear any parallels drawn between that engagement and the Crusade against Islam, of which the war in Iraq — and the terror axis of Hussein and Osama — was a significant element.

MM You mean your precious crusade against so-called “Islamo-fascism,” the bizarre coinage of a Trotskyite, such as you once were? Lepanto at least saw the Ottoman armada, and the unfortunate slaves who rowed their galleys, sent to the bottom of the sea. Your crusade in Iraq saw the triumph of the Shi’a, and a significant victory for Iran. With Vice President Cheney you must be the last two men alive who believe in the Hussein/Osama axis.

JOHN PAUL II The Holy See strongly opposed the war. Before it began, I sent Cardinal Pio Laghi to tell Bush it would be a disaster and would destroy human life. The war was useless, served no purpose and was a defeat for humanity. Such was my view, which was the recorded opinion of the Holy See.

MM Surely, a more humane posture than your own hosannas to cluster bombs: “Those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and, guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.”

CH Rather well put, if I say so myself.

MM You are impervious to rebuke, which is not surprising, since if one rebuke is let in the door, it can usher in another, and then some serious inner reflection may become unavoidable. As Cardinal Newman put it, “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

CH Newman, that old queen!

MM Like St. Pius, I’ll quit the field now, but let me return to something His Holiness John Paul II said. “Would a starving person near death be more likely to get a bowl of soup or shelter from the Blessed Teresa or from Christopher Hitchens?”

What has constantly struck me is the desolate sterility of your atheism. We had atheists in our generation, of course, but they lived in a world and consorted with people for whom religion had profound meaning, often inspiring them to acts of nobility and extraordinary self-sacrifice. In your book, religious people are stupid. But they weren’t stupid, and the atheists — I’m thinking of my dear friend, a man you profess to have admired, Claud Cockburn — didn’t deride them, but cheerfully swapped quotations from the Sermon on the Mount. The context was one of respect and mutual striving for a better world.

What sort of moral leadership did you, the great and ultimately rather wealthy exponent of atheism display? Extreme disloyalty to close friends, constant public drunkenness and brutish rudeness, particularly to women, and a life, if I may say so, of almost psychotic self-centeredness and exhibitionism. You had your claque — Messrs Amis, Fenton and the others — and their energies in promoting you as a major intellectual and stylist were unceasing, and in their somewhat homoerotic loyalty, rather touching, but I don’t think the verdict of history will be quite so kind.

SCENE THREE

Antechamber to Heaven. CH is sitting on a bench. Door opens and St. Michael bids HK a cheerful goodbye.

HK Mr. Hitchens. You seem somewhat subdued. (proffering flask) A little schnapps?

CH My dear fellow! (drinks deeply) You arranged your affairs successfully?

HK Entirely so. In large part owing to you. Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa, not to mention St. Pius V, were so shocked by your views and by your language that they entirely discounted the charges you leveled against me, and believe me to have been vilely traduced.

CH I suppose I should be glad to have been of service. But let me ask a question: since you are Jewish, why would you be taking such trouble to build up contacts in what is clearly a Christian Heaven?

HK Between ourselves, I am preparing for a final conversion and absolution. Jews are vague about heaven and, after a lifetime’s observation, I am inclined to think that the atmosphere in Gehenna would be extremely acrimonious. Your plans?

CH Once again, I feel it necessary to insist that I do not recognize myself as being in Heaven, or disputing with a sixteenth-century pope, or indeed being reprimanded by St. Michael and Malcolm Muggeridge. Or talking affably with Henry Kissinger. So, please, regard this as ongoing cerebral activity on the part of C.H. Hitchens, patient at M.D. Anderson.

HK As you wish. But here, (slips him the flask) just remember Dr. Johnson’s stone. Farewell, my friend.

Lights fade to a dark red.

END

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

On March 7 the high society eatery La Côte Basque (used as a chapter heading in habitué Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers ) closed its doors. This last Wednesday the New York Times mourned at length the Chicago restaurant Charlie Trotter’s, slated for extinction in August. According to the Times, Trotter’s “had a huge and lasting impact on Chicago’s culinary landscape, if not the nation’s.”

Okay, a couple of big time restaurants bite the dust in the great recession. So?

For several years one of the New York Times’ most avidly read writers was Sam Sifton. Sifton approached his job con amore. Not from him any cavils about price, let alone high-end gastro flim flam. His prose had the confident lilt of a man writing for Wall Streeters for whom a couple of thousand dollars dropped on a dinner for four was absolutely no problem, and indeed almost an emblem of parsimony.

In early October last year he published an emotional eulogy to Per Se, “the best restaurant in New York City,” located in the Time-Life building at Lincoln Center. A photo disclosed no less than six Per Se employees mustered round a dish being plated for some expectant customer.

“Per Se’s signature starter course is Oysters and Pearls,” wrote Sifton. “It combines a sabayon of pearl tapioca with Island Creek oysters (small, marble-shaped, from Duxbury, south of Boston, fantastic) and a fat clump of sturgeon caviar from Northern California. These arrive in a bowl of the finest porcelain from Limoges. Paired with a glass of golden semillon from Elderton, they make a fine argument for the metaphor of transubstantiation.”

After this rather laconic reference to the Eucharist, an editorial note disclosed that this was Sifton’s last review. I’ve no idea whether Sifton’s liver couldn’t take the pace any more (“I have eaten in restaurants five or more nights a week for the last two years”) or whether the Times simply felt things were getting a little out of hand, and the paper was becoming a stand-in for Gourmet magazine. Either way it seemed we’d got to the end of an era. The day it announced the closing of Charlie Trotter’s, an article counseled Times readers on how to use leftovers.

The readers seemed to be getting testy too, though they are by nature on food sites, saving for the post mortem all the things they didn’t dare tell the waiter. Oliver Gardener from Florida wrote: “Ate there one time in 2006. Was awful. Paid $400 for a bottle of wine that retailed for $60. Ridiculous mark up. A couple of the courses were very good, but each consisted of about two bites of food. It was over before you knew it. Attitude like I’ve never seen. Snooty snooty snooty. Would not return. Better meal, by far, at Momofuku Noodle Shop.”

When I first came to New York in 1972 the high end gastro-porn industry was barely in motion. If you wanted to have a fancy French meal, you went to Lutece, which closed down in 2004. Domestic kitchens were wreathed in smoke from burned offerings to Julia Child. Fiery Hunan cooking was all the rage, followed by a pallid style of cooking known as cuisine minceur, where tasteful dollops of steamed chard held sway.

Then, in 1975, Craig Claiborne reported on the front page of the New York Times that he and Pierre Franey had blown $4,000 on a 31-course, nine-wine dinner at Chez Denis in Paris, a feast offered by American Express at a charity auction.

In those post-Vietnam days, columnists kept whole stables of moral high horses pawing the ground in their stalls. Espying the $4,000 binge, Harriet Van Horne stabbed furiously at her typewriter: “This calculated evening of high-class piggery offends an average American’s sense of decency. It seems wrong, morally, esthetically and in every other way.” Above the column I remember an editor ran the head ‘Edunt et Vomant’ (they eat and they vomit).

People were shocked but Claiborne had put down a marker. Thirty years later, you didn’t need to eat your way through 31 courses to run up a tab of $4,000. The wine alone could cost that. These days several restaurants offer food clad in gold. New York’s Serendipity, for example, advertises “the Golden Opulence Sundae, a chocolate sundae covered in 23-karat gold leaf, suffused with gold dragets, and served with an 18-karat gold spoon that diners can keep.” The price? $1,000. (Don’t eat the spoon. Any gold of less than 23 karats may contain other, possibly harmful, metals.)

Mannerism began to creep onto the food pages. In 2010 bugs were suddenly all the rage. “A five-course Mexican feast at the Brooklyn Kitchen in Williamsburg last Saturday night [was] engineered to introduce New Yorkers to the succulent wonders of edible insects,” the New York Times reported. “The first couple of courses [offered] yucca frites dotted with mealworms, a smoked corn custard sprinkled with crispy moth larvae… at some point during dinner a bowl of squirming wax moth larvae was passed around.”

Good restaurants are still cooking excellent food. Restaurants establishing direct relationships with small farm suppliers is surely a good thing, though often the Menu in such places begins to look like a gazetteer, and one does ask oneself, is the “Niman ranch” really all that it claims to be? Overall the standard, domestic as well as professional, of American cuisine has never been higher. It’s just that one doesn’t pick up that crackle of excitement, that rush to get a table at that new place down the block.

Also, there have been unpleasing stories of the darker side of the profession, with the owners or managers of restaurants, such as Mario Battali stealing the tip income of their miserably underpaid waiters. In a recent story in The Guardian by Moira Herbst three Manhattan bartenders accuse the owners of downtown wine/tapas spots Bar Veloce and Bar Carrera of skimming up to 30% of their tips, along with failing to pay proper wages and overtime.

“Earlier this month, celebrity chef Mario Batali and his business partner agreed to pay $5.25 million to settle claims that their restaurants including downtown Manhattan’s Babbo and Casa Mono illegally nabbed a portion of servers’ and other staffers’ tips. Del Posto, another Batali restaurant, faces a separate lawsuit in New York alleging employees were underpaid.

“Other New York City eateries sued for similar allegations include Keith McNally’s Pastis and Balthazar, which settled for $1.48 million; BLT restaurants, which settled for $925,000; and Nobu, which settled for $2.5 million.”

Whenever possible, pay the tip in cash.

Lists of America’s best restaurants these days have a somewhat haphazard look, which may be no bad thing. One site, The Daily Meal, lists Le Bernardin in New York as its top pick. Le Bernardin is indeed a very fine restaurant, but scarcely evidence of exciting novelty. My brother Andrew and I went there in the early 1980s, pockets stuffed with expense money from House and Garden with which to track down America’s best of that era. We had plates of flaked salt cod followed by oxtail stew — just about the simplest, cheapest ingredients money could buy. Both were unbeatable, with faddism kept at bay by Italian cooking at its simple best.

Tumbril Time!

A tumbril (n.) a dung cart used for carrying manure, now associated with the transport of prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Fouquier-Tinville is preparing for a major trial, having announced the arrest and incarceration in the Conciergerie of “telling truth to power” — a hugely annoying phrase, simultaneously exaggerating the courage required to tell the truth and underestimating power’s own resourcefulness in adjusting truth to its own requirements. As Fouquier-Tinville tartly remarked, is the implication that the Revolutionary Tribunal does not want to know the truth? As Louis Patrick writes from Memphis:

“Telling truth to power. What a ridiculous joke that has always been. What is power if not the ability to create the truth by which the rest of us must live? The elite have never been Christ-like fools wandering blindly in a moral wilderness, waiting only to be awakened by the enlightened. They are predators. Murder and lies are mother’s milk.”

And from Missy Beatie these little ones to toss into Fouquier-Tinville’s intray: kind of, sort of, like sort of, and kind of, kinda, sorta. Last week there were calls for a couple of these to take the final ride. The people’s vigilance has clearly been aroused.

Not True!

My Nation colleague Richard Kim is upset by a description in a recent article in CounterPunch, to the effect that

“the Nation is heavily hyping MoveOn’s 99 Spring, [and this is] made clear by the cover of its April 2, 2012 edition, which is a special issue dedicated to the cause.” Richard writes: “The April 2 issue, which I edited, is called the Occupy Spring (NOT the 99% spring). In the 14 articles about Occupy there are only TWO sentences in total about the 99% Spring and both of them are in passing. The idea that the entire issue is dedicated to pushing MoveOn’s 99% Spring is ludicrous — as anyone who even skimmed the issue can see.”

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

Photo Courtesy Thirteen Of Clubs.

Mitt Romney will be the Republican to face President Obama in the fall. Tuesday night was the clincher, as the Mormon zealot won in Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington DC. He may stumble on, but the Catholic zealot Rick Santorum is finished.

It’s hard to detect any alluring feature in Romney’s psychic or political make-up, and I’m none too sure about Ann Romney, who at this stage of the game is filling the role played by the late Elizabeth Edwards in the Edwards campaign on its upward trajectory back in early 2008.

The last Republican challenger to an incumbent Democratic president was Bob Dole in 1996. I always had a soft spot for the guy for his crack, which backfired on him, when he was Ford’s veep nominee in 1976, running against the Carter/Mondale ticket: “I figured it up the other day: If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans — enough to fill the city of Detroit.” There was a lot of howling because Dole said “Democrat,” thus diverting attention from the substantive charge which was probably true.

When I was on the Village Voice, James Ridgeway and I went to interview Dole some time in the late 70s when he was one of the most powerful Republicans in the US Senate. I think we wanted him to denounce the New Cold War, then being launched, which he was happy to do because he was from Kansas whose farmers made plenty of money selling grain or corn to the Soviet Union. Though he had a reputation of being a savage conservative, we found him pleasant and very funny and he gave the Voice an hour of his time. Compared to Romney, or Obama for that matter, he sounded like Henry Wallace.

Santorum got roughed up for actually espousing conservative Roman Catholic positions. For some reason Romney is being given a pass as a Mormon, as though his religion is of no consequence, as inconsequential a piece of ideological baggage as Bill Clinton’s Baptist label. Columnists evidently feel it’s poor taste to suggest that a candidate’s religion might have some bearing on his conduct and that the candidate should be properly grilled on the matter.

No doubt in the upcoming campaign Romney will attack Obama for his associations with radicals, the lunatic idea — most recently promoted by the late Andrew Breitbart — being that ex-Weatherfolk Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn imparted to the eager Obama the left’s secret plan to take over the United States and put everyone in slave labor camps, have abortions and engage in unmentionable sexual practices.

Alas, the left never did have a plan — secret or overt — to take over the United States. Abortions and unmentionable sexual practices were a different matter. Ayers’ and Dohrn’s actual role was obviously to help hook up the eager Obama with big Democratic Jewish money in Chicago, directing the attention of the latter to this well-mannered Harvard-educated black politician as someone to watch and assist.

The left never had a secret plan or much discipline. But the Mormons really do have secrets and a lot of discipline. Does Romney espouse Mormon doctrines about gays or not? About obedience to the Prophet or not? If not, then isn’t he a fake Mormon, without a shred of principle? Why should we believe him about anything? If yes, then where does that put his loyalties and priorities as someone hoping to be President of the United States and supposed upholder of the Constitution? (Of course Obama has shredded substantial portions of the Constitution without even the excuse of being a Mormon.)

What about Romney’s associations? He is no ordinary Mormon. By lineage, upbringing and personal decision he’s about as dedicated a Mormon as you can be — which is very dedicated indeed. I urge you to check out the piece by a former Mormon in our CounterPunch newsletter, which delves into Mormon practices and points out that Romney attends a Mormon temple. Temples are only open to those members who adhere completely to the strict standards of Mormonism, including unwavering loyalty to the president of the church.

“The level of secretiveness surrounding the temples is extraordinary, so much so that members of the Mormon Church who have not been to the temple have virtually no idea as to what they entail… Before Mormons are allowed to enter a temple, they must be interviewed by two separate tiers of ecclesiastical leadership to determine their worthiness to enter these edifices. These so-called temple-recommend interviews are the first issue of concern regarding Mitt Romney. Among the various questions asked of a member, one particular question goes as follows: ‘Do you support, affiliate with, or agree with any group or individual whose teachings or practices are contrary to or oppose those accepted by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?’ The very nature of this question, coupled with several others regarding complete obedience to the president of the church (or ‘prophet’), put into question the overall allegiance of Mitt Romney (and, indeed, all Mormons). If members are found to be in violation of this question (or any other from the list of questions), they will not be allowed to enter the temple. Being blocked from entering the temple is tantamount to being blocked from Heaven, albeit temporarily. (They can always repent.)

“Among the various ‘ordinances’ performed in the temples, none are more divisive than the Law of Consecration. This rite requires members to pledge all their time, money, and abilities to the establishment of the kingdom of heaven on earth (the Mormon kingdom). Couple this with the demand to sustain the president of the church as the only prophet seer and revelator on earth, a particularly troubling form of absolute obedience emerges.”

Mormonism aside, Romney’s opportunism in junking previous positions when under conservative pressure has been unremitting. Take the single biggest issue in American politics today, the minimum wage.

If you adjust for inflation, median personal income in America hasn’t moved for almost half a century. Nearly a quarter of US households have zero to negative net worth. It just takes one unlucky turn of the cards — an illness, an accident, a brush with the law — to put them under.

Even though the cost of living has gone up, the federal minimum wage hasn’t moved since 2009, when the last of a series of increases signed into law by George W. Bush kicked in. In 2011 dollars, the minimum wage was more than $10 in 1968, when jobs and pay were peaking for America’s workers.

The current minimum wage ranges between $7.25 and $8.67 per hour. Work a 40-hour week for $7.25 and you end up with $15,080 a year, just above the $11,000 federal poverty line for an individual but well below the $22,000 for a family of four.

In November 2008 President-elect Obama promised to “raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011 and index it to inflation to make sure that full-time workers can earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs such as food, transportation, and housing, things so many people take for granted.” It was a pledge to low-paid workers to give them a 30% pay hike. Of all Obama’s betrayals, this was one of the bitterest. He never really tried, skittish with fear that he’d be nailed by the Big Business lobbies and their creatures in Congress as an inflationeer.

If ever there was an issue on which Romney could get real traction with the blue-collar voters who liked Santorum it’s the minimum wage. As Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative put it:

“these days a crucial component of the Republican electorate consists of working-class whites, often strongly religious ones, who tend to live in non-unionized low-wage states or otherwise generally subsist, sometimes with considerable difficulty, on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Proposing a large wage increase to a socially conservative evangelical Christian who works at Walmart and currently struggles to pay her bills would be the sort of simple, clear message that might easily cut through an enormous amount of ideological clutter.”

That was in “The American Conservative.”

Informally to me he adds, “One of the more ridiculous aspects of the situation is that none of the rich banksters actually care about the minimum wage, and might not even have heard of it. After all, none of their friends or employees are anywhere near MW territory. None of their nannies earn MW. I even doubt that even any of their nannies’ nannies are paid anything like the current MW. On the other side, if the MW were raised to something like $12/hour, lots of Americans would use some of the money to try to catch up on their delinquent credit-card bills, which would make most of the banksters pretty happy. So they’d probably support a boost in the MW… except that the paid-ideologues in conservative DC thinktanks would warn them that it would totally wreck the American economy.”

(As I’ve noted before, I count Unz as a friend, supportive of left ventures such as CounterPunch as well as of The American Conservative, whose tiller he took over in 2007.)

The left economist James K. Galbraith, picking up Unz’s suggestion of a hike to $12, writes:

“What would workers do with the raise? They’d spend it, creating jobs for other workers. They’d pay down their mortgages and car loans, getting themselves out of debt. They’d pay more taxes — on sales and property, mostly — thereby relieving the fiscal crises of states and localities. … Women in particular would benefit because they tend to work for lower wages… Working families would have more time for community life, including politics; Because payroll- and income-tax revenues would rise, the federal deficit would come down. Social Security worries would fade.”

Romney was well positioned. In January of this year he said at a campaign event in New Hampshire that he favored raising the minimum wage automatically each year to keep pace with inflation. He could have built on this, just as Reagan did in his 1980 campaign with entirely factitious economic populism. But no. A couple of whacks from the Wall Street Journal and fears of being pilloried as a liberal saw Romney flop on the issue at the start of March. Now he wants the wage to stay at $7.25, with no indexing for inflation. In other words, he wants poor people to earn less every year.

In his first bid for the nomination in 2008 Romney’s foreign policy positions were relatively demure. This time he’s swerved into palaeolithic Cold War conservatism, rivaling McCain’s in 2008. Near the end of March he was bellowing that “Russia is America’s number 1 geopolitical foe.” He wants to keep troops in Afghanistan and bomb Iran — this last a predictable bow to the Israel lobby.

In February, president Obama trailed Romney in the top 12 swing states, 46% to 48%. Last week a USA Today/Gallup poll reported that in these same swing states a majority of registered voters now favor Obama by 9 points. According to the USA Today/Gallup pollsters the biggest change came from women younger than 50, where the president now leads Romney by 2 — 1. Not long before the poll was taken, Romney, fending of attacks from Santorum, said he wants to get rid of Planned Parenthood and endorsed the Blunt amendment, which would have allowed employers to deny coverage of contraception on religious grounds.

Romney has beaten off all challengers, but now he sports all their most unalluring features. The Obama camp is not unhappy. Most progressives watch with complacency the suicidal Republicans heading over the cliff. Let them step back and look at the desperation of millions of Americans today. Will they stay loyal and inert right through to November?

Tumbril Time!

A tumbril (n.) a dung cart used for carrying manure, now associated with the transport of prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

The common view is that thousands of French aristos perished under the blade. Not true. Greer’s statistical study, “The Incidence of Terror During the French Revolution,” published in 1935, shows that 666 nobles got the chop in Paris and another 1,543 in the rest of France. Compare that to the carnage after the French commune of 1871 when some 20,000 Communards were executed.

The best defense of the French revolution and its supposed excesses is surely that of Mark Twain in “A Connecticut Yankee”:

“There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’ if we would remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror — that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Almost all the executions were performed by the public executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson, the rest by his sons, one of whom — Gabriel — perished by slipping off the scaffold.

A slow week on the verbal front. “Has ‘infotainment’ been judged and sentenced yet?” asks John Sprey. “I heard it used in a car ad the other day, something along the lines of ‘cutting edge infotainment system.’ Maybe ‘cutting edge’ could go too?”

Carol Fitzmaurice, in a hand-written denunciation, calls on revolutionary justice for At the end of the day, and Sort of, kind of.

Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville has added the denunciations to his stack.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

Under fierce attack, Barbour said 90% of those involved had already been released from prison, some many years earlier and he’d acted in order to allow them to find employment, to get professional licenses, to vote, and — very important — to hunt. Of course many of the pardons went to well-off folk and those with political ties to the governor, which is only to be expected. A posthumous pardon went to Leon Turner, a prisoner who’d helped around the house when Barbour’s father, a Circuit Court judge, was sick, dying when Haley was two.

Barbour had political battles over pardons through his political career in Mississippi, some unedifying. This time he laid stress on Christian forgiveness and giving people a second chance, just like another Republican, Mike Huckabee (1033 pardons and commutations) did when quitting the governor’s mansion in Arkansas. Mitt Romney, I should say, didn’t issue a single pardon in his term as governor of Massachusetts which shows as clearly as his treatment of his dog what a blazing, ineffable asshole he is. Incidentally, they could do with more mercy in Mississippi which has the second highest rate of incarceration in the nation and a lopsided group of non-violent or drug offenders — 36% compared to the national average of 20%.

There’s something mythic about pardons, at least in the old days, when Robin Hood knelt to receive forgiveness from King Richard. These days the pardoning privilege as held by the president and by governors (some in conjunction with pardoning boards) always throws a usefully bright light on the operations of the political system, as with Bush Sr.’s pardons of the Contra-gate conspirators, starting with Elliott Abrams; Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich; Bush Jr.’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence.

A pardon instills very remote hope in the citizenry that the system can offer the tiniest chink of light, like an IRS amnesty. A pardon can mean a nullification (such as jurors have the power — rarely used, alas — to issue, this being the pardoner’s belief that the law is unjust and should be set aside); the reversal of a moral injustice or of a disproportionate punishment; or of a frank admission of the power of a really hefty bribe, as with Rich, or Bush’s Sr.’s pardon of Armand Hammer.

There’s been a downward trend in nullification, or compassion or maybe even bribery since Lyndon Johnson, who pardoned 1,187 across five years. Nixon ran him second with 926, including Jimmy Hoffa. Ford pardoned 409 including Nixon, Robert E. Lee and Tokyo Rose. Carter, on his second day in office issued unconditional amnesties to draft resisters and among others pardoned Jefferson Davis and Patty Hearst (commutation). He pardoned 566.

With Reagan, a two term president, the numbers dipped to 406, including George Steinbrenner and Mark Felt, the subject of an absorbing piece by John Dean on our Counterpunch.org site last weekend. George Bush Sr. had a chill heart, beyond the mercy extended to Elliott Abrams and his old CIA buddies. He issued only 77 pardons in his single term. Across two terms Clinton bumped the number up to 459, including his brother Roger, Patty Hearst (full pardon), former CIA director John Deutch and 16 members of the Puerto Rican FALN. Bush Jr., as merciless as his father, pardoned 200 across two terms.

And Obama? Merciless too, as befits someone whose concern for personal survival and advantage are always paramount. So far as I can determine, by the end of 2011 he’d pardoned 22. The worst? George Washington, with 16. The most forgiving? FDR, with 3,687.

Republican Death March Continues

“I am learning to say y’all and I like grits and things. Strange things are happening to me.” This is Mitt Romney reaching out to the south. As one of the locals said, “If that isn’t skillful targeting of us Mississippians, I don’t know what is.”

Last Tuesday Mormon money and organization stopped crusading papism at least temporarily in its tracks, though Romney will have to do better in the south if he’s going to win on the first ballot in Tampa. The primaries run till the end of June, concluding in Utah, which will crown Romney’s run through primary and caucus. Barring an act of God, Santorum’s in this instance, it looks as though Romney will be the Republican nominee, however many complicated calculations about delegate counts we have to put up with in the interim. Already menacing his march to the White House is the powerful Dog Owner vote. That business of transporting Seamus the Irish setter on the top of his station wagon for 12 hours, is not going away, nor the news that Romney decreed the bathroom stops in advance before the car with wife, five kids and Seamus set forth.

Romney has survived, but at serious cost. A recent poll run by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal discloses that 70% of all respondents used harsh language to describe the Republican presidential race.

Forty percent said the GOP contest so far had made them feel less favorable about the party, with only 12% saying they now have a more favorable impression.

55% of respondents — including 35 percent of Republicans — thinks that the Democratic Party does a better job than the GOP in appealing to those who aren’t hard-core supporters. Just 26% say the Republican Party does a better job on this front.

Romney’s favorable/unfavorable rating was 28% favorable and 39% unfavorable among all respondents (and 22%/38% among independents). By contrast, John McCain’s at this point in 2008 was 47%/27%. The only candidate who did worse in the early spring of a presidential campaign year was Bill Clinton in 1993 whose numbers were 32%/43%, but that was right after it had been disclosed that he spent most of the 1980s with his nose between Gennifer Flowers’ thighs, as fetchingly described in her memoir of their affair. By the summer of 1993 the voters had figured that this was Bill’s way and they didn’t really care.

People don’t like Romney that much, if at all, and he’s given them scant reason to feel otherwise. Through the last months he’s flowered as a clumsy, cowardly opportunist who roosts on every quarter of the political compass as circumstances seem to dictate.

Netanyahu’s in town? Romney’s right there at his side: “Look, one thing you can know and that is if we reelect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. And if we elect Mitt Romney, if you elect me as the next president, they will not have a nuclear weapon…”

Tumbril Time!

A tumbril (n.) a dung cart used for carrying manure, now associated with the transport of prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

It’s time to throw noted into the tumbril. Article after article, I read that X “noted” and then Y “noted” and then Z “noted.” In the old days we took more trouble. Our sources and authorities “pointed out” or “stressed ” or “hinted” or “explained” or sometimes simply just “said.” We rang the changes. Now it’s just one single noted and it’s got to stop, with a summary thwock and a cackle from the tricoteuses.

Following noted up onto the scaffold will be penned. Even though fountain pens, let alone quills, are as rare as tumbrils, I read more than I should of people “penning” an article, or sometimes “authoring” it which is nearly as bad. What’s wrong with “wrote”?

Richard Kidd writes from Winnipeg: “I would like to nominate two of President Obama’s favorite expressions. “Let me be clear,” or more commonly, “Let me be perfectly clear.” If you want to be clear, then phrase your ideas clearly. ”Make no mistake…” I suppose this qualifier is intended to warn listeners against misinterpretation, or perhaps against doubting the sincerity of the speaker. It’s another of Obama’s annoying catch phrases that richly deserves tumbrilization.”

And from long-term CounterPuncher Glenn Ierley:

“Years ago, Edwin Newman inveighed in vain against the then common custom of commencing observations with the pointless interrogatory phrase ‘You know something?’ For want of a tumbril this phrase died a few years later of natural causes, but not before spreading its mutant spores.

“The recently hatched spawn of this is another pointless interrogatory phrase now appended to all too many observations, as I was reminded on seeing it occur not once, but twice, in a column by that fearless defender of the status quo, George Will. The offender? ‘Who knew?’

You know something? Ask not for whom the tumbril rolls, it rolls for thee. Who knew? Best, Glenn.”

I say Aye to these. Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville will give the charges his usual scrupulous attention.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

If you’re into sunspot theory, increased negative ionization during sunspot maximum periods increases human excitability.

The sunspot-sodden American right — in this instance the male right — is imploding under the sheer pressure of its repressions, always nearer the surface than in the more decorous psychic plumbing of the liberal legions. It feels like we’re back in 1960 when the pill first came on line and predictions of moral collapse were selling by the gross at every convenience store.

First the Savonarola of Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum, says we’re in Satan’s toils and will remain so until liberated by the sharp lances of theocracy. Then comes further Republican insanity with the all-male Congressional panel pondering the issue of contraception and now Rush Limbaugh, whose tastes run to cherubim-daubed ceilings and rococo furniture, cuts loose with hysterical denunciations of Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and a “prostitute” after she testified about contraception before a Pelosi-led informal hearing.

Then Andrew Breitbart blows up on a midnight walk through boring Brentwood at the age of 43. One of Breitbart’s colleagues, Michael Walsh, furnished an obituary to the National Review online, extolling Breitbart thus:

“In the war against the institutional Left, Andrew Breitbart was the Right’s Achilles; the bravest of all the warriors, now fallen on the plain…. It was not in his DNA ever to leave the field. [Not like Achilles, who sat out a fair slice of the Trojan War.] He was the kind of leader the Right needs more of — not a go-along, get-along time-serving functionary but a tactical commander on the battlefield, ever ready to take the bridge, fire the village, and move on to the next objective.”

“Fire the village”… how about that for a manly phrase? One of the mightiest of the Homeric exploits of Breitbart, who described himself as Matt Drudge’s “bitch,” was to concoct an edited video of USDA official Shirley Sherrod, designed to misrepresent her as a racist. He jimmied the notorious ACORN videos too. A nasty bit of work. He was no doubt peering into his i-Phone when the Reaper struck.

Death March to November

A week ago Santorum looked as though he might give Romney a thrashing in Michigan, which would have unleashed a wave of grim assessments of the Mormon’s prospects, his failure to lock up the race for the nomination, his inability to connect with the common man or woman, the looming possibility of a brokered convention.

Romney’s put such a fate behind him, at least till the next time he falters, perhaps in caucuses in Washington state in the Pacific northwest this coming weekend or in any of the ten states having primaries or caucuses next Tuesday.

So Romney’s a survivor. He recovered from a defeat at the hands of Newt Gingrich in South Carolina in time to win Florida; he prevailed over Santorum last week. But each comeback has come with a huge price tag. Not just the millions Romney had to pour into negative ads against Santorum in Michigan, but in the whole character of his battle with the former senator.

What nearly sank Romney in Michigan was his refusal to concede that he was totally wrong four years ago in opposing bailouts — initiated by Bush and carried through by Obama — for General Motors and Chrysler. Both companies were thrown life belts of government loans, are now doing well and giving jobs to thousands of autoworkers and suppliers in Michigan and Ohio. At the convention of the United Auto Workers last week Obama had rare sport with Romney on this issue, eliciting howls of merriment and derision for Romney from his blue collar audience. They could easily pull both Michigan and Ohio into the Democratic column next November. No Republican has ever won the White House without winning in Ohio.

If Romney is to have a decent chance of defeating Barack Obama in the fall he has to make a strong showing among Hispanics, and women and middle of the roaders generally. The growing Hispanic vote in states like California and Texas is one of the core truths of politics in the coming era. In the early 1990s Gov. Pete Wilson destroyed the Republican Party in California — the party of Nixon and Reagan — by backing legislation targeting illegal Hispanic immigrants. Hispanics are naturally conservative. They oppose abortion. But they don’t forget politicians who race-bait and try to deny immigrants and their children access to schools and social services.

Yet in the last debate in Arizona, yet another state with a hefty Hispanic population, Romney applauded as “a model” the state’s repellent crackdown on illegal immigrants, repudiated by the Obama administration as unconstitutional. For good measure Romney launched an attack on Sonia Sotomayor, the first Puerto Rican member of the US Supreme Court. In terms of political strategy it’s like watching a man put a rope around his neck and kick away the chair.

Republicans win by stressing their superior ability in standing tall, defending the United States against its enemies, steering the ship of state in the right direction. They don’t win campaigns on social issues, like contraception or abortion. They don’t win by persuading women they’re completely crazy and are set to ban all forms of birth control beyond the rhythm method.

For a couple of weeks Americans have been listening with incredulity to Santorum denouncing the separation of church and state, and saying he “threw up” when he read a speech by President John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic , endorsing just such a separation in his campaign in 1960. Santorum’s America will have no bedroom free from its intrusions. Santorum seems quite blithe at the prospect. And over in the other corner is a Mormon, active in his faith and secret rites. Is this a recipe for victory in modern America?

What we could be witnessing is the death of the Republican Party as one capable of winning a national election, since its active base are right-wing nuts of the sort Romney has been groveling to across the past months. Because seats for the US Congress are now all gerrymandered and very rarely change hands Republicans can still command majorities in the House of Representatives, but their hopes of capturing the US Senate are now receding. Romney is a clumsy candidate. He’s stuck his foot in his mouth so many times he has to have a professional extractor at his elbow at all times. His economic recipe is to add to the unemployment rolls by having the old folk work an extra couple of years. On his present course, assuming he survives the contests of the next week, he faces doom in the fall. Small wonder Obama looked and sounded pretty chipper in Detroit when he addressed the autoworkers.

Even smaller wonder that Obama took the trouble to make a well publicized phone call on Friday to Ms Fluke: “He encouraged me and supported me and thanked me for speaking out about the concerns of American women,” Fluke told Andrea Mitchell. “And what was really personal for me was that he said to tell my parents that they should be proud. And that meant a lot because Rush Limbaugh questioned whether or not my family would be proud of me. So, I just appreciated that very much.”

Tumbril Time!

A tumbril (n.) a dung cart used for carrying manure, now associated with the transport of prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Unctuous. It’s standard in pretentious food reviews, as in “unctuous sauce,” though not “unctuous head waiter” where the usage would be permissible once or twice a year. Into the cart with it, shoulder to shoulder with “vibrant,” denounced to Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville by Citoyen actif Rick Claymore, who writes, I’ve been over this one for decades, but, living in the Bay Area, where every event or place is “vibrant,” I cannot escape.”

Rick also wants to consign “old school” to the tumbrils. “I’m sick to death of hearing anything older than 1980 being referred to as, ‘old school.’ I was recently informed that my crocheted bicycle gloves are, ‘old school.’ I’m not so sure about this. “Old-school” is usually linked with “courtesy” or some kindred trait of times long gone. But I tremble for its future once Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville catches sight of the word.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

But with Santorum — a conservative Roman Catholic and member of Opus Dei — there’s a truly manic edge to his religious pronouncements and activities. It was Santorum and Mrs. S, don’t forget, who took their still-born baby home from the hospital and laid it among their living tots, telling them, “he’s with the angels now,” an episode Mrs. Santorum later recorded in a memoir.

Santorum doesn’t believe in the right to privacy. Not that Obama has any qualms about taps on your phone and powers of arbitrary arrest, but he probably doesn’t care too much about whatever human combos are being tried out in the bedroom. Santorum frets 24/7 about beastliness and unnatural acts, and yearns to restore full rights to snoops to kick down the motel door, twitch aside the blankets and haul couples off for all manner of moral abominations.

Contraception in Santorum’s opinion is “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” Pre-natal testing is also a no-no for Santorum, father of eight.

In 2003 Santorum said he favored having laws against polygamy, adultery, sodomy, and other actions “antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.” The possibility of bestiality in today’s licentious times bothers him a lot — “man on dog,” as he famously put it on a talk show. Not for him the possibility of abortion in cases of rape: “I believe and I think that the right approach is to accept this horribly created, in the sense of rape, but nevertheless, in a very broken way, a gift of human life, and accept what God is giving to you.”

Santorum was two when the Sixties began. But like so many cultural conservatives he believes to the bottom of his soul that everything went to hell when the love generation came of age: “Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has become. They have become the party of Woodstock. They prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that’s sex. And the whole abortion culture, it’s not about life. It’s about sexual freedom. That’s what it’s about. Homosexuality. It’s about sexual freedom.”

In 2008 he gave a speech in which he ventured that “Satan has his sights on the United States of America. Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that have so deeply rooted in the American tradition.”

Santorum traces Satan’s hoofprints back to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Just the other day he told an audience: “They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left are no unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we do follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.”

The whole diatribe is thrilling, but utterly ludicrous, not least because it was the revolution that promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which defined individual and collective rights for all men.

Why is a guy like this currently running neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination? The usual maps drawn by political experts stipulate that at some point in the prolonged nomination battle the candidate has to shed the gothic nuttiness and over-the-topness that got him traction in the early primaries and reach out to the independents without whose support no presidential bid can succeed.

There’s zero sign that Santorum is of any disposition to do this. So why does he turn out to be the last man standing in the path of the Mormon billionaire Mitt Romney in the battle for the nomination?

First and foremost, he’s not Mitt Romney.

Candidates, now long forgotten, like Herman Cain, or still vaguely remembered like the fading Newt Gingrich, fared well with this simple asset. Blue-collar Americans in the old industrial states don’t care for Romney, who began life as a rich kid and then became a lot richer by buying up businesses, putting them on a “sound footing” (fire half the work force), selling them and moving on.

So Santorum can work the blue-collar vote with a few populist rhetorical gestures. He can also work the racist, anti-Obama vote by hinting that the president is driven by a non-Christian, environmentalist, New Age, putatively Satanist agenda. A few days ago Santorum declared that Obama’s actions are motivated by “some phony theology, not a theology based on the Bible… The president has reached a new low in this country’s history of oppressing religious freedom that we have never seen before. If he doesn’t want to call his imposition of his values a theology that’s fine.” Then he added a day later by way of clarification that he understands Obama is a Christian, but that the president was misinterpreting God’s truth.

After the Florida primary everyone thought Santorum was toast and Romney coasting to the crown. Then Santorum won three fairly insignificant contests in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota. A billionaire, Foster Friess, gave his campaign a huge wad of money and he was on his way again.

Suddenly Romney was fighting for his life in Michigan (next Tuesday’s primary), where he was born and where his father was governor. Polls show Santorum ahead, both in Michigan and nationally, and also with a slightly better chance than Romney of beating Obama in November, though the president leads both of them by around four to six points.

The very latest poll, taken as Romney has desperately poured money into a fresh negative ad campaign against Santorum, shows the Mormon two points ahead in Michigan — no small achievement since Romney has denounced the bailout initiated by George Bush and ratified by Obama that saved GM and Chrysler, both companies now doing well and hiring thousands in a stricken state. In a lower key, Santorum also denounces the bailout, which shows just how insane these Republicans are.

On Wednesday night, in a debate in Arizona, where he has a decent lead, Romney was pronounced the clear winner, not least because he had Ron Paul on Santorum’s other side, thumping him for being a Washington insider and phony. It would be folly to predict what will happen next Tuesday night. If Santorum prospers, a huge disaster for the Republicans looms in November, far beyond even the Goldwater debacle of 1964. Don’t believe the talk about a brokered convention and someone like Jeb Bush or Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey parachuted in by the Republican establishment.

These are cheering days for the Obama campaign.

Tumbril Time!

A tumbril (n.) a dung cart used for carrying manure, now associated with the transport of prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

CounterPunchers are a vigilant, dare I even say (a phrase under close scrutiny by Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville) even a bloodthirsty crowd. The Prosecutor’s inbox is filled to overflowing with calls for revolutionary justice.

From Watsonville comes a denunciation from Frank Bardacke, who quotes Carlyle, a fervent counter-revolutionary of course, but a stylist Frank has long admired: “Like a black Spectre, daily at eventide, glides the Death-tumbril through the variegated throng of things.”

“I accuse: privilege as a gerund. As in, “Privileging the body, he rarely missed a meal.” Citoyen actif, Bardacke.

Yes indeed, citoyen Bardacke — These gerunds are everywhere — gerund… girondin… I think the case is clear.

From Gui Rochat, with the peremptory cry “Into the tumbril!”

“Should, a word too often used by progressives, reflecting de facto a redundant idealist and basically liberal compromise.”

Shane Mayer: “The Prosecutor will surely consider, for a brief but purposeful ride on the tumbril cart, the habit of converting punctuation marks into sentence fragments. The same sentiment used to be expressed with the equally imperious and unnecessary ‘ipso facto’: ‘Smoking causes cancer. Period.’ A quick and painless dispatching of the usage is just the thing; consider that it has already generated a staccato variation on its original theme: “Smoking. Causes. Cancer. Period.”

Lawrence Magnuson draws an approving roar from the sans-culottes as he presses his j’accuse: “the tumbril, to fully do its stern duty, needs but one ecumenical occupant: unconscionable. Was ever a more feckless state of the moral mind alluded to? Was ever outrage so easily negated? The blandest dead word I know.”

Sondjata Olatunji: “Can we also put hyper-masculinity on that cart? Each time I have heard the phrase I have asked the user to define ‘normal masculinity’ since there can be no ‘hyper’ or ‘hypo’ masculinity without some defined and accepted ‘normal’ masculinity.”

Normal masculinity,” Sondjata? Now there’s a can of worms.

Each day, as the tumbrils creak towards the Place de la Revolution, one can see the pale faces of words and phrases seized by popular vigilance from the world of corporate language-mangling. CounterPuncher Pete Jones, who says he works in a place “inundated by verbal nonsense,” advanced these candidates for the fateful blade: “to re-examine: to think about; to leverage: to use for future profit-making (why do they need a special word for this?); functional team: the group of coworkers you work with on a daily basis; iterative thinker: someone who is indecisive, a trait which appears to no longer be a flaw; bandwidth: this is the most stupefying of all, as it is constantly used, knowingly — with an implied wink, occasionally — for the simpler, but unspeakable term, ‘free time.’”

The jury had no difficulty in imposing the supreme penalty.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

At one grimly hilarious moment last Friday, these worthy sermons were buttressed by a message from Ayman al-Zwahiri, the head of al-Qaeda, therefore presumably the number one target on President Obama’s hit list, similarly praising the ‘Lions of Syria’ for rising up against the Assad regime. Al-Qaeda and the White House in sync!

The last time the United States faced serious internal dissent was in the 1960s and early 1970s, from war resisters and black and Native American movements. The government responded instantly with a methodical program of violent repression, including a well-documented agenda of assassination.

In 1993, the first year of the Clinton administration, federal agents launched an armed assault on a religious group in a compound outside Waco, Texas. The Feds deemed the compound and the Branch Davidians therein, headed by David Koresh, an affront to their authority. After seven weeks, Attorney General Janet Reno concluded that negotiation with the besieged Christian fundamentalists was useless and ordered an assault. Seventy-six Branch Davidians were burned alive. Autopsies showed that five children were among those shot to death by federal agents. The outcome was widely endorsed by the national press and Attorney General Reno commended for her resolve.

No one could doubt that determined separatist activity or armed challenges to the government of the United States are always met with immediate, overwhelming and lethal ferocity. For further historical illustration I recommend an interview with any moderately informed American Indian or black.

For a while it looked as though Obama’s government was being swept into yet another intervention, ranging itself shoulder-to-shoulder with the GCC coalition, headed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, stoking the fires in Syria. That momentum was certainly checked by the Russian and Chinese veto of the US-backed resolution presented to the UN Security Council.

Maybe it’s fanciful, but perhaps enthusiasm for underwriting the destruction of the Syrian state was somewhat undermined by the late Anthony Shadid’s excellent report from Libya in the New York Times of February 9. Shadid (struck down by an asthma attack at the end of last week on the Syrian-Turkish border) described a dismembered country, rent by banditry, torture and summary executions.

Civil war in Syria would be of a brutality and level of bloodshed far beyond what is transpiring in Libya — as veterans of Lebanon’s civil war from 1975 to 1990, or of the sectarian bloodletting in Iraq in 2006-07, can attest.

There is no doubt that Assad’s police state is corrupt and brutal. There is every reason to press Assad towards reform. But it has become plain that negotiated reform is not on the rebel agenda. To the contrary, the bombs that killed 28 and wounded 235 in Aleppo, no doubt set by Sunni suicide bombers, probably operating through al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, were intended to elicit government repression, not to encourage negotiation.

The performance of the western press has been almost uniformly disgraceful. In the wake of the Aleppo atrocities, network journalists blandly quoted spokesmen for the Syrian rebels that the Syrian security forces had blown themselves up to discredit the rebels.

Aisling Byrne of Conflicts Forum recently described in considerable detail the propaganda machine that has provided a non-stop flow of mendacious bulletins eagerly seized upon by the western press.

As Byrne reported, “Of the three main sources for all data on numbers of protesters killed and numbers of people attending demonstrations — the pillars of the narrative — all are part of the ‘regime change’ alliance. The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, in particular, is reportedly funded through a Dubai-based fund with pooled (and therefore deniable) Western-Gulf money (Saudi Arabia alone has, according to Elliot Abrams allocated US$130 billion to ‘palliate the masses’ of the Arab Spring). What appears to be a nondescript British-based organization, the Observatory has been pivotal in sustaining the narrative of the mass killing of thousands of peaceful protesters using inflated figures, ‘facts’, and often exaggerated claims of ‘massacres’ and even recently ‘genocide’.”

But will the US really mount a covert supply effort to the Syrian rebels? US UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, may use the undiplomatic word “disgusting” to describe the Russian and Chinese vetoes, but perhaps these vetoes came as something of a relief, getting the US off the hook, in terms of action rather than rhetoric. An article in The Washington Post of 11 February was headlined: “As carnage builds, US sees ‘no good options’ on Syria.” In the story, the reporter wrote that the US government has “no appetite for a military intervention.”

Does Israel really crave Assad’s fall, a prolonged period of anarchy and the probable emergence of a Sunni regime eager to confront Israel? All in all, Syria under the Assad dynasty has been a relatively good neighbor. Turkey has its own Kurdish problems which Syria could exacerbate if it wanted to. The foreign minister of Saudi Arabia was careful to tell the New York Times that “international intervention had to be ruled out.”

Assad has been written off many times in recent months. Israel’s Ehud Barak said a while ago he would be gone in weeks. In December the US State Department described Assad as “a dead man walking.” But Syria is not Libya. Assad commands an army that has remained loyal. Large numbers of Syrians gaze into the abyss and decide that, all things considered, they don’t want to follow the fate of Lebanon, Iraq or of Libya. The obits for Assad’s regime have been premature. He could be with us for a while yet and it seems that behind the thunderous rhetoric the US government may be accommodating to that fact. On the other hand, Peter Lee in his excellent, very well informed report on our CounterPunch.org website last weekend, remarks, “My take on the situation is that the United States is willing to let the GCC chew up Syria as a consolation prize for not going all out on regime change against Iran.”

Tumbril Time!

A tumbril (n.) a dung cart used for carrying manure, now associated with the transport of prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

“The Other” made its long awaited appearance before the Revolutionary Tribunal presided over by Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville. Popular feeling ran high on the grounds that “the other” was actually a German spy, “Fichte,” intent on undermining the Revolution by preaching divisiveness. “L’Autre à la lanterne!” was the vociferous popular chorus.

“The Other” made a poor impression in the hearing, standing in a posture of less than manly albeit slightly insolent submission and speaking mysteriously about “inter-subjectivity” but — perhaps fatally — also alluding to the “master-slave” relationship in a manner that displayed insufficient passion in denouncing the abominable practice of slavery, ended in all French colonies the previous February, 1794.

“The Other” mustered a large number of character witness, ranging from the philosopher Hegel, to the psychoanalyst Lacan to writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, to Reason editor Jesse Walker (who defended “the other” as having “an eldritch quality I like — academic jargon that feels Lovecraftian”) to the literary critic Edward Said who spoke of the stigmatization of “the Other” in terms of what he termed — to Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville’s visible bewilderment — “Orientalism” and “western domination of the colonial subject.” Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville responded sharply that though the term “Orientalism” was unknown to him, he had long noted “the Other” as a subversive element in institutions of higher learning, sabotaging clear thought with “modish catchphrases long since drained of useful content.” Fouquier-Tinville pointed sternly to recent successful prosecutions of “narrative” and “post-colonial.”

The hearing was suspended to permit speedy trial of “nuanced,” unanimously condemned to the guillotine by the jury.

Now this, from CounterPuncher JoAnn Wypijewski: “sexual abuse is a term that ought to be summarily dispatched to the tumbrils, as it has lost any shred of meaning, which is the whole point in this extended night of moral panic. There is no need whatsoever for this term, except to obfuscate. There are plain terms, readily understood, with common meanings (or more common): rape, forced fellatio — strange, you never hear of forced cunnilingus — [Oh yes you do, see Jeffrey St Clair’s recent essay on Willie Dixon, AC] , exhibitionism, leering, groping, finger-fucking, pawing, dirty talk, kidnapping, exploitation in x, y and z ways (yes, that would require more words — how burdensome is precision), unwanted touching, unwanted hugging…

“The list is long because people may experience, or claim to experience, different things as abuse. But abuse is potent in law, and is therefore a handmaid of prosecution. In the various sex panic stories over the past 20 years ‘sexual abuse’ has meant everything from fantasized Satanic black masses to actual rape to nudity in the YMCA showers. (That last is not a flourish; the Catholic Church caved, paying out tens of thousands of dollars to people who said they saw Father Geoghan walk around naked in the YMCA shower room, nothing else. He, as you recall, was murdered in prison to the cheers of the liberal faithful after he was convicted for touching a kid’s ass while pulling him out of a pool.) Let’s call things by their names. And let’s restore ‘fondling,’ a word that has been yanked into the sexual abuse bag, to its proper place in the realm of sexual play. ‘Molestation’ is a fine word no one would confuse with ‘fondling.’ Without the catch-all ‘abuse,’ people might be able to claw their way back to sanity by distinguishing what is harmless or unruly or actually criminal.

“And while we’re at it, let’s throw sex offender into the tumbril. As it is, a sex offender might be: a rapist; a child who draws a stick figure with breasts and penis, a child who plays doctor with another or kisses another or slaps the ass of another or asks the teacher for a hug; a teacher who gives a hug; a voyeur; a collector of porn; a kidnapper and torturer; an exhibitionist; a person caught urinating in public; a high school senior who has sex with a high school freshman; anyone who transmits sexual pictures to another person; anyone who transmits pictures that some policeman decides are sexual to another person; anyone caught having sex in the bushes, etc.

“Like terrorist, ‘sex offender’ is most useful in defining a group of people out of the realm of rights, making them a new category of human being, against whom any atrocity of the state is considered acceptable.

“Exception: ‘self-abuse.’ In its blur of rigor and humor it’s far more evocative of the act it describes than masturbation, onanism, self-pleasuring, jacking off, etc.”

Thank you JoAnn. Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville is giving the case his urgent attention.

Steve Leonard writes: “They seem to be tighter than a congenital syndactylism: the vast majorities. I wonder if there are majorities vaster than vast, or what the vastest of the vast majorities might look like? What about majorities less than vast? Are they sub-vast or semi-vast or half-vast? Surely the vast majority of your readers will approve the tumbril ride for vast majority.”

This just in from Philip Bittenbender” “Alex, Speaking of time plans: Looking forward, it is now time to backtrack, reverse course, touch base, get on the same page, let bygones be bygones and then, regroup and move forward with best practices. (!) Phil B.”

Into the tumbrils with them. And while we’re at it, let’s toss in the last analysis, end of the day, both doomed to the same implacable blade that dispatched the bottom line a few weeks ago.

The New York Times continues to be disfigured by the “well” plague. Here is Jesse McKinley in his piece “Whatever Happened to First Class?”: “This was the high life, I figured, a conviction that only intensified when the flight attendant approached with a silver tray and addressed me — unprompted — as ‘Mr. McKinley.’ Then he handed me, well, a towel. Or sort of.”

Why did he hand him well-a-towell? Would not a simple towel have sufficed?

McKinley’s piece, quite amusing on the topic of the low ebb to which first class seating on planes has now fallen, contained this marvelous bit of corporate-speak: “And those are just the perks on the plane. According to Fern Fernandez, managing director for marketing and customer loyalty of US Airways, for some customers they pale in comparison with the biggest prize of all: less time waiting to get on. ‘Domestically, it’s that ability to have an expedited experience in the boarding process,’ he said. ‘And having a little extra space.’

The same NYT edition also featured Mark Bittman on Indian restaurants in London: “But those that offer the real deal are amazing, and frankly have more guts than those that cater to, well, a white-tablecloth clientele.”

Bringing up the rear was repeat offender Paul Krugman: “Finally, there’s Mr. Romney, who will probably get the nomination despite his evident failure to make an emotional connection with, well, anyone.”

Let’s close out with persuasive denunciations from Pepe Escobar of Asia Times:

“Dear Alex, I suggest the weaponized tumbrilization of “international community” to the sound of David Bowie’s Scary Monsters, Super Creeps. This is NOT a community, and — as a NATO/GCC compound — it couldn’t be more provincial. And while we’re at it, why not tumbrilize ‘staunch ally’ as well?”

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

This statement of defeat and imminent flight comes in an election year. Panetta’s speech was the first time any senior American official has publicly put the Afghan government and the Taliban, not to mention We the Peo­ple and Gov. Romney, on notice that Uncle Sam will be packing his bags well ahead of the all-troops-out dead­line of the end of 2014.

Big story? Initially, not everyone seemed to think so. The New York Times ran a dispatch on Feb 2 from Elisa­beth Bumiller in Brussels, but not in the top headline deck of its electronic edition. A bigger NYT headline the same day went to a story by Rod Nordland and Alissa Rubin, datelined Kabul, reporting that Taliban prisoners were tell­ing their US interrogators that they — the Tali­ban — were winning the war.

Finally Romney tottered from Donald Trump’s embrace to grasp at the issue of the Obama administra­tion providing further proof that the president is a traitor to the flag. “There are now hints from the White House that Panetta spoke out of turn. Before nailing himself to the colors, Romney should remember that his father lost a strong chance of winning the Republican nomination in 1968 after saying that he’d been “brainwashed” by the Pentagon during a visit to Vietnam.

Footnote: “Civilian deaths due to drones are not many, Obama says.” So that’s okay then. This was a headline in the New York Times for January 31, accu­rately reflecting Obama’s expressed views. It was back in the mid-1920s that my father Claud, then working as a night editor at the London Times, won a prize for writing the dullest headline actually printed in the Times for the following day. Headline: “Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.”

Tumbril Time!

A tumbril (n.) a dung cart used for carrying manure, now associated with the transport of prisoners to the guillo­tineiduring the French Revolution.

Quitting time in Afghanistan brings us back to “in harm’s way” — a phrase usually occurring in the same paragraph as “blood and treasure” which went to the guillo­tine last week amid particularly delighted cackles from the tricoteuses knitting in the Place de la Révolu­tion.

Among those pressing Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville to haul “in harm’s way” into the dock was my brother Patrick, who was also trying to shove “go-to person” into the tumbrils. I use this phrase from time to time and felt a twinge. Fortunately, Patrick changed his mind, writing to me, “I have rather changed my mind on ‘Go-to per­son.’ ‘Sejanus, becoming known as the go-to person in the court of Tiberius’ — Easy to mock, but is there a word or phrase convey­ing same idea? I am not sure there is and uncertain Fou­quier-Tinville would have been wholly satisfied that it was a case for the tumbril.”

Denny Chericone advises that “For a good time if you haven’t seen it before — In Harm’s Way with The Duke, The Kirk, Henry Fonda, Patricia Neal, Franchot Tone, Franchot Tone!? All brought together by Otto Preminger. Worth a view because I’ve never seen a WWII movie shot in a bathtub before. Then you’ll really be looking for that tumbril.”

There can be no debate about “if you will,” a particu­lar favorite of the CNN crowd, and recommended to me for the fatal blade by Leslie Cockburn. The phrase serves the function of a pre-emptive apology every time the reporter or commentator makes something approaching a substan­tive statement. The late Christopher Hitchens used it a lot, archly. Off it goes to the tumbrils.

I’ve learned once more that it is always dangerous — if you will — to make any statement regarding sports history. Last week I cited CounterPuncher Jeremy Pikser on the source for “it’s not over till the fat lady sings.” Pikser wrote to say the phrase “was actually first popular­ized by the coach (or owner?) of the Baltimore Bullets basketball team in 1978.” James Blum promptly wrote that “your source on the Fat Lady was wrong in a detail, the NBA champion Bullets of Wes Unseld and Elvin Hayes were in Washington in 1978.” (Blum, thirsty for blood, added, “May I nominate for the tumbrils the pomo-prog ‘excavate’ and ‘unpack’?”

And then:

From: Richard Stack <rstack1@cogeco.ca>

Date: January 29, 2012 2:56:25 AM PST

Alex, Just a note on the actual origin of ‘It’s not over till the fat lady sings’. It is a line in an old 1930/40 movie with Wallace Beery and Jackie Coogan. The two of them are improbably at an opera. The kid says “When can we leave?” Beery says “ Not till it’s over” The kid says “When will be over?” Beery says “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” Regards R Stack.

It’s time too for clôture on “closure,” beloved of Ameri­can families mustered in front of prisons on execu­tion day. It’s an odious word, fragrant with fake feeling, with the cold breath of an undertaker lowering the coffin lid. Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville is mustering the neces­sary docu­mentation and witnesses with his usual scrupu­lous attention to the rights of the accused.

From: Sandra Marr <marrsandra@gmail.com>

Date: January 28, 2012 2:52:06 PM PST

To: alexandercockburn@asis.com

Subject: For the tumbril

Hello Alex, Greetings from Guilford! Am I too late to propose ‘defending our freedom’; which seems to be the only way most media can talk about the activities of brutal US troops conducting appalling aggressions around the world? All the best, Sandra.

Finally, from this just in from Okinawa:

From: Douglas Lummis <ideaspeddler@gmail.com>

Alex, The bottom line is, to the tumbril with ‘the bot­tom line.’ I think it was about 15 or 20 years ago, sud­denly everybody was talking about ‘the bottom line.’ I asked around, The bottom line to what? Nobody seemed to know. On the bottom line of a letter is the signature. On the bottom line of an invoice is how much you owe. In fishing, I suppose a bottom line will be good for catch­ing bottom fish. In the language of seduction, pre­sumably the bottom line will be something obscene. In comedy, it would be the punch line. But in politics there is no bottom line, because there’s always the next page. — Doug Lummis

The Port Huron Statement — 50 Years On 

Fifty years ago a group of students in the American midwest issued a document rather portentously titled “The Port Huron Statement.” It was the founding mani­festo of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and became one of the most famous documents of that momentous and crea­tive decade.

Read any history of the upsurges in the United States in the 1960s written over the past three decades and you’ll at once encounter tributes to SDS as on the cutting edge of radical organizing — in the battles against racial discrimination, particularly in the South; in the protests against the Vietnam War; and more largely in the aim of young people in the 1960s to break the shackles of the cold-war consensus that had paralysed independent thought and spread fear of McCarthyite purges through the whole of what remained of the organized left in America, in the labor movement, the churches and in the universities.

SDS was founded in 1960 and in the summer of 1962 held its first convention just outside the Michigan town of Port Huron, on the US-Canadian border an hour’s drive north of Detroit. Presented to this gathering was a manifesto initially drafted by a former student at the University of Michigan — Tom Hayden — and revised by committee and finally delivered to the world as the Port Huron statement.

“We are people of this generation,” it began, “bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, look­ing uncomfortably to the world we inherit. When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. …As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too trou­bling to dismiss…”

I’m going to leave you hanging there, because the remainder of this essay on the Port Huron statement is to be found in our latest newsletter, being released to subscribers over this weekend.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

Await a presidential State of the Union address with keen anticipation? It’s like saying one looks forward to taking a niece to the Nutcracker. The last time I truly enjoyed one — the speech, not the ballet — was Bill Clinton’s in 1998, and it wasn’t because of anything he said. It was his terrific aplomb, despite the fact that the Lewinsky scandal was breaking over his head. He was rewarded with a bounce of ten points, from 59 to 69 per cent popular approval. The message was clear. We, the people, couldn’t care less about Monica. In fact, we the people thoroughly approve. The following year, the US Senate was trying him for impeachment, after months of steady servings in the press of Monica’s semen-stained dress, and here was Bill as bouncy as ever, rock solid at 69 per cent.

Normally, the American people don’t set much stock by State of the Union addresses. Half the times Ronald Reagan — the Great Communicator — gave the annual State of the Union address across his two terms in office, he promptly sank in the polls by 3 or 4 points. People turned on the tv set, gasped and said, “He’s the presi­dent?”

By all rights, Obama should be a natural at the job. The desired mix is inspirational — his forte — and notion­ally programmatic, though the history books are knee deep in empty pledges made on such occasions. But somehow the methodical rhythms of Obama’s high-minded eloquence has a narcotic effect on me.

Last year Obama said the American people did “big things,” omitting to qualify this with the fact that mostly they’re big stupid things. This year the menu seemed to be a potpourri of things big and small, of the sort Clinton could gabble about by the hour: retraining schemes, pub­lic/corporate partnerships.

Then suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a ringing pledge to prosecute those responsible for the mortgage crisis. Next day, Glenn Ford gave a useful summary in Black Agenda Report.

“President Obama had hoped to put on a big show — a huge con, really — at his State of the Union address, by announcing a monetary ‘settlement’ of massive banker criminality in housing foreclosures. Obama’s operatives have doggedly pressed for a settlement that would effectively give banks immunity from prosecu­tion. But he was thwarted by a small group of state attor­neys general who wanted a real investigation into the crime of the century. So the president was finally forced to set up a federal unit of his own. Since Obama’s own law enforcers have failed to send a single banker to jail, Wall Street immunity is likely to remain the real State of the Union.”

Obama’s announcement was no doubt also a defen­sive reaction to a recent Reuters expose which suggested that the failure of the Department of Justice to launch any foreclosure fraud prosecutions during Obama’s first term might have something to do with the fact that US Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, were partners for years at a huge Washington law firm, Covington and Burling, that represented big banks at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud.

Then Obama herded us back into “green energy,” though not the vast program for “green jobs” pledged last year; then an abrupt switch to the bad business of teenagers dropping out of high school, a swipe at the oil companies and then, finally, a paean to the core national achievement of 2011 — the killing of bin Laden, which the President rather tastelessly used as his finale on the theme of American unity. It’s no surprise that Presidents laud the American fighting man in such addresses, but Obama really does go over the top.

The whole 65-minute speech will be forgotten in a week. It would have been far better if Obama had simply read out selected portions of Mitt Romney’s tax returns, perhaps with an aside on one number that jumped from the page. Though they have three large homes in Massa­chusetts, Boston and California the Romneys took a deduction of just above $20,000 in 2010 for domestic help. So who keeps those mansions up and running? Mor­mon volunteers?

Watching Obama proposing economic programs that will never come to pass, one’s prime thought was, It’s all far, far too late, by three years. Obama’s one opening for doing anything substantial about the crashed economy and the banks was the honeymoon period, which last about 48 seconds after taking office.

Thursday’s Jacksonville debate was fun. There have been 19 such debates so far, and this was maybe my fourth, so the engagement had the freshness of relative novelty. By its end, Romney was glowing with the know­ledge that at last he’d put in a robust performance and given Newt Gingrich three sound wallops in the solar plexus. The commentators kept referring to Rom­ney’s “new debate coach,” who turns out to be the per­son who honed Michele Bachmann’s modest skills in this department.

There was a turning point which possibly assured Romney’s victory in Florida next Tuesday, maybe the nomination itself, perhaps the White House, conceivably even, as his ultimate reward in the Mormon hereafter, a really nice big planet with lots of beautiful wives await­ing his beck and call. The turning point came early on.

BLITZER (to Gingrich): “Earlier this week, you said Governor Romney, after he released his taxes, you said that you were satisfied with the level of transparency of his personal finances when it comes to this. And I just want to reiterate and ask you, are you satisfied right now with the level of transparency as far as his personal finances?”

Gingrich saw an opening for the sort of grandstand­ing against CNN’s John King in the South Carolina debate that won him the evening there.

GINGRICH: “Wolf, you and I have a great relation­ship, it goes back a long way. I’m with him. This is a non­sense question.

(APPLAUSE)

… Look, how about if the four of us agree for the rest of the evening, we’ll actu­ally talk about issues that relate to governing Amer­ica?”

Blitzer could have taken it on the chin, as King did — but it looks as though he had already decided to take a stand.

BLITZER: “But, Mr. Speaker, you made an issue of this, this week, when you said that, ‘He lives in a world of Swiss bank and Cayman Island bank accounts.’ I didn’t say that. You did.”

GINGRICH: “I did. And I’m perfectly happy to say that on an interview on some TV show. But this is a national debate, where you have a chance to get the four of us to talk about a whole range of issues.”

BLITZER: “But if you make a serious accusation against Governor Romney like that, you need to explain that.”

At this point Romney jumped in:

ROMNEY: “Wouldn’t it be nice if people didn’t make accusations somewhere else that they weren’t willing to defend here?”

He had the better of the subsequent to-and-fro. Then he came out ahead on points in a lengthy spat about immi­gration, beginning with the stern admonition to Gingrich that “The idea that I’m anti-immigrant is repul­sive. Don’t use a term like that.” I wouldn’t have expected “repulsive” to be part of Romney’s verbal arse­nal. It had shock value, like a pistol shot. Then he whacked Newt in a go-round on personal investments in Fanny Mae. By the end of it Romney was swelling up like Popeye after a mouthful of spinach and Gingrich stayed decidedly subdued for the rest of the night.

Ron Paul played the role of avuncular, anti-imperial libertarian very well, even though the everybody’s-uncle image was dented a few hours later by the declaration in the Washington Post of a former secretary that Paul had closely supervised the editorial production of those racist newsletters of yesteryear. On Thursday night he certainly did well against Rick Santorum’s ringing call for counter-revolutionary war across Latin America.

Thursday night, assuming it’s cashed with a Romney victory in Florida next Tuesday, must have come as a huge relief to the Republican establishment which had become so desperate after Gingrich’s victory in South Carolina and initial surge in Florida that it was contem­plating a draft of Mitch Daniels at the convention next summer. But they’d have to revive Daniels first. In his response to Obama in Tuesday on behalf of the Republi­cans he gave every appearance of having been dead for at least a week.

It didn’t take long for Bill Clinton to figure out how to deal with Gingrich after the latter became Speaker of the House in ’95. Clinton would constantly invite Gingrich over to the White House, saying that he craved the Speaker’s depth and vision. So Newt would hasten over and blather on about moon colonies and the future. Then he’d return to the Hill where his colleagues in the Republican leadership would discover that in the midst of the palavering about space Bill had outwitted him in some crucial negotiation about highway funding. In the end they insisted that in any trip to the White House Gingrich had to take along Dick Armey as chaperone.

Gingrich’s affair with the woman who later became his third wife, Callista Bisek, became public in 1998. But it was certainly no secret in the House Agriculture Com­mittee where Callista worked from 1995. According to one witness her phone rang frequently. If she was away from her desk one of her colleagues would pick it up, and call across the room, “The speaker.”

Joke: Q. How did Newt get Sheldon Adelson to give him $18 million?

A. He promised his next wife would be Jewish.

Tumbril Time!

A tumbril (n.) a dung cart used for carrying manure, now associated with the transport of prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Last week revolutionary Prosecutor Fouqier-Tinville announced the capture and imminent trial of “grow,” long sought in its counter-revolutionary mutation as a tran­sitive verb governing an abstraction, as in “grow the economy,” a formulation popular among the Girondin fac­tion. “Grow,” said the Prosecutor, was being held in the Conciergerie, under constant surveillance.

I’ve no doubt that the Tribunal will not long delay in sending “grow” in this usage to a well-deserved rendez­vous with the fatal blade. I associate the usage with the 1992 Clinton campaign, where talk about “growing the economy” was at gale force. My friends and neighbors here in Petrolia, Karen and Joe Paff, tell me that when they were starting up their coffee business, Goldrush, at the start of the 1980s, the local bank officials were already hard at it, talking about “growing the business.” I hate the usage, with its smarmy implication of virtuous horticultural effort. As CounterPuncher Michael Green­berg writes, “It sounds phony, aggressive, and even grammatically incorrect, not the nurturing ‘grow’ that one associates with living things.

Joining “grow” in the tumbril will, I trust, be “blood and treasure,” used with great solemnity by opinion form­ers to describe the cost, often the supposedly worthy sacrifice, attached to America’s wars. The usage appar­ently goes back to Jefferson, but that’s no excuse. The catch-phrase seeks to turn slaughter and the shoveling of money to arms manufacturers into a noble, almost mythic expenditure.

Shackled to “blood and treasure” should be its co-con­spirator, “in harm’s way.” Jack Flannigan writes from Kerala, “Mr. Cockburn, Somebody might have beat me to it but my candidate for the squeaky old tumbril is ‘in harm’s way.’ It has, especially in the last ten years, acquired a treacly red, white and blue patina about it that is overwhelmingly connected to the military and police.

“Someone sailing on a Gaza flotilla or staring down a line of sneering, rabid cops is not very likely to be referred by our political/media elites as ‘in harm’s way’.”

Last week, dispatching the phrase to the tumbrils, I said the G. H.W Bush campaign of 1979 for the Republi­can nomination hefted “It’s not over till the fat lady sings” to national prominence. Jeremy Pikser writes to say the phrase “was actually first popularized by the coach (or owner?) of the Baltimore Bullets basketball team in 1978. As usual G. H.W. Bush was only capable of feeble imitation when he used it, hoping to sound like a ‘real guy’.”] Further research discloses its use in sports journalism has been attributed to writer/broadcaster Dan Cook around the same time, and in the mid-70s by a Texas Tech sports official.

Back to “narrative,” en-tumbrilled recently. Here’s a good example of its baneful penetration into the lan­guage, in a Reuter’s news story: “Rubio initially cast him­self as the US-born son of Cuban immigrants who fled Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959. That narrative ran aground when records surfaced showing that his parents actually had left Cuba years earlier.”

Rubio is caught telling a big lie, and it gets demurely tricked out as a “narrative.”

I also passed sentence on the hiccupping “well” con­struction. Here it is in the first paragraph of Paul Krug­man’s column for January 27. “Mitch Daniels, the for­mer Bush budget director who is now Indiana’s gover­nor, made the Republicans’ reply to President Obama’s State of the Union address. His performance was, well, boring.”

What’s coy little “well” doing in that sentence?

From: kathy@polarfocus.com

“Dear Alex, My nomination for tumbril baggage is ‘It is what it is.’ Way overused, and vacuous in any case. Thanks, Kathy.”

From: “Kevin Rath” <kevinr@lmi.net

“Mr. Cockburn, Recently I have been accosted with the phrase “reaching out to you” by sales people. While it may be inappropriate since your focus is the news, this stupid phrase people from marketing use in their email subject titles and language is really annoying. “Reaching out to your Tumbril cart, Kevin Rath, A CP member.”

Thank you, Kevin.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

One has to feel for Romney, thrashing about amidst the Newt horror. Here comes the portly Georgian, brush­ing aside the Mormon priests guarding Mitt’s hotel suite, kicking open the bedroom door, seizing Romney by the throat… Aaaargh! And then Romney is awake, realizing that this is a cold-sweat nightmare that will last … maybe until they close in Florida on January 31, maybe until Super Tuesday on March 6, when nine states hold their primaries, maybe….

We left Romney amidst the supposed flush of victory in Iowa (now awarded to Santorum), and triumph in New Hampshire, with polls in South Carolina showing him a solid ten points ahead of Gingrich, who made a poor showing in New Hampshire on top of a fourth place in Iowa below Santorum and Ron Paul.

Gingrich burned for revenge for his rough treatment in New Hampshire by Romney’s campaign commercials. But how, on a tight timeline, to acquaint South Carolina Republicans with Romney’s infamies?

He needed money, lots of it, double-quick.

Occupy Las Vegas!

Some things don’t change in American politics, and rich people sitting in Las Vegas with pots of cash is one of them. Joel McCleary, a friend, remembers fund-rais­ing in Las Vegas when he was working for the Jimmy Carter campaign in 1976. The crucial Pennsylvania pri­mary was coming up and the Carter people (their chief fundraiser was Morris Dees) needed a big wad of cash for the final push against Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, known as “the senator from Boeing,” also running for the Democratic nomination and favored by powerful labor chieftains in Pennsylvania.

Joel was told the go-to guy for untraceable campaign cash was Hank Greenspun, editor of the Las Vegas Sun. Greenspun was a notoriously tough egg, former gun-run­ner for the Haganah, the man who, in the midst of the Cold War witch hunts, outed Senator Joe McCarthy in the Sun as a homosexual. Joel was told to act manly. Greenspun duly received him in his office. “Why the hell should I get money for Jimmy Carter?” he asked.

“Because Jimmy Carter is going to be president,” Joel answered boldly, “and if you don’t support his cam­paign he’ll fuck you.”

Greenspun told Joel to come back in two hours. He returned to find Greenspan sitting at a table surrounded by other toughs. In the middle of the table was a paper bag. “So the Baptist fuck wants money,” Greenspun growled, as he pushed the bag over to Joel. “Remember, this comes from the state of Israel. Don’t you ever forget it.”

Greenspun was no doubt also sluicing money to Jack­son, a particularly slavish errand boy for Israel. With Carter he was hedging his bets. Wisely, as it turned out. They called the odds right in Las Vegas. Carter won the Pennslyvania primary, beating Jackson 36 per cent to 27 per cent. Jackson pretty much gave up after that, saying frankly, “We’re out of money.” At least Greenspun, who died in 1989, didn’t live to know that he invested $100,000 in a man later to denounce Israel as an apart­heid state.

Las Vegas paper bags notwithstanding, in former times there were certain pettifogging constraints on how much a billionaire could lavish on his favored candidate. But then came the “Citizens United” decision by the US Supreme Court (split 5-4) , issued in January, 2010, rul­ing that the First Amendment, protecting free speech, prohibits the government from placing limits on inde­pendent spending for political purposes by corporations and unions. As Ralph Nader correctly pointed out at the time, “With this decision, corporations can now directly pour vast amounts of corporate money, through inde­pendent expenditures, into the electoral swamp already flooded with corporate campaign PAC contribution dol­lars.”

Enter 78-year old Sheldon Adelson, the world’s 16th richest man, a bit dented by the property crash in Nevada but still with $23 billion at his disposal. The sun rises on his empire in Las Vegas, sets on it in the east in Macao, with its zenith over the state of Israel, whence his second wife hails. On Israel Adelson entertains very harsh views about the advisability of negotiations of any sort with Palestinians and lately has been lobbying fiercely — he owns the free weekday Israel Hayom, the largest circu­lation newspaper in Israel — for an attack on Iran.

When Newt Gingrich, fishing for Zionist money, abandoned his previous, relatively temperate posture on the Israel/Palestine issue, and declared that Palestinians were an “invented people,” he was directing his remarks to an audience of one.

Adelson was exceedingly pleased and expressed his gratification in material terms, with a further $5 million, now staking Gingrich’s campaign ads in South Carolina. To date Adelson has donated about $13 million to Gingrich’s campaign — a US record. The ads put out by the Gingrich forces derive in origin from Senator Ted Kennedy’s successful effort to defend his US senate from Romney’s challenge back in 1994. The Kennedy campaign put together ferocious spots depicting Rom­ney, erstwhile boss of the private equity firm Bain Capi­tal, as one of the most vicious operators in the history of American capitalism, never happier than when taking over factories, destroying jobs, kicking workers into the snow, and sneering at the tears of their distraught wives and children.

Chunks of just such a film have been broadcast this week across South Carolina, airtime bought by a Politi­cal Action Committee backing the Gingrich campaign. They are brilliantly done, so effective that the New York Times — evidently worried for the overall reputation of capitalism — ran a very comical piece a few days ago critiquing the commercials as going altogether too far and being marred by error. Gingrich announced piously that “I’m calling on them to either edit out every single mistake or to pull the entire film. They cannot run the film if it has errors in it.” But the nominally independent Political Action Committee refused, demanding a clarifi­catory interview with Romney.

South Carolina has been faring badly in the current national slump. Tough talk about job-killers, particularly Mormon millionaire job-killers, commands a sympa­thetic audience. By Tuesday the press was hailing Gingrich’s Monday debate performance as worthy of Edmund Burke, which indeed it was, since in its rancid racism towards black people it rivaled Burke’s slurs on the French revolutionaries.

It became clear by midweek the ads were taking their toll on Romney. By Wednesday the polls were showing the Mormon millionaire with 30 per cent support and Gingrich surging, with 27 per cent of the vote. By Fri­day, Gingrich was running ahead 32-30 in some polls, after his carefully rehearsed “Have you no shame, Sir” reproof to CNN’s John King following the latter’s opening question about the “open relationship” Gingrich’s second wife Marilyn says he proposed after disclosing his affair with Callista. Marilyn’s disclosure probably won Gingrich an extra slice of the state’s male vote, on ground that this is the sort of thing men blurt out when driven into a corner in a “her or me” confrontation with the Missus.

On Tuesday Romney finally lifted a corner of the pre­viously tightly sealed file containing his tax returns. The partial disclosure won’t help him nor his evasive­ness in the debate. He said his effective tax rate was “probably closer to the 15% rate than anything.” That 15% is on investment income — a huge perk for the very rich — as opposed to the higher rates on wages and salaries — up to 35% — paid by many Americans. He also deprecated his speaking fees last year of $374,327 as “not very much.” This man definitely lacks the com­mon touch. So much for my fears last week for the future of the election industry after what looked like an immi­nent Romney closeout.

Tumbril Time!

A tumbril (n.) a farm cart often used for carrying manure, also to carry prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Any headline modeled on “It’s the economy, stupid.” This tedious phrase derives from the Clinton campaign of 1992, and is still echoing on opinion pages 20 years on. To the tumbrils with it!

“Well…” , as in constructs like “His performance was.. well… frankly bad.” Equally awful is “…er,” as in “Is Angeline Jolie a great actor? Er… no.” The British are particularly keen on this piece of stylistic coyness.

“Staunch,” as so often used to describe right-wing­ers: “a staunch Republican,” “a staunch Conservative,” though not I think, “a staunch fascist.” I see left writers using this phrase freely about Republicans and Conser­vatives. Don’t they know that “staunch” carries the aroma of unstinting, courageous loyalty. It’s an honor­ific. How about “fanatic Republican”? “crazed Conser­vative”? No rightwinger would talk about “staunch lib­erals” — admittedly an oxymoron, just like “staunch Democrat.” Now, there really are staunch pacifists. Save the word for them.

Michael Donnelly offers “At the end of the day,” which, I need scarcely remind you, is the hour when the fat lady sings, after the rubber has met the road. The fat lady line was first popularized in George H.W. Bush’s run for the Republican nomination in 1980. When he finally threw in the towel, the press corps hired a fat Valkyrie with a horned helmet to rush up to him and sing at the top of her voice, waving a trident.

From Jean-Pierre Duboucheron: “Bad guys.” Spot on, Jean-Pierre.

From Sean Dunne in Ireland: “this ain’t my first rodeo” ; “just sayin’”; “Really.” True, one does see the terse “Really” all too often. Time for the final haircut.

“I would like to request that you consign one more word to the tumbrils. And that word is ‘stakeholder.’” Vukoni Lupa-Lasaga. Happy to oblige, Vukoni.

From Egidio Mondolfi: “Natalie Bauman and I sub­mit ‘folks’ for your consideration. If ever a word was long overdue for a ride in the farm cart…”

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

It was a big win for Romney who showed he could break 25%. He wiped out the opposition and took a big stride towards the nomination. All the same, as New Hampshire primaries go, it was a very dull affair, at least for those of us who remember such excitements as the trickle of Ed Muskie’s tears — or was it merely snow? — turning his 1972 front-runner campaign into a mighty river of defeat.

The much touted grudge debates last weekend between Romney and Gingrich were pallid. Sheldon Adel­son, a billionaire Las Vegas casino mogul and fanatic supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu, poneyed up $5 million for a Friends-of-Newt operation, which did pro­duce a brilliant campaign ad against Romney, the Job-Slayer. No traction for Gingrich came of it, though maybe further outpourings from Adelson and friends could pump life back into his campaign down south.

Romney’s big foot-in-mouth moment came when he remarked in a campaign trail speech that “I like firing peo­ple.” He was actually talking about the freedom to fire your health insurance company, a luxury supposedly enjoyed by Americans until Obama passed his health bill, but he’ll be whacked over the head with the line for a while.

Now Romney heads down south to a likely victory in South Carolina and probably in Florida. Such triumphs, should they come to pass, will plunge the election indus­try into profound crisis. At this stage in the game, pre­cisely one week after the presidential year opened with the Iowa caucuses on January 3, no one — except per­haps the candidate himself — wants to have the race locked up. The news business, led by the TV networks, wants cliffhangers. Campaign managers, dirty tricksters, and kindred consultants want volley after volley of cam­paign ads rolling dollars into their pockets. There are armies of “strategists” to be fed their campaign stipends.

At this stage in the game back in 1992, Bill Clinton was fighting for his life after his affair with Gennifer Flowers gradually seeped into public consciousness. In 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugged it out, round after round and well into the summer.

Will scandal breathe life into the campaign? Does the limber Romney have any dark personal secret still pant­ing in the closet? Could he emulate the shameful John Edwards and be faithless while his wife Ann endures MS, just as Edwards’s wife Elizabeth fought cancer even as John carried on his romance with Rielle Hunter? It seems very unlikely, and even if some affair from Rom­ney’s pre-marriage days doing his two-year stint as a Mormon missionary in Paris surfaces it probably wouldn’t do him any harm.

The same problem of being the locked-in nominee confronted John McCain in 2008. He won New Hamp­shire, South Carolina, Florida and then the super-Tues­day primaries, just as Romney is likely to do. Desperate to give his campaign a lift, McCain used the opportunity of the Republican convention to pluck Sarah Palin from her grizzly-skin rug in the governor’s mansion in Alaska. Last week, Tea Party queen Michele Bachmann, perhaps hoping for the Palin role, was notably restrained in her comments on Romney.

Ron Paul will fight on, and give the campaign season at least the semblance of life. In New Hampshire he won strong support from low-income Republicans and the young. It’s conceivable he could bolt onto the Libertar­ian third party ticket. It would certainly juice up the political year. High-level Republicans are reportedly threatening Paul that if he does bolt, they’ll make sure that his son Rand is not re-elected Senator in Kentucky in 2016.

Meanwhile Obama is running the sort of campaign incumbent presidents usually wage, seeking to display mastery on the international stage, preferably by waging war or threatening to do so. With this in mind, Obama has been steadily driving Iran into a corner with boycotts and sanctions. It seems likely that what Obama is maneuvering towards is for a desperate Tehran, its back to the wall with a collapsing currency, to make the first bellicose move.

It’s nothing new. President Roosevelt pushed a desper­ate Japan into war with his embargoes and eco­nomic sanctions. For the attack on Pearl Harbor, substi­tute the Iranians mining the straits of Hormuz.

War on Iran: It’s Not A Matter of “If”

The world’s press is choc-a-bloc with “if” questions about Iran and war. Will Israel attack? Is Obama, coerced by domestic politics in an election year, being dragged into war by the Israel lobby? Will he launch the bomb­ers? Is the strategy to force Iran into a corner, methodi­cally demolishing its economy by embargoes and sanc­tions so that in the end a desperate Iran strikes back?

As with sanctions and covert military onslaughts on Iraq in the run up to 2003, the first point to underline is that the US is waging war on Iran. But well aware of the US public’s aversion to yet another war in the Middle East, the onslaught is an undeclared one.

The analogy here is the run up to Pearl Harbor. Let me quote from a useful timeline. On October 7, 1940, a US Navy IQ analyst, Arthur McCollum, wrote an eight-point memo on how to force Japan into war with US. Beginning the next day FDR began to put them into effect and all eight were eventually accomplished.

On February 11, 1941 FDR proposed sacrificing six cruisers and two carriers at Manila to get into war. Navy Chief Stark objected: “I have previously opposed this and you have concurred as to its unwisdom.

In March 1941 FDR sold arms and convoyed them to belligerents in Europe — both acts of war and both viola­tions of international law — the Lend-Lease Act. On June 23, 1941 Advisor Harold Ickes wrote FDR a memo the day after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, “There might develop from the embargoing of oil to Japan such a situation as would make it not only possible but easy to get into this war in an effective way. FDR was pleased with Admiral Richmond Turner’s report read July 22: “It is generally believed that shutting off the American supply of petroleum will lead promptly to the invasion of Netherland East Indies…it seems certain she would also include military action against the Philip­pine Islands, which would immediately involve us in a Pacific war.”

The next day FDR froze all Japanese assets in US cut­ting off their main supply of oil. US. Intelligence information was withheld from Hawaii from this point forward. Against protests from US naval commanders the West Coast fleet was moved to Hawai’i.

John Maynard Keynes once said, “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.” Ronald Reagan used to attrib­ute this insight to the man he loved to call “Nikolai Lenin,” thundering from podium after podium across America, that Lenin had said, “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.”

You want a graphic illustration of what US embar­goes are doing in the way of debauching Iran’s currency?

Imagine if the Iranians had done this to the US dol­lar? Can you imagine any American politician who would have refrained from calling this an act of war?

To further inflame the leadership in Iran we had last week the murder of Iran nuclear scientist Ahmadi Roshan which came on the one-year anniversary of the murder of two other Iranian nuclear scientists by similar methods. As CounterPuncher Peter Lee writes, “It came at a time of heightened tensions (anyway, tensions higher than the usual heightened tensions), inviting the infer­ence that somebody, probably somebody in the region, wants to goad the Iranian government into a response that could start the military action ball rolling.”

As for the embargoes of Iranian oil, Obama is most certainly doing the oil industry a big favor. There have been industry-wide fears of recession-fueled falling demand and collapse of oil prices. That has led to indus­try-wide enthusiasm (aided by heavy pressure from the majors) for strongly cutting total world oil production (and enjoying the bonuses flowing from the subsequent world price rise), with all the cuts to be taken out of the hide of the Iranians. The Financial Times made clear the need to shrink world production in the following key paragraph in a report last week: “Oil prices have risen above $110 a barrel since Iran threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important oil chokepoint, accounting for about a third of all seaborne traded oil. Oil fell to a low of $99 in October amid global economic growth worries.”

As Pierre Sprey remarked to me, “Note also that this is one of those rare but dangerous moments in history when Big Oil and the Israelis are pushing the White House in the same direction. The last such moment was quickly followed by Dubya’s invasion of Iraq.”

It’s somewhat immaterial to ask whether Obama really wants war with Iran, thus interfering with the “strategic pivot” to Asia. Presidents are creatures of cir­cumstances and lobbies, and Obama is certainly no exception. We have to hope that the traditional prudence of Iran’s leadership prompts them not to make some des­perate retaliatory lunge, such as mining the Straits of Hormuz, or offering some kindred excuse to the US to up the tempo of the undeclared war it is already waging.

To the Tumbrils! 

Some readers of my consignment last week of certain words to the tumbrils expressed curiosity about the word. A tumbril was a farm cart. They were used to carry pris­oners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

Some more candidates. Fred Gardner writes: “Add ‘Gamechanger’ to the mis- and over-used words of 2011. For years I’ve winced as lawyers and businessmen and reporters casually used ‘game’ in reference to the legal system, finance, war itself… You sometimes see a bumper sticker on a sports car that says ‘the one with the most toys wins.’ It makes me want to give them a little nudge with the old Volvo…”

Jon Swift: “Also the drug-treatment shibboleth: ‘The user’s always chasing that first high.’ As though they couldn’t possibly enjoy it the 875th time. You never hear ‘Religious worshippers are always chasing that first feeling of being at one with God,’ or ‘Voters are always chasing that first thrill they got on entering the booth at 18’….”

Wat Stearns: “I nominate ‘expensed’ and ‘leveraged’ for the tumbrils as well.”

Let me toss in the odious “project,” initially favored by the left but now in general currency, attached to almost every human endeavor. Also “conversation” — a way of taming all debate and doctrinal struggle into demure prattle. And let us note the meteoric rise of “existential.”

Tumbril time! And if you want a vivid sense of what it was like for French aristos condemned to death to hear the rattle of the tumbril as it arrived to take him to the guillotines, I advise a trip to the Conciergerie in Paris. Very creepy.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

Photo courtesy Gage Skidmore

A Catholic former US senator from Pennsylvania once rated the dumbest man in the US Congress crested Tuesday night in Iowa’s see-saw battle among candidates for the Republican nomination and ran a virtual tie with Mormon millionaire Mitt Romney. Well after chilly midnight on caucus night in the Midwestern state, Iowa’s Republican Party declared Romney the winner by 8 votes, a count that Santorum will inevitably question and perhaps contest. Each hovered just below 30,000 votes, with libertarian Republican Ron Paul of Texas run­ning third with a respectable 26,000-plus votes.

Only a couple of weeks ago Newt Gingrich seem poised for exactly the same unexpected surge that blessed Santorum across the last week. But battered by volleys of viciously negative campaign ads financed by big Republican money backing Romney, Gingrich ran fourth with just under 16,000 votes. Hobbling along in the rear came Texas governor Rick Perry, Tea Party star Michele Bachmann and – with 668 votes – Utah million­aire Jon Huntsman.

Exactly four years ago, Santorum’s surprise showing last night was prefigured by the upset victory of a Protes­tant evangelical, former Arkansas governor Mike Hucka­bee who won with 41,000 votes, Romney came second on that occasion with 30,000 votes, a little more than he managed last week, with a similar 25% of the vote. Third, with 15,000 votes came the man who actually won the Republican nomination, John McCain.

So, as far as Republicans are concerned, Iowa can be a poor predictor. On Tuesday January 10 the surviving candidates went head to head in New Hampshire. Rom­ney has spent months in the state and has one of his sev­eral dreary homes there. Santorum, who committed months of seemingly fruitless effort clasping the hands of countless Iowans, has little presence in New Hamp­shire and a tiny war chest of campaign cash. Romney’s big-money attack dogs who were too busy battering Gingrich in Iowa to notice Santorum’s late surge, will unleash a torrent of abuse via tv and radio.

New Hampshire is a must-win for Romney if he is to escape the charge that he simply can’t clinch any race. Two debates are scheduled and an embittered Newt Gingrich, no slouch in the campaign-debate setting, will be quivering to get his revenge.

Watching the Iowa results with some satisfaction are Obama’s campaign chieftains. To them, the Iowa contest showed that Iowa’s Republicans simply couldn’t figure out who to vote for. No one pleased them for long. Bach­mann, Perry, Cain and Gingrich each had their moment in the sun, then faded. A week ago Ron Paul seemed set to win. Had the Iowa vote been held a week from now, Santorum might too have been eclipsed and Huntsman limped to the front.

The Republican high command decided some time ago that Romney is their best chance of beating Obama. Though infinitely elastic in political doctrine he’s not a nut. It’s imaginable that the all-important independent voters in the general election in the fall could vote for him. He made his millions buying and selling compa­nies, very often firing workers in the process. He gov­erned Massachusetts without egregious failure, passing the precursor to Obama’s health insurance reform, which achievement has been a red rag to the conservatives, who regard him as (a) a crypto-liberal and (b) an agent of Satan, since he is a Mormon. No Mormon has ever been president and reservation about the Church of Latterday Saints extends beyond conservatives. For example, Mormon theology is not friendly to the children of Ham.

Troubling to this same Republican high command is Ron Paul who has won passionate adherents across the political spectrum. The right likes him for his libertarian economics, which prompt Paul to denounce the basic elements of the social safety net – Social Security and Medicare. He would abolish the Federal Reserve (a laudable objective). He’s a gold bug, and in his speech to his supporters last week he shouted a line which I’ll haz­ard has never before been uttered on an election night podium – “We’re all Austrians now” – thereby pro­claiming his allegiance to the economist Ludwig van Mises and parodying the line actually coined by Milton Friedman, though often attributed to Richard Nixon, “We’re all Keynesians now.”

A lot of leftists like Paul because he really is an ardent anti-imperialist – the only one in the race – vigor­ously denouncing America’s wars, its overseas bases and its alliance with Israel. He’s also an eloquent foe of the imperial presidency and of constitutional abuses such as the law signed by Obama on December 31, giving the military a role in domestic enforcement against terrorists and opening US citizens to military detention without benefit of counsel, without charges, and without trial.

Part of Paul’s vote in Iowa was undoubtedly leftists who, under Iowa’s rules, could cross over and vote in the Republican caucus. Republicans fear that if Paul gets sufficiently incensed at his treatment by their party, he might bolt and run on the Libertarian third party ticket, thereby draining votes from the Republican candidate next November. For their part the Obama forces simi­larly fear that Paul would steal vital left votes from those thoroughly disillusioned with the President. In the run-up to the Iowa vote The New York Times ran more than one aggressive onslaught on Paul for newsletters, racist in content, which ran under Paul’s name 20 years ago, and which he has since disavowed.

It’s hard to imagine Santorum getting long term trac­tion, particularly given his scrawny campaign finances. He is a very conservative Catholic, actually a member of Opus Dei. Perhaps the Vatican will organize a hasty funding drive through Catholic billionaires like Tom Monaghan, Opus Dei member and founder of Domino’s Pizzas (which was bought in the late 1990s by Mitt Romney’s old firm, Bain Capital).

Santorum says that as president he would bomb Iran tomorrow. Romney and Gingrich don’t lag far behind in their ravings against the Islamic Republic. Obama ratch­ets up sanctions against Iran while supposedly telling Netanyahu that the US will not endorse any attack by Israel on Iran. Only Ron Paul stands out against this deranged chorus. Given a chance, I’ll vote for Paul, even though he hasn’t a prayer of taking over the Oval Office. One has to draw the line somewhere, though I don’t feel in the least Austrian.

Into The Tumbrils With Them

First up: “sustainable.” It’s been at least a decade since this earnest word was drained of all energy, having become the prime unit of exchange in the argot of pur­poseful uplift. As the final indication of its degraded status, I found it in President Obama’s “signing state­ment” which accompanied the whisper of his pen, as on New Year’s Eve — a very quiet day when news editors were all asleep — he signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2012 which handed $662 billion to the Pentagon and for good meas­ure ratified by legal statute of the exposure of US citi­zens to arbitrary arrest without subsequent benefit of coun­sel, and to possible torture and imprisonment sine die, abolishing habeas corpus. Don’t bother asking what happens to non-US citizens.

As he set his name to this repugnant legislation the president issued a “signing statement” in which I came upon the following passage: “Over the last several years, my Administration has developed an effective, sustain­able framework for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected terrorists…”

So much for “sustainable.” Into the tumbrils with it.

Obama is against signing statements, at the theoreti­cal level. In 2008 he said, “I taught the Constitution for ten years, I believe in the Constitution, and I will obey the Constitution of the United States. We’re not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around Congress.” Whatever Obama may have taught, a signing statement, whether issued by Bush or Obama, doesn’t have the force of law. Obama’s December 31 signing statement was part of a diligent White House cam­paign to suggest that (a) there is nothing in the NDAA to perturb citizens, but (b) anything perturbing is entirely the fault of Congress, and (c) Obama solemnly swears that so long as he is president he’ll never OK any­thing bad, whatever the NDAA might be construed as authorizing, and anyway (d) there’s nothing new about the detention provisions because they merely reiterate those of the Authorization for Use of Military Force, signed by Bush in 2001.

Next up: “iconic.” I trip over this golly-gee epithet 30 times a day. No warrant for its arrest is necessary, nor benefit of counsel or trial in a US court. Off to the tum­brils, arm in arm with “narrative.” These days everyone has a narrative, an earnest word originally recruited, I believe, by anthropologists. So we read “according to the Pentagon’s narrative…” Why not use some more ener­getic formulation, like, “According to the patent non­sense minted by the Pentagon’s press office…”? Sud­denly we’re surrounded by “narratives,” all endowed with equal status. Into the tumbrils with it.

I think “parse” has almost run its course, though occa­sionally this shooting star of 2011 is spotted panting along in some peloton of waffle from the Com­mentariat. Off with its head, along with “meme,” an exhausted little word that deserves the long dark rest of oblivion.

Back to janitors and the flailing of Newt’s’s master­plan for youth. Doug Lummis writes from Okinawa:

“Alex,

You should know that the public schools in Japan do not hire janitors. The kids do it, boys and girls, all of them. Nobody gets paid for it, so it doesn’t have any­thing to do with rich or poor. It’s just something you do at school. They dust and sweep, and wipe down the floors with damp rags, and clean the toilets. I don’t know if it teaches a ‘work ethic,’ but it teaches them some valuable skills, and it also teaches them that that kind of work is not ‘beneath them,’ something only poor people do. I suppose some of the kids dislike doing it, but a lot of them seem to enjoy it, and take pride in their skill at wielding the broom, or bending over and laying your wet cloth on the floor, putting your weight on it and running to the end of the hall, leaving a clean damp streak behind. Of course this is utterly different from what Gingrich is proposing which, like the present US system of hiring adults to clean the children’s schools, is bound to teach that certain jobs are only for certain classes. The Japanese system doesn’t produce an egalitar­ian society, but it does have a good educational effect.

“You might mention that I consider myself qualified to talk about janitoring because when I was in the fifth and sixth grades I was the janitor for the one-room Don­ner Trail Elementary School at Norden, California. I was chosen not because we were the poorest family but because I was one of the few who didn’t have to take the school bus to get home. They gave me $20 a month, which in those days (1947-48) was very nice money for a kid to get.”

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at: alexandercockburn@asis.com

Photo courtesy Everett Taasevigen

From John Walsh’s letter to Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, on the program’s coverage of Ron Paul:

“I have a bone to pick about your coverage of Ron Paul and the five comments that appeared in his newslet­ter a generation ago.

“First, contrary to what you say, the rest of the MSM does publish the exact words of the statements — in fact they appear ad nauseam in semi-official publications like the NYT.

“Second, as you surely know, Paul has said he did not write those statements, did not read them or know of them at the time and DISAVOWS them. You did not mention that.

“Third Ron Paul is against the death penalty and man­datory minimum sentences in part because they are racist — and he has said so. You did not mention that.

“Fourth, the head of the NAACP in Austin who has known Ron Paul for 20 years says that the man can in no way be considered a racist. You did not mention that.

“Fifth, in an interview with Bill Moyers Ron Paul spe­cifically says that Libertarianism is incompatible with racism. You do not mention that. I think you have a duty to tell the whole truth on the matter because a half truth is a full lie — as the saying goes.

“Finally I might ask which is more racist — bombing people of color all around the world as Obama has done, for example in the war on Libya for which your constant guest CIA ‘consultant’ Juan Cole was a cheerleader — or five statements written by someone else a generation ago which have now been repudiated by Paul?

“Have you forgotten that your program is subtitled the War and Peace Report? My friends in NYC have taken to calling it Hypocrisy Now! I hope that soon it can reclaim its older tradition of principled and consis­tent anti-interventionism and report the full truth on anti­war candidates like Ron Paul, the only anti-imperialist and peace candidate in the race.

John V. Walsh, MD,

Professor of Microbiology and Physiological Systems, University of Massachusetts Medi­cal School.”

One question Paul should be asked is whether or not the doctor believes, as Lew Rockwell (the imputed author of the memos, though he denies it) and most other southern libertarians do, that plantation owners should have been compensated after the freeing of the slaves for their lost ‘property’?

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at: alexandercockburn@asis.com

At least the DPRK doesn’t trumpet its status as the last best sanctuary of liberty. American politicians, start­ing with the president, do little else.

A couple of months ago came a mile marker in Amer­ica’s steady slide downhill towards the status of a Banana Republic, with Obama’s assertion that he has the right as president to order secretly the assassination, with­out trial, of a US citizen he deems to be working with terrorists. This followed his betrayal in 2009 of his pledge to end the indefinite imprisonment without charges or trial of prisoners in Guantanamo.

Now, after months of declaring that he would veto such legislation, Obama has now crumbled and will soon sign a monstrosity called the Levin/McCain detention bill, named for its two senatorial sponsors, Carl Levin and John McCain. It’s snugged into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

The detention bill mandates — don’t glide too easily past that word — that all accused terrorists be indefi­nitely imprisoned by the military rather than in the civil­ian court system; this includes US citizens within the bor­ders of the United States. Obama supporters have made strenuous efforts to suggest that US citizens are excluded from the bill’s provisions. Not so. “It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help Al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next,” says Senator Lindsay Graham, a big backer of the bill. “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a law­yer.’” The bill’s co-sponsor, Democratic senator Carl Levin, says it was the White House itself that demanded that the infamous Section 1031 apply to American citi­zens.

Anyone familiar with this sort of “emergency” legisla­tion knows that those drafting the statutes like to cast as wide a net as possible. In this instance the deten­tion bill authorizes use of military force against anyone who “substantially supports” al-Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces.” Of course “associated forces” can mean anything. The bill’s language mentions “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly sup­ported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

This is exactly the sort of language that can be bent at will by any prosecutor. Protest too vigorously the assassination of US citizen Anwar al Awlaki by American forces in Yemen in October and one day it’s not fanciful to expect the thud of the military jackboot on your front step, or on that of any anti-war organizer, or any journalist whom some zealous military intelligence officer deems to be giving objective support to the forces of Evil and Dark­ness.

Since 1878 here in the US, the Posse Comitatus Act has limited the powers of local governments and law enforcement agencies from using federal military person­nel to enforce the laws of the land. The detention bill renders the Posse Comitatus Act a dead letter.

Governments, particularly those engaged in a Great War on Terror, like to make long lists of troublesome peo­ple to be sent to internment camps or dungeons in case of national emergency. Back in Reagan’s time, in the 1980s, Lt Col Oliver North, working out of the White House, was caught preparing just such a list. Reagan speedily distanced himself from North. Obama, the for­mer lecturer on the US Constitution, is brazenly signing this authorization for military internment camps.

There’s been quite a commotion over the detention bill. Civil liberties groups such as the ACLU have raised a stink. The New York Times has denounced it editori­ally as “a complete political cave-in.” Mindful that the votes of liberals can be useful, even vital in presidential elections, pro-Obama supporters of the bill claim that it doesn’t codify “indefinite detention.” But indeed it does. The bill explicitly authorizes “detention under the law of war until the end of hostilities.”

Will the bill hurt Obama? Probably not too much, if at all. Liberals are never very energetic in protecting con­stitutional rights. That’s more the province of libertari­ans and other wackos like Ron Paul actually pre­pared to draw lines in the sand in matters of principle.

Simultaneous to the looming shadow of indefinite internment by the military for naysayers, we have what appears to be immunity from prosecution for private mili­tary contractors retained by the US government, another extremely sinister development. Last Wednesday we ran an important article on CounterPunch.org on the matter from Laura Raymond of the Center for Constitu­tional Rights.

The US military has been outsourcing war at a stag­gering rate. Even as the US military quits Iraq, thousands of private military contractors remain. Suppose they are accused of torture and other abuses including murder?

The Centre for Constitutional Rights is currently repre­senting Iraqi civilians tortured in Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq, seeking to hold account­able two private contractors for their violations of interna­tional, federal and state law. In Raymond’s words, “By the military’s own internal investigations, private military contractors from the US-based corporations L-3 Services and CACI International were involved in the war crimes and acts of torture that took place, which included rape, being forced to watch family members and others be raped, severe beatings, being hung in stress positions, being pulled across the floor by genitals, mock executions, and other incidents, many of which were documented by photographs. The cases — Al Shimari v. CACI and Al-Quraishi v. Nakhla and L-3 — aim to secure a day in court for the plaintiffs, none of whom were ever charged with any crimes.”

But the corporations involved are now arguing in court that they should be exempt from any investigation into the allegations against them because, among other reasons, the US government’s interests in executing wars would be at stake if corporate contractors can be sued. And Raymond reports that “they are also invoking a new, sweeping defense. The new rule is termed ‘battle­field preemption’ and aims to eliminate any civil law­suits against contractors that take place on any ‘battle­field’.”

You’ve guessed it. As with “associated forces,” an elastic concept discussed above, in the Great War on Ter­ror the entire world is a “battlefield.” So unless the CCR’s suit prevails, a ruling of a Fourth Circuit federal court panel will stand and private military contractors could be immune from any type of civil liability, even for war crimes, as long as it takes place on a “battle­field.”

Suppose now we take the new powers of the military in domestic law enforcement, as defined in the detention act, and anticipate the inevitable, that the military dele­gates these powers to private military contractors. CACI International or a company owned by, say Goldman Sachs, could enjoy delegated powers to arrest any US citi­zen here within the borders of the USA, “who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly sup­ported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces,” tor­ture them to death and then claim “battlefield preemp­tion.”

Don’t laugh.

On this issue of the “privatization,” T.P.Wilkinson has a brilliant essay in our latest CounterPunch newslet­ter on “corporate nihilism and the roots of war.” Wilkin­son starts with a critique of the familiar argument that a return to the draft would bring America’s wars home to the citizenry and the prospect of their children being sent off to possible mutilation by IEDs or death would spark resistance. Wilkinson suggests that this underestimates the saturation of our society by militarism. He goes on:

“But does the new warfare even need the large battal­ions of expendable troops? Just as financial “engineer­ing” has replaced industrial production as a means of wealth extraction, remote-control weapons deployment and mercenary subcontracting have largely replaced the mass armies that characterized US and UK warfare in Korea and Vietnam. In this sense, warfare has become even more “corporate.” The fiction that wars of invasion and conquest are the result of state action is obsolete. The entire ‘national security’ process has been fully depoliticized; in other words, the state is more clearly than ever a mere conduit for policies and practices whose origin and essential characteristics are those of boardroom strategic planning and marketing. The differ­ence between global business and global warfare has, in fact, dissolved.

“This presents a serious cognitive problem for any­one trying to find the root of this poisonous plant in order to tear it from the ground that nurtures it. The mili­tary sustained by the draft was mimetic of the steel mill in Gary, Indiana, or the cotton plantation in the south? Today’s military operates like the headquarters of Micro­soft or USX — the actual physical violence has been out­sourced.”

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

***

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As so often with friends and former friends, it’s a matter of what you’re prepared to put up with and for how long. I met him in New York in the early 1980s and all the long-term political and indeed personal traits were visible enough. I never thought of him as at all radical. He craved to be an insider, a trait which achieved ripest expression when he elected to be sworn in as a US citi­zen by Bush’s director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. In basic philosophical take he always seemed to me to hold as his central premise a profound belief in the therapeutic properties of capitalism and empire. He was an instinctive flagwagger and remained so. He wrote some really awful stuff in the early 90s about how indige­nous peoples — Indians in the Americas — were inevitably going to be rolled over by the wheels of Pro­gress and should not be mourned.

On the plane of weekly columns in the late eighties and nineties it mostly seemed to be a matter of what was currently obsessing him: for years in the 1980s he wrote scores of columns for The Nation, charging that the Republicans had stolen the 1980s election by the “Octo­ber surprise,” denying Carter the advantage of a hostage release. He got rather boring. Then in the 90s he got a bee in his bonnet about Clinton which developed into full-blown obsessive megalomania: the dream that he, Hitchens, would be the one to seize the time and finish off Bill. Why did Bill — a zealous and fairly efficient executive of Empire — bother Hitchens so much? I’m not sure. He used to hint that Clinton had behaved abomi­nably to some woman he, Hitchens, knew. Actu­ally I think he’d got to that moment in life when he was asking himself if he could make a difference. He obvi­ously thought he could, and so he sloshed his way across his own personal Rubicon and tried to topple Clinton via betrayal of his close friendship with Sid Blumenthal, whom he did his best to ruin financially (lawyers’ fees) and get sent to prison for perjury.

Since then it was all pretty predictable, down to his role as flagwagger for Bush. I guess the lowest of a num­ber of low points was when he went to the White House to give a cheerleading speech on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I think he knew long, long before that this is where he would end up, as a right-wing codger. He used to go on, back in the Eighties, about sodden old wrecks like John Braine, who’d ended up more or less where Hitchens got to, trumpeting away about “Islamo-fascism” like a Cheltenham colonel in some ancient Punch cartoon. I used to warn my friends at New Left Review and Verso in the early 90s who were happy to make money off Hitchens’ books on Mother Teresa and the like that they should watch out, but they didn’t and then kept asking ten years later, What happened?

Anyway, between the two of them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup? You’d get one from Mother Teresa. Hitchens was always tight with beggars, just like the snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity.

One awful piece of opportunism on Hitchens’ part was his decision to attack Edward Said just before his death, and then for good measure again in his obituary. With his attacks on Edward, especially the final post mortem, Hitchens couldn’t even claim the pretense of despising a corrupt presidency, a rapist and liar or any of the other things he called Clinton. That final attack on Said was purely for attention — which fueled his other attacks but this one most starkly because of the absence of any high principle to invoke. Here he decided both to bask in his former friend’s fame, recalling the little moments that made it clear he was intimate with the man, and to put himself at the center of the spotlight by taking his old friend down a few notches. In a career of awful moves, that was one of the worst.

He courted the label “contrarian,” but if the word is to have any muscle, it surely must imply the expression of dangerous opinions. Hitchens never wrote anything truly discommoding to respectable opinion and if he had he would never have enjoyed so long a billet at Vanity Fair. Attacking God? The big battles on that issue were fought one, two, even five hundred years ago when they burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiore. A contrarian these days would be someone who staunchly argued for the existence of a Supreme Being. He was for America’s wars. I thought he was relatively solid on Israel/Palestine, but there too he trimmed. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency put out a friendly obit, not­ing that “despite his rejection of religious precepts, Hitchens would make a point of telling interviewers that according to halacha, he was Jewish” and noting his suggestion that Walt and Mearsheimer might be anti-Semitic, also his sliming of a boatload of pro-Palestinian activists aiming to breach Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. (His brother Peter and other researchers used to say that in terms of blood lineage, the Hitchens boys Jewishness was pretty slim and fell far outside the defi­nitions of the Nuremberg laws. I always liked Noam Chomsky’s crack to me when Christopher announced in Grand Street that he was a Jew: “From anti-Semite to self-hating Jew, all in one day.”

As a writer his prose was limited in range. In extem­pore speeches and arguments he was quick on his feet. I remember affectionately many jovial sessions from years ago, in his early days at The Nation. I found the Hitchens cult of recent years entirely mystifying. He endured his final ordeal with pluck, sustained indomitably by his wife Carol.

The People vs “Europe”

On our Counterpunch.org website this weekend the great historian Gabriel Kolko makes a persuasive case that in the end the eurozone, inded the EU, will go into meltdown. This is just fine in my book. The sooner we get back to francs, lire, punts, drachmas and the rest of the old sovereign currencies, the better in the long run. It used to be as much a part of going to France as choking on Gauloise smoke to change money and be handed a bundle of notes featuring the devious Cardinal Richelieu, instead of the characterless but somehow always expen­sive euros.

The argument against the eurozone is that hard-faced Euro-bankers — their killer instincts honed at Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s School of the Americas — have the power to act as the bully-boys of international capital and impose austerity regimes from Dublin to Athens, scalping the poor to bail out the rich.

Throughout the entire Eurocrisis there has been a basso profundo chorus from the Eurocrats that what’s needed is a lot more centralizing — in the words of Wolfgang Münchau in the Financial Times for Novem­ber 28, “a fiscal union”: “This would involve a partial loss of national sovereignty, and the creation of a credi­ble institutional framework to deal with fiscal policy, and hopefully wider economic policy issues as well.”

I’ve read many editorial paragraphs with this same bullying timbre — that what the whole European enter­prise needs is an impregnable fortress of Eurocrats dis­patching its disciplinary legions — first technocrats and then, if necessary, NATO’s shock troops to crush all resistance.

Two generations years ago, when Britain shook with acrid debates about the pros and cons of joining the EU, a big chunk of the left was in favor of joining, the notion basically being that in terms of potential for socialist advance, EU membership would at least offer a shot at liberating the sceptred isle from the suffocating, reac­tionary constrictions of post-imperial infarction. (Also, Gaullism — meaning in this case defiance of the United States — was translated into a hope that the EU would be a left counterbalance to the American Empire.) Here we are 40 years on, with social democrats across Europe toiling even more diligently than their nominally more right-wing rivals to bail out the rich and grind down the poor at the behest of the bankers and panic-stricken bondholders.

Crisis is often invoked as the midwife of revolution­ary change, and here are Greece, Italy, Spain and even France at various levels of crisis, with political ortho­doxy and the normal order of things increasingly dis­credited. Yet perhaps only in Greece and possibly Portu­gal — both with active Communist parties — is there any organizational vigor on the left, and some sense that one could see some emulation of the glorious path taken by Argentina in 2003 and 2004, with factory occupations and immense popular outrage, combined with decisive leadership by the late President Nestor Kirchner. The international debt collectors were successfully defied. Maybe in Italy there are some flickers of resistance, but France?

As Serge Halimi, the director of Le Monde diplo­matique, put it recently, “There is no reason to believe that François Hollande in France, Sigmar Gabriel in Germany or Ed Miliband in the UK will succeed where Obama, Jose Luis Zapatero and Papandreou have failed… In the current political and social situation, a federal Europe would strengthen the already stifling neoliberal mechanisms and reduce the sovereign power of the people by handing it over to shadowy technocratic bodies.”

The EU “project,” a very irritating word that should be tossed in the dumpster along with “iconic,” “meme,” “parse” and “narrative,” is in potential outline a totali­tarian nightmare. Down with federalism! Remember Simone Weil’s hatred of the Roman Empire and what it did to Europe’s cultural richness and diversity: “If we consider the long centuries and the vast area of the Roman Empire and compare these centuries with the ones that preceded it and the ones that followed the bar­barian invasions, we perceive to what extent the Medi­terranean basin was reduced to spiritual sterility by the totalitarian State.” As Weil’s biographer, Simone Pétre­ment, comments, “The Roman peace was soon the peace of the desert, a world from which had vanished, together with political liberty and diversity, the creative inspira­tion that produces great art, great literary works, science, and philosophy. Many centuries had to pass before the superior forms of human life were reborn.”

But as Halimi concludes, “But when the people cease to believe in a political game in which the dice are loaded, when they see that governments are stripped of their sovereignty, when they demand that banks be brought into line, when they mobilize without knowing where their anger will lead, then the left is still very much alive.”

“What did the Roman Empire ever do for us?” the left nationalist asks in Monty Python’s imperishable The Life of Brian. “Roads,” the federalist begins tentatively. My native country of Ireland has been covered with vast roads, courtesy of the EU. We’ve got enough of them. Europe’s got enough of them. Enough of the eurozone, enough of the “European project.”

When in doubt, wheel on Teddy Roosevelt. It’s in every Democratic president’s playbook. TR was presi­dent from 1901 to 1909. He was manly, ranching in North Dakota, exploring the Amazon and nearly expiring on the River of Doubt. He was an imperialist con amore, charging up San Juan Hill, sending the Great White Fleet round the world, proclaiming America’s destiny as an enforcer on the world stage. He loved wilderness, mostly through the sights of a big game hunter’s rifle — a wilder­ness suitably cleansed of Indians. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indi­ans,” he wrote in The Winning of the West , “but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

When necessary he could play the populist rabble-rouser’s card, flaying the trusts, railing against “the male­factors of great wealth”. But on TR’s watch the mod­ern, centralized corporate American state came of age. H.L. Mencken writes of him in Prejudices II that

“Roosevelt, for all his fluent mastery of democratic counter-words, democratic gestures and all the rest of the armamentarium of the mob-master, had no such faith in his heart of hearts. He didn’t believe in democracy. He believed simply in government. His remedy for all the great pangs and longings of existence was not a disper­sion of authority, but a hard concentration of authority. He was not in favor of unlimited experiment; he was in favor of a rigid control from above, a despotism of inspired prophets and policemen… He was for a paternal­ism of the true Bismarckian pattern, almost of the Napoleonic pattern – a paternalism concerning itself with all things, from the regulation of coal-mining and meat-packing to the regulation of spelling and marital rights… When he tackled the trusts the thing that he had in his mind’s eye was not the restoration of competition but the subordination of all private trusts to one great national trust with himself at its head.”

Mencken compared TR to the German Kaiser:

“Both dreamed of gigantic navies, with battleships as long as the Brooklyn Bridge. Both preached incessantly the duty of the citizen to the state, with the soft-pedal on the duty of the state to the citizen. Both praised the habitu­ally gravid wife. Both believed in the armed pur­suit of the lower fauna… Both were intimates of God and announced His desires with authority.”

LBJ loved TR for his “toughness.” Draft-dodging Bill Clinton invoked TR as his ideal. At least Johnson and Clinton had elements in them of TR’s most admira­ble trait – gusto, something of which Obama is dismally devoid.

But now Obama has seized on TR as his role model in denouncing those destroying the supposed guarantee of the American Way, strangely defining TR’s philoso­phy as one guaranteeing that every citizen gets a fair bounce on the trampoline, soaring into the safe harbor of “the middle class”.

As for imperial destiny, last month Obama did his own reprise on the Great White Fleet, opening a new US Marine base in Australia and shaking his fist at China.

Last Tuesday in Osawatomie, Kansas, where TR, attempting a political comeback in 1910, slagged corpo­rate power for the benefit of his audience of 30,000 prai­rie populists, Obama told a crowd of 1,200: “At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.”

He went on: “There are some who seem to be suffer­ing from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that’s hap­pened, after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess.”

Obama and crew are obviously betting that there won’t be too much unseemly sniggering at the sight of a president thus blithely denying the prime feature of his conduct during the worst economic crisis in 70 years, which was to pick an economic team – Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers as his chief eco­nomic adviser — determined precisely to “return to the same practices that got us into this mess,” to head off any serious economic reform of those institutions and prac­tices that prompted the great crash of 2008.

Obama could have played the populist card back at the start of August amid the Republicans’ efforts to force savage cuts in the social safety net. But he blinked. Now, four months later, there’s the Occupy Wall Street move­ment reminding Americans that in practice as opposed to rhetoric Obama has been a doughty protector of the 1%. OWSers heckled him fiercely in New Hampshire three weeks ago.

But of course Republicans aren’t going to be attacking Obama as the pawn of the bankers. They favor the absurd script that designates him as a closet commie, scheming night and day to bring the most bloodthirsty sce­narios of Karl Marx to fruition. So from their point of view the Osawatomie speech was gratifying vindication of all their most lurid charges.

Ever the trimmer, Obama was obviously aware that with this lunge into rhetorical populism he was exposing himself to just such charges. So amid his execrations against the Republicans for not supporting the Democ­rats’ effort to extend the 2% reduction in the payroll tax, he suddenly threw in a homage to deficit reduction, thus doing a mini-reprise on his collapse in August.

The irony is that the continued reduction of the payroll tax Obama is campaigning for means that the Social Security fund is getting 2% less. Even though the missing 2% is suppos­edly meant to be replaced by money from elsewhere in the federal budget, the drop in Social Security revenues from the payroll tax will allow those urging “reform” of Social Security – i.e., its eventual destruction – to claim ever more fiercely that the system is in budgetary crisis.

A new poll out of Iowa, scheduled to hold its Republi­can caucuses a month from now, shows Newt Gingrich now well ahead of Mitt Romney. Whatever his own many substantive flip-flops, Gingrich is certainly capable of making fun of Obama’s gyrations. After Osawatomie he swiftly designated Obama as President Food Stamp, thus highlighting Obama’s failure to lower the unemployment rate significantly, and also supplying a racist subtext about Obama’s supporters. It won’t be hard for Gingrich to flip through Obama’s speech and point out the contradictions.

Obama at Osawatomie: “Factories where people thought they would retire sud­denly picked up and went overseas, where workers were cheaper.” True – and Gingrich can point out that Democ­rats cheerfully voted through the trade pacts that allowed this to happen.

Final caution: careful how you bet on the outcome in Iowa. The New York Times, which in concert with CBS, conducted that recent Iowa poll, points out that only “30% of likely caucus-goers say that they had been con­tacted by the Gingrich campaign, raising questions about his ability to identify his supporters and lure them to more than 1,600 precinct caucus locations on a winter night. By comparison, 60% say that they have been con­tacted by the [Ron] Paul campaign and 47% by the Rom­ney campaign, underscoring a stealth operation that has been under way for months.”

Thus far Gingrich is running a shoestring operation. He’ll have to weather possible adversity in Iowa and New Hampshire before getting to friendlier territory in South Carolina and Florida. ·

Meanwhile supporters of Ron Paul eagerly devour reports of his campaign’s diligent grass-roots organizing in Iowa and New Hampshire and scan their crystal balls for omens of a January surprise on the order of Gene McCarthy’s ambush showing against LBJ in New Hamp­shire in 1968, followed by victories against Bobby Ken­nedy in Wisconsin and Oregon.

One of the strongest arrows in Paul’s quiver is his anti-imperialism and anti-interventionism and so some were shaken by an interview Paul recently conducted with the right-wing Newsmax:

“Newsmax: What then, if anything, should we do for Israel?

Ron Paul: We should share intelligence for mutually agreed-upon goals. We should honor our pledge to refuse any arms sales that would undermine Israel’s qualitative military edge in the region.

But we should stop interfering with them. We should not announce bargaining positions even before she begins her negotiations. We should not dictate what she can and cannot do. We should stop trying to buy her alle­giance. And Israel should stop sacrificing their sover­eignty as an independent state to us or anybody else, no matter how well-intentioned.”

Sending me this exchange, Jeffrey Blankfort com­mented: “Maybe the Republican Zionist Coalition will give the old boy another look.” John Walsh, an ardent Paul fan strove to reassure me:

“Of this a friend writes me: ‘It’s a tack he’s taken for years: calling for non-intervention in Israel’s disputes by saying it’s bad for Israel. He may be right; he may be wrong. I’m just interested in the non-intervention.’

I tend to agree. I think the Jewish Republicans knew exactly what they were doing when they told him he was not welcome to their debate today. That with RP’s call for friendship with Iran and his consistent non-interven­tionism is about all I can hope for now.”

Dead Indians? Multiply by Five

Did you catch the New York Times’s “On this Day” for December 3?

“ON THIS DAY

On Dec. 3, 1984, more than 4,000 people died after a cloud of gas escaped from a pesticide plant operated by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal, India.”

Not even in the ballpark. Back in June, 2010, we published  P. Sainath’s commentary on the light sen­tences handed out by an Indian court:

“Over 20,000 killed. Over 500,000 victims maimed, disabled or otherwise affected. Compensation of around 12,414 rupees per victim on average on the 1989 value of the rupee. $470 million total. (And that divided between 574,367 victims.) Over a quarter of a century’s wait. To see seven former officials of Union Carbide Corporation’s Indian subsidiary sentenced to two years in prison and fined $2100. Not a single person from the far more responsible parent US company punished.

“Yet, the notion that the main injustice to Bhopal is a failure to extradite then UCC chief Warren Anderson from America is mildly ridiculous. Trying to evade the lessons the 1984 Bhopal Gas disaster threw up on the tyr­anny of giant corporations is completely so. Well over two decades after its MIC gas slaughtered 20,000 (mostly very poor) human beings, Bhopal still pays the price of Carbide’s criminality. (Evident from the long-term impact on the health of the gas-affected. And from the poisoned soil and water around the former Carbide plant.) While the Indian government’s appalling Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill, if adopted, would give legal cover to such conduct across the country.

“Bhopal marked the horrific beginning of a new era. One that signalled the collapse of restraint on corporate power… Seven years after Bhopal, Larry Summers, then chief economist at the world bank, wrote his infamous memo. This said, among other things: “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]?” Summers suggested that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.” Summers was to later say that he was joking, being sarcastic, and so on. Few buy that pathetic plea. Still, he went on to become President of Harvard and is now President Obama’s chief economic adviser, And his memo’s logic holds in the real world. It is exactly what has happened since Bhopal.”

Today Union Carbide is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company, which has just ada­mantly refused yet again to give the victims any money.

Dow Chemical is currently a prime sponsor of the upcoming Olympics in London, arousing a storm of pro­test in Britain and India. The company is commissioning 336 fabric panels, each 25 meters high and 2.5 meters wide, to embrace the Olympic Stadium for the Games, featuring its red diamond corporate logo. Jacquelin Mag­nay, Olympics Editor of the Daily Telegraph reported back in August that “London organizers, in an unusual step, have awarded the company the right to have adver­tising on the panels from the time of installation, expected to be finished around Easter, up until June 26, 2012, which is the date that the official Olympic period begins. The IOC has demanded that all Olympic venues remain free of advertising during the Olympic period but the logo will be displayed in the lead-up to the Games and during the test events at the Olympic Park.”

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.

Just when the Mormon millionaire thought he’d got the nomination sewn up, the polls showed him still stuck at about 23% with huge numbers of Republicans saying they didn’t trust the former governor of Massachusetts, that Mormons are in league with Satan, that he took his dog on holiday, tied to the roof of his car, that he’s a flip flopper, that he made his money firing people, that…. On and on.

So there was the Rick Perry challenge. The governor of Texas soared in the polls. He was a cert. Romney raged. Then Perry turned out to be a moron. Romney was on his feet again. A cert. But did his polling numbers surge? Nope. Stuck at 23% and then came another pile of elephant crap, in the form of Herman Cain. Yes, Republi­cans told pollsters they liked his style, his feistiness, his 9-9-9 tax plan, and above all his consummate skill in not being Mitt Romney.

At this point, the pretty smart New York Times con­servative columnist Ross Douthat got weary of the slap­stick and stated categorically in his column on October 22 that “barring an unprecedented suspension of the laws of American politics, Mitt Romney has this thing wrapped up. Note that I am not saying that he will win every primary or caucus. He could easily lose Iowa to somebody, and if he loses Iowa, he will probably lose some Southern primaries as well, giving political report­ers grist for the horse race narrative they crave. But Rom­ney’s path to the nomination is more wide open than for any nonincumbent in decades. He should win New Hampshire and Nevada, Florida and Michigan. “

When it emerged that Cain had some sexual harass­ment problems, plus a very tentative grasp of interna­tional affairs, it looked as though Douthat was entirely right — a wrap for Romney. Inevitability lasted the pre­cise length of time it took to get the elephant back in the ring again. Here we are at the start of December, and a political has-been, an adulterer who dictated harsh terms of divorce to a wife dying of cancer, who has pocketed millions from some of the tackiest corporate lobbies in America, has now roared past Romney, who as usual is face down in elephant crap with the ladder on top on him.

If Republicans are prepared to bet on the has-been — former House speaker and Newt Gingrich — it shows that the most vehement diehards in America are the Republicans who will never, ever vote for Mitt Romney. There are millions of them.

So Newt is having his hour in the sun. Quite an hour. Nationally in the polls of Republican candidates for the nomination, he’s leading Romney 26.6 to 20.4. In Iowa, whose caucuses on January will kick off the year, Gingrich is currently leading Romney 26.3 to 15.

Then, a week later, comes New Hampshire. Relief for Romney. Right now he’s leading Gingrich 36.2 to 19.6. But then on January 21 comes South Carolina. Gingrich currently polls 26.3, Romney, 17.7.

Next, the big, all-important state of Florida — one of the crucial swing states in the ultimate election next November. The elephant, please. Not since the robber baron Henry Flagler blazed a path through Florida in the 19th century with his railroad has there been so trium­phant a progress through the Sunshine state as Newt’s, fittingly so, since Florida is stuffed with hucksters. Newt a staggering 41%, Romney 17%, the sample being 600, questioned by the Florida Times Union.

Back in October Douthat had factored in a Newt surge: “Next week, perhaps, it will be Newt Gingrich’s surprising resilience or Ron Paul’s potential strength in the early caucuses or the appeal of Perry’s flat-tax plan. Then there will come a debate in which Mitt Romney looks shabby instead of smooth, a poll that shows one of his rivals surging, a moment when all his many weak­nesses are on every pundit’s lips. Please do not listen to any of them.”

But maybe there has been one elephant, one pratfall too many. After some tetchy moments with interviewers, Romney is now being whacked for being unable to take a punch, for being a whiner, for being a guy who can’t get above 23%, for a man who… but we’ll leave that joke to Gail Collins.

But can Gingrich survive any kind of resolute scru­tiny? The answer is that in a world that didn’t contain Mitt Romney, probably not. This former college history teacher entered Congress in 1978. His peak moment came in 1994 when Time magazine made him Man of the Year, for being the architect, the prime mover in the ending of Democratic majority rule in the US Congress after 40 years.

At this moment of supreme triumph, when he became Speaker of the House, Gingrich went into a long slide. Bill Clinton outsmarted him in a face-off over Gingrich’s threat to shut down government. Then he whined publicly about not getting a decent seat on Air Force One. Then he plunged ever deeper into the mire of scandal. In 1997, the House of Representatives voted to discipline him for ethical wrongdoing, misusing charita­ble donations. He had to pay a $300,000 penalty as part of a settlement. In 1998 he was reelected for an eleventh term but resigned as speaker and as a member of Con­gress — in January 1999, suggesting that someone might have whispered in his ear that staying out of the slammer required immediate departure from the halls of Congress. Or maybe he just needed more money and decided that one dose of “ethical wrongdoing” charges from House colleagues was enough. He became a lobbyist.

Like another college lecturer, Barack Obama, Gingrich is a glib fellow. Unlike Perry, he’s got several answers to everything. He can take any side of a ques­tion. His past is disreputable in so many egregious ways that it is hard to see how the big Republican donors would want to invest substantial money in his campaign, except perhaps as insurance. His campaign organization is an utter mess. It’s surely a better than even bet that IEDs of scandal await detonation along his campaign trail.

But he’s not Mitt Romney. This year, that’s appar­ently a game changer. If Newt goes down, the Republi­cans will be left with the next in line in the polls — namely Ron Paul. Trouble is, Paul really does have princi­ples, starting with a refusal to endorse torture, assas­sinations, abuses to the Constitution, including end­less wars. That puts him out of the picture.

Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

Drummin' in Zuccotti. Courtesy, David Shankbone.

From Manhattan, to Nashville, to St Louis, to Port­land, Oregon, to Oakland, California, the police this week moved in to clear out the Occupy Wall Street pro­testers from the various downtown plazas or squares where they’d established their peaceable focos. The mayor of Oakland, Jean Quan, had earlier acknowledged a conference call between 18 mayors (at obvious federal instigation from the Justice Department) across the US discussing strategy, and the mode elected was clear enough. Get them out, by any means necessary.

These marching orders were taken most seriously in — where else? — the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement back in 1964, at Sproul Plaza, entry way into the University of California at Berkeley. FSM’s birth was prompted by the arrest of Jack Weinberg for solicit­ing money for the civil rights movement. He was put into a police car, but a spontaneous sit-down trapped it. Eventually the roof was used as a FSM platform.

Last week 100s of students massed in Sproul Plaza to protest proposed fee hikes of 81% that would bring UC tuition from $13,000 to over $22,000. The stu­dents pointed out that the banks caused the financial cri­sis, which in turn caused the budget crisis. So the banks, not the students, should pay for it. The students set up their own small encampment on the lawn outside Sproul Hall.

An eyewitness, Michael Levien, described on Coun­terPunch last week what happened at around 9.30 pm last Monday night:

“A phalanx of police in riot gear turned the corner of Sproul Hall and rapidly charged, thrusting their batons with violent force into the crowd. Chanting ‘non-violent protest’ and ‘stop beating students,’ student after student took fierce baton thrusts to their chests and limbs.

“Then the police started swinging, brutally beating people’s chests, arms, knees, and backs. They were swinging to hurt. With the crowd behind and the police in front there was no way for people to leave even if they wanted to. A few people tried to escape in the narrow gap between the students and police. They were savagely beaten. Throughout what can only be described as a terri­fying physical attack that has left many with serious injuries, the students stayed entirely non-violent.”

Enter Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who often likes to reminisce about his Freedom Rider days. At the 40th anniversary of the founding of FSM, they had a mock po­lice car and platform and Chancellor Birgeneau spoke from it, reminiscing warmly about the birth of FSM and the importance of free speech. I spoke at the same anniver­sary, giving measured praise for subversive free speech in an event organized by Lenni Brenner, “FSM and the Sixties: Lessons for Today.”

Chancellor Birgeneau seems to be a man changed from the freedom rider of the mid-1960s or even the man perched on the platform in 2004. Last week he emailed the campus, defending the administration’s response by saying that it was necessary to remove the encampment for “practical” considerations of “hygiene, safety, space and conflict issues.” He remarked: “It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience.” So Rosa Parks prevented a white per­son from sitting in the seat reserved for them on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Club her to the ground!

So chapter 1 of the Occupy movement draws to a close; maybe the concerted onslaught by uniformed goons actually did the movement a favor—scant comfort to those battered to the ground—by leaving the Occupi­ers with a positive bank balance in ·terms of imagery at the moment of their enforced departures. Besides, this will allow trained teams of OWSers to hunt down all members of those drumming circles and dispose of them by any means necessary. This is not protected speech.

What next? Thus far the OWS movement has mostly been evoked by its participants in terms of self-education and consciousness-raising about the nature of America’s political economy. There’s been a lot of talk about a brave new world being born. One fellow chided me for not writing more about the movement which he hailed as “the most militant upsurge from the Left since the Viet­nam War, the most frontal assault on the worst features of capitalism since the Great Depression.”

This is a vast overstatement. In terms of substantive achievements, OWS has a long way to go, which is scarcely a reason for reproof since it only really got going in September. “The most frontal assault on the worst features of capitalism since the Great Depres­sion?” Scarcely.

The early 60s Civil Rights Movement prompted the Civil Rights Act, and Medicare, the latter being effec­tively socialized health insurance for the senior crowd. Pushed by the popular movements, President John­son and a Democratic Congress passed a flood of laws.

As historian Alan Nasser pointed out last week, “In less than four years, Congress enacted the Truth In Lending Act, the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, the National Gas Pipeline Safety Act, the Fed­eral Hazardous Substances Act, the Flammable Fab­rics Act, the federal Meat Inspection Act and the Child Protection Act.

“Business-government relations had never before seen such an avalanche of legislation limiting the free­dom of capital in the interests of working people. Between 1964 and 1968 Congress passed 226 of 252 worker-friendly bills into law. Federal funds transferred to the poor increased from $9.9 billion in 1960 to $30 bil­lion in 1968. One million workers received job train­ing from these bills and 2 million children were enrolled in pre-school Head Start programs by 1968.”

Resistance to the war in Indochina was fierce. In Viet­nam the troops mutinied. Units shot their officers in the back or threw grenades into their tents. In 1971 the Pentagon counted 503,926 ‘incidents of desertion’ since 1966 and reckoned that more than half of US ground forces in Vietnam openly opposed the war. At Christmas 1971, Vietnam Vets Against the War seized the Statue of Liberty for 48 hours and draped it with a banner demand­ing ‘Bring our Brothers Home.’

On the home front, people fought the draft or simply fled it. Major US cities were torn by riots. The anti-war movement, coming on the heels of the civil rights movement, transformed a generation. Finally, Congress simply denied Nixon the war money in Indochina.

To evoke those stormy times is to underline that America was at the peak of its economic power in the late 1960s, whereas today Moody’s warns the world that US T-bills are a risky investment, American corporate capitalism is infinitely better protected in its perquisites than it was 45 years ago when those worker-friendly laws shot through Congress.

These days corporate lobbies own the President and the US Congress and the regulatory agencies. National economic policy is laid down by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, an errand boy of the banks. He took over from Hank Paulson, also an errand boy for the banks. If Obama is not re-elected in 2012, another errand boy will be waiting in the wings.

In the 1930s Roosevelt developed his New Deal pro­gram in part to head off mass movements to his left. In the 1960s Kennedy and Johnson similarly responded to the challenge of mass movements. Today, the OWSers have registered a presence and won considerable public support, which should not be surprising because America is in poor shape, the rich unpopular and politicians despised. But, as yet, there is no sign of any material political consequence deriving from this popularity.

Four years ago a candidacy was gathering momen­tum, declaring that the time had come in America for a moral awakening, for a change in national conscious­ness, a rising above self-interest and partisanship. Young people rallied to the call. Obama swept into the White House and promptly stuck a ‘Business As Usual’ sign on the door of the Oval Office.

Suppose the OWS movement had begun in the early fall of ’08, just as the economy was imploding, amid widespread public fury at Wall St.’s corruption, notably the banks and big investment houses? Would candidate Obama have felt quite so blithe in lobbying his fellow senators to support Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s TARP bailout of the 9 biggest banks? Obama had been in close touch with top-tier Wall St. men all year long and was their point man rallying his fellow senators — and of course the recipient of their campaign contributions, far outstripping what Wall St. gave McCain.

On October 1, 2008, the US senate voted 74 to 25 for the unconditional bank bailout, with eight Democrats vot­ing No, among them Dorgan, Feingold, Wyden, and Landrieu. Sanders also voted No. (Dorgan always had a healthy mistrust of Obama. In his recent book Confidence Men , Ron Suskind writes that at a December 2008 meeting during the transition, after Obama had announced his appointments of Geithner and Summers — thus making absolutely clear where his priorities would lie — Dorgan told him bluntly, “You’ve picked the wrong people. I don’t understand how you could do this. You’ve picked the wrong people!”)

Imagine an OWS movement spreading across the country through September and October of 2008, pierc­ing through Obama’s vapid rhetoric about change, excori­ating the bipartisan congressional support for de facto financial dictatorship by Wall Street. There would have been a thousand opportunities for dramatic actions. Birgeneau’s Freedom Rides could this time have been “Freedom from Debt” rides with OWS trucks collecting maxed out credit cards from every voting district in the country and driving them to Washington to dump in front of the White House and Congress.

Okay, so you’re a realist and you can’t imagine it, and you’d be right, because in the late summer and fall of 2008, it was All Aboard for Obama and the Change Express. The pressure to conform to this ecstatic, albeit totally irrational call was intense. One of my friends — a left militant from way back — told me he didn’t dare voice his doubts publicly in front of his wife and chil­dren. All he could do was mumble to the family dog out in the garden.

So now, four years later, we have OWS, in part a re-run of the idealistic hopes of those Obama zealots of 2008, minus illusions about crusading candidacies. There’s lots of talk about What Next. Somebody will think of something, no doubt. A friend from Portland recently wrote privately, apropos OWS:

“It doesn’t seem to me that the OWS is ready to be fully political. Didn’t it take the new left years to build to 1968? Was part of its less-than-fully ‘successful’ push because it was premature or exhausted? Was it because it never had full enough backing from social forces to be overwhelming? The new left didn’t spring ready formed into mass collective action in 1960 but built up powerful oppositions through solidarities only formed through prac­tical common struggles. We see this happening now but we can’t expect it to happen overnight. On the con­trary, OWS has shaky grounds to build on, but a more propitious moment. The early sixties were a period of ris­ing affluence with a strong labor movement, albeit with a corrupt and conservative bureaucracy, a strong potential for working-class solidarity and powerful social movements demanding change. OWS faces a largely anomic society after decades of economic erosion and declining political power at every level, with the excep­tion of anti-globalization movements that were the older brother and sisters of OWS. Our folks in Portland are still being arrested and still occupying and re-occupying. They have it pretty easy for now because they have tre­mendous support from the public. Let us hope that in one way there is rounding of the circle. Where the unin­tended consequences of parts of new left agitation became identity politics, the OWS might bring us back to class politics. From there, we can join the Greeks.”

On Counterpunch last weekend Michael Hudson lays out a minimal economic program on how to clean out the Augean stables. He calls for a financial Clean Slate:

“To restore the kind of normalcy that made America rich, the most important long-term policy would be to rec­ognize what is going to be inevitable for every econ­omy. Debts need to be written down — and the politi­cally easiest way to cut through the tangle is to write them off altogether. That would free the bottom 99% from their debt bondage to the top 1%. It would be a Clean Slate, starting over — and trying to do things right this time around. The creditors have not used the bank­ing system to make America more productive and richer. They have used it as a vehicle to reduce the population to debt serfdom.

“A debt write-down sounds radical and unworkable, but it’s been done since World War II with great success. It is the program the Allies carried out in the German economy in that country’s 1947 currency reform. This was the policy that created Germany’s Economic Mira­cle. And America could experience a similar miracle.”

Hudson is a fascinating scholar of the history of debt cancellations. He just sent me his pamphlet, The Lost Tra­dition of Biblical Debt Cancellations. It has a drawing of the cuneiform transcription of a debt cancellation (amargi law) by Enmetena, ruler of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash, c. 2400 BC, the first known legal proclamation. The original is in the Louvre.

Let’s hoist our Babylonian banner!

Cain protester in Scottsdale, Arizona. Photo by Gage Skidmore.

As he prepares to follow Gov. Rick Perry into the oubliette of campaign history Herman Cain can at least console himself that as an alleged harasser of women, his was certainly a classier act than that of a man who not only got elected president in 1992 but was triumphantly reelected in 1996, each time by about 45 million Americans armed with the knowledge that if you left your wife at the next table to Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas in Macdonald’s, by the time you got back from ordering more fries Bill would  be ensconced in your seat, his hand already hovering above your wife’s thigh.

Sharon Bialek, one of the women accusing Cain of seeking to take advantage when he was head of the National Restaurant Association in 1997, says that her apprehensions were aroused when in his car, having offered to drive her home,  Cain told her he’d  already called Washington’s  Capital Hilton and upgraded her accommodations to a luxury suite. It was only after this material demonstration of his high regard that Cain put his hand up her skirt and then sought to guide her head towards his lower regions. Ms Bialek says the minute she said No, Cain abandoned his advances and drove her home.

A luxury suite!  One of Bill’s targets, when he was governor of Arkansas, would have been lucky to get a ride home in the troop car, after a brisk session in the governor’s office, with bruises on her arms when she resisted the guiding hand.  Who says this isn’t the land of progress? Seventy years ago a  black man making the sort of advances of which Cain is accused tended to end up swinging from the branch of  a tree, not running for president with a hefty quotient of Americans saying they don’t give a toss about the harassment charges.

Actually Cain has never had a prayer of getting the Republican nomination. He doesn’t have the money, or the big backers, just a handful of staffers and the 9-9-9 thing. His star began to rise when the Tea Party crowd figured Gov Rick Perry of Texas  as a hypocrite and also a moron, as he conclusively demonstrated in the debate in Michigan Wednesday night. Him a conservative Republican and he couldn’t remember all three of the federal agencies he’s pledged to wipe out. “Commerce, Education,…” Then, 53 seconds later, “The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.” He forgot Energy. It’s like an Anglican parson only able to get through two thirds of the Trinity: “God, the father, God the son and… and… “ Duh!  And this is the man Texans elected as their governor three times?

Cain’s final bit of bad luck has been  to have his harassment charges sitting cheek to cheek on the front pages and in the newscasts with gross details of the gay sex scandal at Penn State.  Wednesday Nov 9  saw the god of college football,  84-year old coach Joe Paterno, fired for effectively covering up the locker-room and shower-stall rampages of  assistant coach Jerry Sandusky with Pennsylvania youth.

So Obama’s opponent in 2012 will surely be Mitt Romney, a Mormon millionaire reminiscent in style and utter lack of any fixed political conviction beyond knee-jerk conservatism to George Bush Sr. Romney is the former governor of Massachusetts and son of George Romney , head of American Motors,  who futilely  sought the Republican presidential nomination back in 1968, and was famous for saying on the campaign trail  that  he’d been “brainwashed” by the US military into declaring his support for the war in  Vietnam.

There’s no point in trying to sketch in “the real Mitt Romney”, because there isn’t one. He’s been campaigning for the Republican nomination for eight solid years, and his brain has been washed clean years ago of anything approaching an original or useful thought about America’s condition.  It would be exciting to think that the fears of the Christian right are true and that Romney, his lower regions swathed in Mormon underwear, is the agent of a master plan to deliver America into grip of the  Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, but no such luck.

In today’s political topography Romney is classed as a man of the Republican center. Only a couple of months ago it looked as though he’d be sunk by the Tea Party ultras, but they’re a wan bunch these days. Their star is sinking fast. On Tuesday Ohio’s voters issued a crushing defeat – 62 per cent  to 38 per cent on a provisional count –  to proposed Tea Party legislation drafted by Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, designed to curb the power of public sector unions to organize and strike. Other right-wing initiatives across the US got similar black eyes on Tuesday. A couple of respectable polls show Romney beating Obama a year from now, though they’re currently outnumbered by a larger number of polls calling it for Obama. These are early days.

Lest readers think I’m being unkind about Gov. Bill Clinton, let me evoke the man in his youthful prime. Clinton said this week on a talk show promoting his new book Back to Work that he can’t see why an ex-president couldn’t return to the job after previously serving two terms.

Back in 1979 our friend Tim Hermach, now fearless leader of the Native Forest Council and breathing the righteous air of Eugene, Oregon, was a businessman seeking commercial advantage. In 1979 this search took him to Little Rock, Arkansas, where an associate said the swiftest way of getting a certificate of origin necessary for a rebar (reinforcing steel for construction) deal was by conferring personally with the new governor of the state.

In short order a dinner was arranged with young Governor Bill at the Little Rock Hilton. Tim recalls that they were scarcely seated before Bill was greeting a pretty young waitress in friendly fashion, putting his hand up her dress while announcing genially to the assembled company, “This woman has the sweetest cunt in Little Rock.”

Tim, an Oregon boy by origin, tells us he listened with burning ears and mouth agape as Bill talked of womanhood in terms of astounding crudity. Badinage notwithstanding, some business was transacted. Hermach tells us that Governor Bill “very openly, nothing shy about it, said words to the effect that our end use certificate would cost about $10,000″, said transaction being of a personal, informal nature.  “Since ours was a $2 million deal, we didn’t care,” Tim recalls.

These tractations concluded, Governor Bill repaired to the Hilton’s nightclub with boon companions, where they cavorted lewdly with sundry flowers of Little Rock before repairing to bedrooms in the upper regions of the hotel.

Back to work indeed.

Why was Tillikum spared? Big whale, big money. There’s a lot riding on the slave orcas toiling away, giving as many as eight performances per a day, 365 days a year, as the star attractions in each of the Shamu stadiums. Tilli­kum’s asset value is enhanced by his duties as a sperm donor. He’s a breeding “stud” often kept in solitary, away from the other orcas, and has fathered 13 orcas.

The Occupy Wall Street movement should raise plac­ards in support of Tillikum and his fellow orca slaves: Sea­World got its start in the mid-1960s, and after various ups and downs, in the late 1980s the three SeaWorlds, in San Diego and Orlando, passed into the hands of the vast brew­ing conglomerate Annheuser-Busch which pumped mil­lions into upgrades, finally selling the theme parks for $2.7 billion in 2009 to the Blackstone Group, a merger and acqui­sitions group cofounded by the odious Pete Peterson and Stephen Schwarzman, formerly of Lehman and Kuhn-Loeb. Blackstone, one of the world’s largest private equity investment firms is at the crossroads of crony capitalism, where the political and financial elites engorge and devour. It has been one of the largest investors in leveraged buyout transactions over the last decade, with huge operations in commercial real estate.

Last week People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit against SeaWorld for “enslaving” five orcas. Tillikum is one of the plaintiffs. PETA’s suit invokes the 13th Amendment, abolishing and prohibiting slavery, and demands the orcas’ release under the Amend­ment’s terms. “All five of these orcas were violently seized from the ocean and taken from their families as babies,” says PETA’s president Ingrid Newkirk, echoed by PETA’s lawyer, Jeff Kerr who told AP, “By any definition, these orcas are slaves — kidnapped from their homes, kept con­fined, denied everything that’s natural to them and forced to perform tricks for SeaWorld’s profit.” Kerr added that the 13th amendment does not refer to a specific species.

SeaWorld, denies the charges.

For those who think the references to slavery and use of the 13th Amendment are excessive, remember the words of Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist and former slave. Douglass often made direct comparisons between the treat­ment and use of other animals and that of himself. “When purchased, my old master probably thought as little of my advent, as he would have thought of the addition of a single pig to his stock! Like a wild young working animal, I am to be broken to the yoke of a bitter and life-long bondage. Indeed, I now saw, in my situation, several points of similar­ity with that of the oxen. They were property, so was I; they were to be broken, so was I; Covey was to break me, I was to break them; break and be broken — such is life.”

Will the orcas get legal standing?

Animals currently have no rights recognized in US law, but many groups of lawyers are working to strengthen laws that protect animals and many individuals have successfully brought suit to protect the welfare of animals. Three years ago the DC Law Journal ran a very useful survey by Kathryn Alfisi. Alfisi points out that it was the Michael Vick case “that allowed for just the right atmosphere to push for state and federal legislation that would strengthen dogfighting and animal cruelty laws.” The Philadelphia Eagles quarterback pulled a 23-month sentence after pleading guilty to conspiracy for running a dogfighting ring on his property in Surry County, Virginia.

Some animal lawyers flee the term “animal rights” as too extreme, while others question the whole concept of legal boundaries between animals and humans. Several state bars and the District of Columbia Bar have animal law sections or committees. In 2005 the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section created its Animal Law Committee. Over 100 animal law courses are being taught at law schools across the country.

The legal system, Alfisi reckons, is beginning “to reflect the increasingly complex relationship between people and their pets in our society.”

The phrase “increasingly complex” does the Middle Ages a grave injustice. Just read my CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair’s marvelous introduction to Jason Hribal’s Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden Story of Animal Resistance , published last year by CounterPunch Books.

As St. Clair writes, “In medieval Europe (and even colonial America) thousands of animals were summoned to court and put on trial for a variety of offenses, ranging from trespassing, thievery and vandalism to rape, assault and murder. The defendants included cats, dogs, cows, sheep, goats, slugs, swallows, oxen, horses, mules, donkeys, pigs, wolves, bears, bees, weevils, and termites. These tribunals were not show trials or strange festivals like Fools Day. The tribunals were taken seriously by both the courts and the community.”

Humans and animals often ended up in the same courtroom as co-conspirators, especially in cases of bestiality. The animals were given their own lawyers at public expense. “Sometimes, particularly in cases involving pigs,” St. Clair writes, “the animal defendants were dressed in human clothes during court proceedings and at executions.”

“In the province of Savoy, France, in 1575, the weevils of Saint Julien, a tiny hamlet in the Rhone Alps, were indicted for the crime of destroying the famous vineyards on the flanks of Mount Cenis. A lawyer, Pierre Rembaud, was appointed as defense counsel for the accused. Rembaud wasted no time in filing a motion for summary judgment, arguing that the weevils had every right to consume the grape leaves. Indeed, Rembaud asserted, the weevils enjoyed a prior claim to the vegetation on Mount Cenis, since, as detailed in the Book of Genesis, the Supreme Deity had created animals before he fashioned humans and God had promised animals all of the grasses, leaves and green herbs for their sustenance. Rembaud’s argument stumped the court.

“As the judges deliberated, the villagers of Saint Julien seemed swayed by the lawyer’s legal reasoning. Perhaps the bugs had legitimate grievances. The townsfolk scrambled to set aside a patch of open land away from the vineyards as a foraging ground for the weevils. The land was surveyed. Deeds were drawn up and the property was shown to counselor Rembaud for his inspection and approval. They called the weevil reserve La Grand Feisse. Rembaud walked the site, investigating the plant communities with the eyes of a seasoned botanist. Finally, he shook his head. No deal. The land was rocky and had obviously been overgrazed for decades. La Grand Feisse was wholly unsuitable for the discriminating palates of his clients.

“The Perry Mason of animal defense lawyers was an acclaimed French jurist named Bartholomew Chassene, who later became a chief justice in the French provincial courts and a preeminent legal theorist. He argued that local animals, both wild and domesticated, should be considered lay members of the parish community. In other words, the rights of animals were similar in kind to the rights of the people at large.

“In 1642 a teenage boy named Thomas Graunger stood accused of committing, in the unforgettable phrase of Cotton Mather, “infandous Buggeries” with farm animals in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Young master Graunger was hauled before an austere tribunal of Puritans headed by Gov. William Bradford. There he stood trial beside his co-defendants, a mare, a cow, two goats, four sheep, two calves and a turkey. All were found guilty. They were publicly tortured and executed. Their bodies were burned on a pyre, their ashes buried in a mass grave. Graunger was the first juvenile to be executed in colonial America…

“In 1750, a French farmer named Jacques Ferron was espied sodomizing a female donkey in a field. Ferron was convicted and sentenced to be burned at the stake. But the donkey’s lawyers argued that their client was innocent. The donkey, the defense pleaded, was a victim of rape and not a willing participant in carnal congress with Ferron. Character witnesses were called to testify on the donkey’s behalf. The donkey was acquitted and duly released back to its pasture.”

The people of the Middle Ages, dismissed as primitives in many modernist quarters, were actually open to a truly radical idea: animal consciousness.

The animal trials peaked in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, then faded away, done in by the Enlightenment and by Rene Descartes who argued that animals were mere physical automatons. They were biological machines whose actions were driven solely by bio-physical instincts. Animals lacked the power of cognition, the ability to think and reason. At Port-Royal the Cartesians cut up living creatures with fervor, and in the words of one of Descartes’ biographers, “kicked about their dogs and dissected their cats without mercy, laughing at any compassion for them and calling their screams the noise of breaking machinery.” Across the Channel Francis Bacon declared in the “Novum Organum” that the proper aim of science was to restore the divinely ordained dominance of man over nature, “to extend more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man and so to endow him with “infinite commodities.” Bacon’s doctor, William Harvey, was a diligent vivisector of living animals.

Thus in the dawn of capitalism, the materialistic view of history, and the fearsome economic and technological pistons driving it, left no room for either the souls or consciousness of animals. They were no longer our fellow beings. They had been rendered philosophically and literally in resources for guiltless exploitation, turned into objects of commerce, labor, entertainment and food.