Vacant-brained Fred Thompson and his GOPer trophy wife. One of the most baffling things about evil is that it often assumes attractive packages.

BY MATT TAIBBI | Dateline: Sep 24 2007

I can say exactly when I first knew that Fred Dalton Thompson is dangerous. It is 12:07 p.m. on Sunday, September 9th, in Manchester, New Hampshire, just outside a restaurant called Chez Vachon. Thompson has just served up another mumbling, noncommittal tour through a packed diner of breakfasting locals, sitting glumly through the requisite this-sure-is-great-coffee shot. Then, once the needed photos are banked, the lumbering B-list character actor — who plays a video called “The Hunt for Red November” at every campaign stop and sells buttons that, in an unsettlingly McLuhanian twist, pimp him as the “Law and Order candidate” — tries to make a quick beeline back to his bus. But a cheeky local TV reporter shouts at him before he can reach the door. Read the rest of this entry »

BHL, a man of strong opinions and a very high opinion of himself.

BY BERNARD HENRI-LEVY

[from the February 27, 2006 issue of The Nation]
REPUBLISHED AS A PUBLIC SERVICE

Editorial Caveat: Who is this diagnostician for the American Left?: In French and US establishment journals, Bernard-Henri Levy, or BHL, as he is commonly known, is one of the best-acclaimed “philosophes” and authors in France today. But when it comes to Henri-Levy, surely probably one of the great “poseurs” and leftist apostates on the world stage, such accolades are to be taken with a huge lump of salt. Indeed, a new biography by French journalists Jade Lindgaard and Xavier de la Porte is the first in a series of seven acerbic critiques of BHL to be released in the coming years and marks an unprecedented attack on the high-profile academic. Read the rest of this entry »

Giuliani—as phoney as a man in drag.

BY BILL CURRY | Dateline: September 24, 2007 The Huffington Post

Rudy Giuliani is slipping, if not quite sliding away. In early polls he led Hillary Clinton and every Democrat and was pulling away from the Republican pack, having benefited much from John McCain’s gracious decision to set himself on fire.

Back then the smart money–and it’s a wonder they still call it that– fretted that Hillary was ‘unelectable’. Today she beats Rudy in every poll. Among Republicans he’s again in a dead heat, this time with B-list TV celebrity Fred Thompson. Read the rest of this entry »

Are Warren Buffet and his ilk— “enlightened” capitalists or merely shrewd self-serving plutocrats, and does it really make a difference?

BY SUSAN ROSENTHAL
Dateline: September 17, 2007 CROSSPOST AT AUTHOR’S BLOGSITE: SUSAN’S BLOG

AMERICA IS DEEPLY DIVIDED. For one thing, most Americans want an end to the war against Iraq and some form of universal health care, while the ruling class is committed to the war and to sacrificing social services to pay for it. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Many liberals and people on the left have grown accustomed to invoking the word “Fascism” when defining just about any oppressive regime that restricts civil liberties, assaults workers’ organizations, or does the bidding for the rich. Unfortunately, there is a broad spectrum of rightwing authoritarian regimes that also do just that, without being, technically speaking, “Fascist.” In fact, both rightwing military dictatorships and fascism have similar class programs, the repression of labor being a top priority, and a number of other overlapping features, but the distinguishing trait of a genuine fascist regime is not just its reactionary, fiercely anti-communist character, but the fact that it rests on a one-party state with a mass base usually drawn from the petit bourgeoisie and the lower middle class. Fascism is therefore a type of rightwing mass movement feeding off of racism, fierce chauvinism, often malignant nativism (as manifested, for example, in anti-semitism), and grandiose warmongering goals. The essay below, by renowned political analyst Michael Parenti, clarifies and expands many of these points. But before we go there, consider what Benito Mussolini himself had to say about the nature of fascism: Read the rest of this entry »

A creature of the system, a “mechanic” who knows how to work the machine, Bill Clinton has made a career of phoney populism all his life. He has successfully fooled a great may people while remaining sturdily on the center-right, what Beltway insiders like to call “the Third Way.” Unfortunately, fronting for a decomposing but still murderous capitalism is not the way to cure what ails America.

By David Nasaw
Dateline: Sunday, September 23, 2007 [Reproduced under Sec 17, US Code]
This piece suggested by and in simulpost at makingthemaccountable.com

“Giving,” Bill Clinton’s folksy first-person tour of worthy causes and the good people who support them, is so relentlessly upbeat that only the most churlish professor would say a discouraging word about the book. But the former president is so intent on celebrating 21st-century philanthropy — and highlighting his and Hillary’s role in promoting “the explosion of private citizens doing public good” — that he blithely ignores a hard reality: Philanthropy and democracy don’t get along nearly as seamlessly as “Giving” would have us believe. Read the rest of this entry »

“Hiya folks, I’m John Kerry. I’m full of shit and how do you like it?!” Extrapolate Kerry’s name for any name in the Democrats’ leadership roster, not to mention the GOP, and you get closer to the unspoken truth.

BY BILL VAN AUKEN Dateline: 19 September 2007 World Socialist Web Site | A fraternal site

Little more than 10 months after winning the leadership of both houses of the US Congress thanks to a swelling tide of opposition to the war in Iraq, the Democratic Party has largely abandoned even the pretense of a struggle to bring the war to an end. Read the rest of this entry »