By: William Rivers Pitt  

Some will tell you the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Others will say it ended when the Soviet Union finally collapsed, when their breed of communism was cast aside in favor of free-enterprise democracy. In truth, the Cold War finally ended this past week, when the Bush administration chose to reframe the strategic posture of the American military away from the concept of deterrence.

Replacing that time-tested and diplomatically pliable stance are two steel fists. One declares the United States supreme over all nations, now and forever, and warns the world that we will never allow another nation to come close to matching our power. The other bluntly proclaims that we will attack any nation, at any time, in a pre-emptive fashion, if we so choose.

By: Diane E. Dees  

The so-called moral outrage of the Christian Right and the Bill Bennett Brigade has become so much a part of the American culture that the very words "moral" and "morality" have become associated with right-wing politics and religion. The Reverend Jerry Falwell, once considered a buffoon, is now an established talking head, chatting away on cable news networks about everything from Presidential behavior to Middle East politics.

How did this happen? In 1979, Falwell founded his Moral Majority and recruited hundreds of thousands of conservative Christians, who gave money to the organization and who voted according to the organization's guidelines. The Moral Majority opposed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, the passage of gay rights legislation, and all abortion rights. It supported prayer in schools and the teaching of creationism, and generally espoused a variety of Christian Right messages: Hollywood is responsible for the collapse of the nation's morals, feminism is part of a plot to bring about a New World Order, gays are out to "recruit" heterosexuals, and public education is evil.

I propose that those of us who hold what are called liberal values take back the concept of morality, as well as its language. It was the morality of the dreaded left that institutionalized the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the consumer protection system, environmental awareness, worksite safety, and prison reform. It's time we took the credit, and it's time we used the "m" word.

"There is no worse tyranny than that of a majority. The test of democracy is not that the majority should always get its way but how far minorities are respected."

- John Stuart Mill

By: Paul Krugman  

We should listen to Karl Rove when he lauds former Presidents. For example, Mr. Rove has lately taken to saying that George W. Bush is another Andrew Jackson. As Congress considers Mr. Bush's demand that the Homeland Security Department be exempt from civil service rules, it should recall that those rules were introduced out of revulsion over the "spoils system", under which federal appointments were reserved for political loyalists - a practice begun under Jackson.

But Mr. Rove's original model was William McKinley. Until Sept. 11, we thought that Mr. Rove admired McKinley's domestic political strategy. But McKinley was also the President who acquired an overseas empire. And there's a definite whiff of imperial ambition in the air once again.

Of course the new Bush doctrine, in which the United States will seek "regime change" in nations that we judge might be future threats, is driven by high moral purpose. But McKinley-era imperialists also thought they were morally justified. The war with Spain - which ruled its colonies with great brutality, but posed no threat to us - was justified by an apparent act of terror, the sinking of the battleship Maine, even though no evidence ever linked that attack to Spain. And the purpose of our conquest of the Philippines was, McKinley declared, "to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them".

From:  

The U.S. poverty rate rose for the first time in eight years and household income fell last year, a double dose of bad economic news that coincided with the first recession in a decade, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.

There were 32.9 million Americans living in poverty last year, up from 31.6 million in 2000. The rate of 11.7% was up from 11.3% the previous year, which was the lowest level since 1974.

The median household income in 2001 declined 2.2% to $42,228, the second straight drop, according to the bureau.

By: Bob Herbert  

There were no terrorists on board. There was no threat of any kind. When the plane landed about half an hour later, Mr. Feuer was taken into custody. And then, shockingly, so was Dr. Rajcoomar. The air marshals grabbed the doctor from behind, handcuffed him and, for no good reason that anyone has been able to give, hauled him to an airport police station where he was thrown into a filthy cell.

This was airline security gone berserk. No one ever suggested that Dr. Rajcoomar, a straight-arrow retired Army major, had done anything wrong.

Dr. Rajcoomar, who is of Indian descent, said he believes he was taken into custody solely because of his brown skin. He was held for three frightening hours and then released without being charged. Mr. Feuer was also released.

By: Joel S.  

Ok, enough time has gone by... The media has given the Administration plenty of time and plenty of passes. Now that the Administration has had the opportunity to get its ducks in a row, it is essential for the media to start asking the hard questions. For now, I'd like to help my fellow Americans wade through all the rhetoric, excuses, spin, and deceit we have been spoon fed over the past year. This only requires one good question: "You're joking, right?"

Editorial from:  

Budget battles are as inevitable as elections. But this year the framework is defined by a widespread refusal in Washington to accept the obvious. The United States cannot wage a war, cut taxes, and pay for the programs that Americans want without throwing the federal budget into deeper deficit. The $5 trillion surplus has vanished. Signs of budget paralysis are everywhere. Senate Democrats cannot rally a majority behind a budget resolution for next year. In the House, Republicans cannot agree on a spending bill covering education, health, and labor. The reason is that the tight budget constraints demanded by President Bush are forcing cuts in the education programs that were at the heart of his own "Leave No Child Behind" initiative.

The actual size of the budgetary dispute is small. The White House wants to spend $759 billion on military and domestic discretionary programs in the next fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1. The Democrats want to spend $768 billion. Mr. Bush argues that this $9 billion difference is worth a veto threat and a fight with Congress. But his argument is undercut by a comment from Lawrence Lindsey, the President's chief economic policy adviser, who told the Wall Street Journal last week that the $100 billion to $200 billion price tag for a war in Iraq amounted to "nothing" in terms of its impact on the economy.

"I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909- 1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street..."

- Smedley D. Butler, (1881-1940), Major General USMC

"The administration isn't targeting Iraq because of 9/11. It's exploiting 9/11 to target Iraq."

- Maureen Dowd

By: Chris Floyd  

Not since Mein Kampf has a geopolitical punch been so blatantly telegraphed, years ahead of the blow.

Adolf Hitler clearly spelled out his plans to destroy the Jews and launch wars of conquest to secure German domination of world affairs in his 1925 book, long before he ever assumed power. Despite the zigzags of rhetoric he later employed, the various PR spins and temporary justifications offered for this or that particular policy, any attentive reader of his vile regurgitation could have divined his intentions as he drove his country - and the world - to murderous upheaval.

Similarly - in method, if not entirely in substance - the Bush Regime's foreign policy is also being carried out according to a strict blueprint written years ago, then renewed a few months before the Regime was installed in power by the judicial coup of December 2000.

Unless it can engineer a war, Bush's administration is political roadkill.

By: Simon Tisdall  

And then, after all this hot and bother fuss, suddenly and out of the blue, even before General Tommy Franks, the wannabe "Stormin' Norman", has unpacked his Qatar camp bed, Iraq simply says "OK". To all these provocations, Baghdad puts a timely stopper.

Nor is there any doubting the popularity of Saddam's shift, enough to make the White House sick. Security council members declare themselves encouraged. Russia looks forward to a political settlement and an end to threats of war. China discerns a positive sign. Backsliding Germany's Joschka Fischer rubs it in with a told-you-so about the efficacy of the U.N.-centred, multilateral approach. Even in London, predictions fly suggesting that war, if it comes, has now been put back a year, that Bush and Blair are split over how to proceed, and that Downing Street will be blamed by U.S. hardliners for steering their president up a diplomatic blind alley. Some Muslim countries, meanwhile, demand a lifting of sanctions.

Worse still, the no-strings nature of Iraq's riposte has plain-spoken appeal. And to the "man in the street", increasingly bowed, browbeaten, and bamboozled by the government's line (as polls show) but now relieved and hopeful, it seems reasonable. After all, what more do these people want?

Quite a lot, actually, and the Bushmen's demands will increase rather than diminish as yesterday's momentary flummoxing fades. The gap between what America might wisely do, and what it really does, may yet grow schismatically chasmatic.

By: Richard W. Stevenson  

Without attracting much attention, Republicans are on the verge of achieving a cherished goal: official assessments of whether proposed tax cuts will help the economy and ultimately pay for themselves by generating more revenue for the government.

For years, supply-side economists have argued that the current system of evaluating tax cuts overstates the expense to the federal budget by looking only at lost revenue and not taking into account benefits like increased output and jobs.

By: Paul Krugman  

...In the early 1990's, as today, recession was followed by a "jobless recovery", in which GDP grew but employment didn't. And then as now there was concern that interest rate cuts by the Fed might not be enough to turn the economy around - though back then we didn't yet have the example of Japan to show that the "liquidity trap", in which even a zero interest rate isn't enough to produce an economic recovery, was a real possibility in the modern world.

But the most striking similarity between now and a decade ago, it seems to me, is political. For all the differences between the moderate father and the deeply conservative son, now as then we have an administration whose key figures are fundamentally uninterested in and uncomfortable with economic policy.

That statement may strike you as strange: wasn't the tax cut George W. Bush's central achievement before Osama bin Laden came along? But the tax cut was never intended as an economic policy: it was a political gesture designed to ward off a challenge from Steve Forbes and satisfy the conservative base. Only later did the administration make the providential discovery that it was also just the thing to fight recession, promote family values, and cure the common cold.

By: John Liechty  

In the past five decades of war and rumors of war, my Uncle Sam has generally been behind the scenes, if not directly on the scene. There have been interludes of more or less peaceful sobriety within the sprees of covert intervention or overt brawling. But living with Uncle feels more and more like living with a drunk. He spends his time whispering with the boys in shadowy bars where the general public is not allowed or not inclined to peek. We're never quite sure what he's been up to, and never quite sure we want to be. When he does come home at night, the booze on his breath can be overpowering, the blood on his hands alarming. Uncle gets defensive when we ask direct questions, though he doesn't mind us asking when it's too late to make any difference. So for the most part, we don't ask. We pretend not to see. There isn't a problem. War happens. Uncle means well. He'll sober up eventually. Won't he?

By: Mike McArdle  

Eichmann was a bureaucrat whose job it was to move political prisoners, mostly Jews to the deaths camps of Europe during World war II. He did his job with cold, detached efficiency. But what had startled political scientist Hannah Arendt as she covered his war crimes trial for the New Yorker in 1961 was Eichmann's stunning ordinariness. He had been a file clerk, a vacuum salesman, and a man who had facilitated mass murder. But he could never understand, even at his trial why he had been singled out. He had simply followed the established procedures, everyone had done it. He had never considered - before, during, or after the fact - the implications of what he had done. In a different time and a different place he would have still been selling vacuums.

Another truly ordinary man walked to a podium in New York this week to address the nations and leaders of the world. He would have sold sound systems or been a convenience store manager if his name had been other than what it is. Well, maybe he would have been an assistant manager. But an accident of birth dictated higher things for him. He didn't feel the need to work hard for these things, he expected them. When he couldn't get things on his own there were always people there to give them to him. He did what they said and never asked questions. Dump the stock, take the money, it'll be okay. We'll take care of it.

"Contain the wild man, the leader with the messianic and relentless glint who is scaring the world. Surround him, throw Lilliputian nets on him, tie him up with a lot of U.N. inspection demands, humor him long enough to stop him from using his weapons and blowing up the Middle East. But this time, the object of the containment strategy is not Saddam Hussein, but George W. Bush, the president with real bombs, not the predator with plans to make them."

- Maureen Dowd, from a New York Times editorial, 09-18-02

More like... Fu*k'n the Pooch!

"There's an old saying in Tennessee... There's a saying in Texas, maybe it's in Tennessee: Fool me once, shame on... shame on you... Fool me... You can't get fooled again."

- George W. Bush to a Nashville, TN audience, 09-17-02, MSNBC

By: Robert Fisk  

You've got to hand it to Saddam. In one brisk, neat letter to Kofi Annan, he pulled the rug from right under George Bush's feet. There was the American president last week, playing the role of multilateralist, warning the world that Iraq had one last chance - through the UN - to avoid Armageddon. "If the Iraqi regime wishes peace", he told us all in the General Assembly, "it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material". And that, of course, is the point. Saddam would do everything he could to avoid war. President Bush was doing everything he could to avoid peace. And now the Iraqi regime has put the Americans into a corner. The arms inspectors are welcome back in Iraq. No conditions. Just as the Americans asked.

No wonder the United States was whingeing on about "false hopes" yesterday. No wonder the Americans were searching desperately for another casus belli - be sure that they will find one - in an attempt to make sure that their next war keeps to its timetable...

"For the sake of liberty and justice for all, the United Nations Security Council must act, must act in a way to hold this regime to account, must not be fooled, must be relevant to keep the peace."

- pResident Weak & Stupid

By: Diane Fabian  

While America was wrapped up in other concerns, assuming that the democracy was strong and solid, we had a political coup. As far as I can determine, Americans initially chose to face this crisis as it has faced political crises in the past: let it run its course, trusting that justice will prevail. But this situation is something new. Nothing has gone as expected. We have this rich maniac in the White House, and don't know what to do about it. Too much has happened that couldn't happen, and it happened too quickly. We aren't sure what we are dealing with.

What scares me is that other nations have the notion that what Bush decides is also what the American people want. We don't. I don't personally know a soul who wants war. We want the murderers of Sept. 11 brought to justice. Justice won't be obtained by the indiscriminate bombing of towns and villages.

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