Alexander Cockburn from Creators Syndicate

Mike Huckabee's Ascending Chariot for 12/21/2007

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

Suddenly, it's Huckabee. The surge of the former Arkansas governor in the race for the Republican nomination has the pell-mell excitement of one of Napoleon's victorious rampages across Europe in his heyday. In this case, the long faces belong not to the crowned heads of the Grand Alliance but to the Republican establishment, quivering with terror at the thought of their doughty standard bearer ...

Updated: Fri Dec 21, 2007

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The Options in America: Kill Yourself or Have a Baby for 12/28/2007

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

Time magazine made Vladimir Putin its Man of the Year. Chalk it up as nostalgia for the Cold War, when America was great and a working man in a state like Michigan had two cars, a nice house, a country cottage, a health plan, a pension and a wife who stayed at home, canning fruit and batting her eyes at the postman. These days he has two lousy jobs, she has three and they have negative equity i ...

Updated: Fri Dec 28, 2007

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Big Wins for Obama and Huckabee Spell Disaster for Clinton and Romney for 01/04/2008

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

For the party establishments — Democratic and Republican — it was a bad night in Iowa as their favored candidates went down to severe defeat on Thursday.

With Barack Obama's crushing victory over Hillary Clinton, the campaign scenario of the Democratic elite is now in the trash bin. Their calculation had been that Obama would never be able to match the Clintons' fundraising. ...

Updated: Fri Jan 04, 2008

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Women to the Rescue, as Hillary Bounces Back in New Hampshire for 01/10/2008

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

The women of New Hampshire saved her. On Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton confuted premature announcements of her political demise. She won the Democratic primary by a narrow 2 percent, 39-37. The prime reasons for her victory were a) women and b) the lower profile in New Hampshire of the war in Iraq.

In Iowa, Barack Obama won the women's vote by more than 5 percentage points over Hillary ...

Updated: Thu Jan 10, 2008

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The Campaign in Black and White for 01/17/2008

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

He's a smart fellow, and so Barack Obama surely knew what was in store for him if he ever looked like taking the Democratic nomination away from Hillary Clinton. The Clintons' relationship with African Americans has always been starkly instrumental. When he was in trouble with white voters in New Hampshire in 1992, Gov. Bill sprinted back to Little Rock to preside over the execution of a mental ...

Updated: Thu Jan 17, 2008

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Clinton, Obama and the Ethnic Battles for 01/24/2008

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

The primary in South Carolina has been all a register of how African Americans feel about the two leading contenders. But primary victories in this season can be short-lived. As cruelly as a new mountain range suddenly looms up, even as a climber pants to the top of the first ridge, so do states holding nearly half the American population loom over the battling Democratic contenders. On Feb. 5, ...

Updated: Thu Jan 24, 2008

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The Frontrunners After Florida: McCain and Clinton for 01/31/2008

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

John McCain must now be reckoned the clear favorite for the Republican nomination, just as Hillary Clinton is the front-running Democrat, despite Obama's crushing win in South Carolina.

Before his handlers told the press Bill Clinton wouldn't be taking any more questions, the former president gave it as his considered opinion that his wife and John McCain have much in common, and that as ...

Updated: Thu Jan 31, 2008

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Super Tuesday Plunges Both Parties into Civil War for 02/08/2008

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Both parties planned Super Tuesday as the coronation of a candidate, followed by six months of furious fund raising to finance the fall race for the presidency. Such hopes were deliciously dashed on Tuesday as chaos descended on both parties.

John McCain won his Republican primary contests largely in states which will probably vote Democratic in the fall — New York, Delaware, Conne ...

Updated: Fri Feb 08, 2008

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Mistakes They Made: From Hillary to Rush to Bush for 02/15/2008

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Hillary Clinton's biggest mistake was not divorcing Bill in 2001 and then pressing forward into the presidential campaign as Senator Hillary Rodham. He's a millstone and the campaign thus far has exploded the claim that Bill Clinton is still magic as a vote winner. Many Democratic Party regulars have very hard feelings about him. Clinton was not good for the Democratic Party when he was in the ...

Updated: Fri Feb 15, 2008

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The Mushrooming Clouds that Hang over McCain for 02/22/2008

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Increasingly certain that their Democratic opponent in the fall will be Barack Obama, John McCain's political handlers sketch out their basic strategy: to portray Obama as a mere novice in statecraft, devoid of those powers of mature wisdom and sober judgment with which the seasoned McCain is so richly endowed.

The danger here for McCain is that there are bountiful stories attesting to h ...

Updated: Fri Feb 22, 2008

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The Race Card for 02/29/2008

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Political race baiting works in America because racism is part of the cultural and historical furniture. In 1960, when Barack Obama's Kenyan father married Stanley Ann Dunham, a white woman who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, 22 states still had laws forbidding interracial marriages. In 1967, an appropriate year since it was the "summer of love," the Supreme Court voided all "r ...

Updated: Fri Feb 29, 2008

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A Great Week for John McCain for 03/07/2008

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800

After eight disastrous years of George Bush, and with a Republican candidate like John McCain, who says he knows nothing about the economy and thinks the United States will be in Iraq for the next 100 years, almost the only way any Democratic nominee can lose the presidential face-off in the autumn is if there is a protracted internecine battle. Any Democrat with any memory of kindred bloodlett ...

Updated: Fri Mar 07, 2008

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Did Wall Street Nail Spitzer? for 03/14/2008

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Was there a medium-size right-wing conspiracy to nail Gov. Eliot Spitzer, above and beyond Spitzer's own diligent efforts in the same cause? It certainly looks like it, with the right-wingers in question very possibly hailing from Wall Street, where the ruling powers loathed Spitzer for his crusades against them when he was New York's attorney general. If threatened, Wall Street plays very dirt ...

Updated: Fri Mar 14, 2008

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Three Blind Mice for 03/28/2008

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

America's tragedy is that we have three neoliberals left in the presidential race at a time when, as Martin Wolf correctly pointed out in Wednesday's Financial Times, neoliberalism has collapsed. The bailout by the Fed of Bear Stearns sounded the death knell for 30 years of deregulation.

How have McCain, Clinton and Obama adjusted to the new facts of life, at a moment when the entire sys ...

Updated: Fri Mar 28, 2008

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My Escape from the Titanic for 04/04/2008

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

I flew home from London to San Francisco from Heathrow's new Terminal 5, inhabited solely by British Airways. I flew on March 27, the day it opened. As the world now knows, this was a day of epic British humiliation. For weeks the British newspapers and television channels had been vaunting the marvels of T5: miles of baggage conveyors rushing luggage swiftly from check-in point through entrail ...

Updated: Fri Apr 04, 2008

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C'est Terrible for 04/11/2008

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

When in trouble, reach for nuclear submarines. President Nicolas Sarkozy, derided by the French as a lightweight, rushed off at the end of March to launch Le Terrible, the fourth in France's fourth generation of such submarines. Thus he seizes the torch of "massive retaliation" from his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who said that a state-terrorist onslaught on France or even the EU mig ...

Updated: Fri Apr 11, 2008

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Hillary Clinton's Ball and Chain for 04/18/2008

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

These past few months have been bad for Bill Clinton, disclosing him as a corrupt lobbyist for top-tier scum, including President Alvaro Uribe's blood-sodden gang of butchers in Colombia. His capacity for serial lying continues at full stretch. Furthermore, he cannot stop opening his mouth, each time dropping his wife another couple of feet through the trapdoor of public disesteem.

Examp ...

Updated: Fri Apr 18, 2008

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Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 U.S. Casualties a Year for 04/25/2008

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

A friend of mine who's a librarian was recently reviewing job applicants. Asked his qualifications in library skills, one man put “machine gunner.” He was a vet who'd served in Falluja. The library is in a state school here in the United States that, last fall, had 650 such vets enrolled. The young man got the job but soon became irked by what he saw as the trivial preoccupations of his colleag ...

Updated: Fri Apr 25, 2008

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The Pigmentation Problem for 05/02/2008

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

In Queens last week, a judge ruled that the cops who turned young Sean Bell into a sieve on his wedding day were filled with most understandable apprehension, though Bell turned out to be unarmed. As usual, the cops walk, and sometime later, the victim's family may get a settlement from the city. The important thing is that justice is seen not to have been done. Power needs the periodic buttres ...

Updated: Fri May 02, 2008

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The Year of the Prisoner for 05/09/2008

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Listening to Hillary Clinton's top aides trying to put a good face on the results of the Indiana primary had the same surreal quality as an aide to Hitler reporting "encouraging news" from Stalingrad. Her candidacy died on May 5. She needed at least a 10 percent win in Indiana, and in the end, she scraped through by not much more than 16,000 votes. Every day she stays in the race now ...

Updated: Fri May 09, 2008

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