Smearing Al Gore: Here We Go Again

By Robert Parry
October 13, 2007

When people wonder how the United States ended up in today’s nightmarish predicament, a big part of the answer is that the right-wing message machine and the mainstream U.S. news media distorted reality at key moments about key people, perhaps most notably Al Gore during Campaign 2000.

That ability to twist reality has been a major focus of our reporting at Consortiumnews.com over the years [See, for instance, “Al Gore v. the Media” or “Protecting Bush/Cheney.”] Much of this work is reprised in our new book, Neck Deep.

But even now – when the consequences of the news media’s earlier “war on Gore” can be measured in the horrible death toll that has followed the Bush presidency – it appears that little has changed.

Read on.

Ex-Commander Blasts Iraq 'Nightmare'

By Robert Parry
October 12, 2007

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq for the first year of the occupation, blamed “incompetence” by President George W. Bush’s national security team for creating a “nightmare” that could last far into the future.

Sanchez, who led coalition forces from June 2003 to June 2004, used an Oct. 12 speech to a conference of Military Reporters and Editors in Arlington, Virginia, to castigate nearly everyone connected to the Iraq War, including the U.S. news media, Congress, the State Department, the White House and the Pentagon.

Read on.

Al Gore's Moral Imperative

By Robert Parry
October 11, 2007

When Al Gore encountered New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof at a recent conference on climate change, the former Vice President lamented the lack of public urgency toward the looming catastrophe from global warming.

“I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers … and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants,” Gore told Kristof, who was accompanied by his teenage son.

Read on.

Should Al Gore Run?

By Robert Parry
October 10, 2007

Al Gore’s supporters are making a last-ditch bid to convince the former Vice President to run for President as a candidate of principle, experience and a powerful claim on the sympathy of Americans who believe in fair play and regret the outcome of Election 2000.

In a full-page New York Times ad on Oct. 10, a group of grassroots Democrats, called DraftGore.com, published an open letter to Gore pleading with him to enter the race.

Read on.

Democrats Signal New Spying Cave-in

By Robert Parry
October 9, 2007

An intriguing part of the Washington political dynamic is that the more the Democrats think they might win an upcoming election, the more timid they become – fearful that they will give the powerful right-wing media machine some issue that will destroy their victory dreams.

What often happens, however, is that once the Democrats slip into their four-corner stall offense, their lack of a clear purpose – or discernable principle – can become the lethal political issue that they so desperately wanted to avoid. John Kerry’s “flip-flopping” or Hillary Clinton’s “triangulations” can prove just as deadly as a controversial stand.

Read on.

So Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby?

By Ray McGovern
October 5, 2007

Virtually everyone: Republican, Democrat—Conservative, Liberal. The fear factor is non-partisan, you might say, and palpable.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee brags that it is the most influential foreign policy lobbying organization on Capitol Hill, and has demonstrated that time and again, and not only on Capitol Hill.

Read on.

Why Not Impeachment?

By Robert Parry
October 5, 2007

The disclosure that the Bush administration secretly reestablished a policy of abusing “war on terror” detainees even as it assured Congress and the public that it had mended its ways again raises the question: Why are the Democrats keeping impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney “off the table”?

After the Democratic congressional victory last Nov. 7, Washington Democrats rejected calls for impeachment from rank-and-file Democrats and many other Americans, considering it an extreme step that would derail a bipartisan strategy of winning over Republicans to help bring the Iraq War to an end.

Read on.

The Clintons and the Bushes

By Robert Parry
October 3, 2007

Editor's Note: Given Hillary Clinton’s emergence as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, a Consortiumnews.com reader asked that we post the entire first chapter of Robert Parry’s 2004 book, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.

The book opens with a scene early in the second year of Bill Clinton’s presidency with him explaining to White House guests why he didn’t pursue geopolitical scandals that had implicated George H.W. Bush in gross abuses of power and arguably criminal acts.

Read on.

The Who's Your Daddy Nation

By Phil Rockstroh
October 2, 2007

How many times do we, the people of the U.S., have to go around on this queasy-making merry-go-round of propaganda and militarism before we shout -- enough! -- then shutdown the whole cut-rate carnival and run the scheming carnies who operate it out of town?

It is imperative the nation's citizens begin to apprehend the patterns present in this ceaseless cycle of official deceit and collective pathology. This republic, or any other, cannot survive, inhabited by a populace with such a slow learning curve.

Read on.

Forgetting Gandhi

By Pablo Ouziel
October 2, 2007

October 2nd marks the birth anniversary of human rights activist Mahatma Gandhi, and for the first time, the United Nations is officially proclaiming this day to be the International Day of Non-violence.

Hopefully, on this day we can all spare a little of our time to reflect on how little we have all understood Mahatma Gandhi's message, after all everyday we seem to plunge into a worse state of affairs and drift away farther from Gandhi's respectable message:

"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent."

Read on.

Bush's Global 'Dirty War'

By Robert Parry
October 1, 2007

George W. Bush has transformed elite units of the U.S. military – including Special Forces and highly trained sniper teams – into “death squads” with a license to kill unarmed targets on the suspicion that they are a threat to American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to evidence from recent court cases.

Though this reality has been the subject of whispers within the U.S. intelligence community for several years, it has now emerged into public view with two attempted prosecutions of American soldiers whose defense attorneys cited “rules of engagement” that permit the killing of suspected insurgents.

Read on.

Bush, Ahmadinejad and Authoritarianism

By Nat Parry
September 28, 2007

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad grabbed attention this past week for his “defiant” posture towards the United Nations over Iran’s nuclear program and his asinine comments at Columbia University on the absence of homosexuality in his home country.

As usual, any legitimate points Ahmadinejad may have made were lost or drowned out in the uproar over his more controversial remarks.

Read on.

Hillary Prods Bush to Go After Iran

By Robert Parry
September 28, 2007

So let me see if I’ve got this right: Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner for the presidential nomination, is demanding that George W. Bush take a more belligerent posture toward Iran.

In her view – and that of 75 other members of the U.S. Senate – President Bush hasn’t been aggressive or hasty enough in designating a large part of the Iranian military, the Revolutionary Guards, as an international terrorist organization.

Read on.

Bush, Oil -- and Moral Bankruptcy

By Ray McGovern
September 27, 2007

It is an exceedingly dangerous time. Vice President Dick Cheney and his hard-core “neo-conservative” protégés in the administration and Congress are pushing harder and harder for President George W. Bush, isolated from reality, to honor the promise he made to Israel to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

On Sept. 23, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned pointedly:

Read on.

Daniel Ellsberg: 'A Coup Has Occurred'

By Daniel Ellsberg
September 26, 2007 (from a speech delivered September 20, 2007)

I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.

If there’s another 9/11 under this regime … it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.

Read on.

Bush to World: Up Is Down

By Robert Parry
September 25, 2007

George W. Bush – who asserts his unlimited personal authority to kill, kidnap, torture and spy on anyone of his choosing anywhere in the world – opened his annual speech to the United Nations by hailing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The U.S. President pushed the envelope of the world’s credulity even further by citing the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of 1948 as justification for his “war on terror” and his draconian policies for eliminating “terrorists” or other threats to world order with little or no due process.

Read on.

#1 Censored Story of 2008

Neck Deep co-author Robert Parry is being recognized this year by Sonoma State University's Project Censored for his reporting on the elimination of habeas corpus rights for those that George W. Bush designates as an enemy of the state. His articles "No Habeas Corpus for 'Any Person'" and "Still No Habeas Rights for You" were designated as this year's 1 censored story.

Parry will be giving the keynote address at Project Censored's Media Accountability Conference this October 26 and 27 at Sonoma State University. Last year, Neck Deep co-author Nat Parry was recognized by Project Censored for his article "Bush's Mysterious 'New Programs,'" and gave a talk on the subject of "militarizing the homeland."

To order Neck Deep, please visit www.neckdeepbook.com.

The Left's Media Miscalculation (Redux)

By Robert Parry
September 25, 2007 (Originally published April 29, 2005)

To understand how the United States got into today’s political predicament – where even fundamental principles like the separation of church and state are under attack – one has to look back at strategic choices made by the Right and the Left three decades ago.

In the mid-1970s, after the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and President Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal, American progressives held the upper-hand on media. Not only had the mainstream press exposed Nixon’s dirty tricks and published the Pentagon Papers secrets of the Vietnam War, but a vibrant leftist “underground” press informed and inspired a new generation of citizens.

Read on.

MoveOn & Media Double Standards

By Robert Parry
September 24, 2007

MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” ad may have gotten more attention than it deserved, but it also has underscored several important points: the foolishness of MoveOn’s ad-buying strategy, the cringing hypocrisy of the mainstream U.S. news media when attacked by the Right, and the pressing need to build independent news outlets.

Ironically, MoveOn has long resisted using its fund-raising capability on the Internet to support an independent news infrastructure, favoring instead the idea of making expensive ad buys in the New York Times and other Big Media outlets.

Read on.

Hard Lessons from MoveOn Fiasco

By Robert Parry
September 22, 2007

The furor over MoveOn.org’s silly “General Betray Us” ad – which led to a bipartisan Senate condemnation of MoveOn after Republicans blocked a move to include right-wing smears against military veterans like Democrats Max Cleland and John Kerry – carries a bitter lesson for the American Left.

Simply put: This is what happens when one side of American politics – the Right – spends three decades and many billions of dollars building a sophisticated and powerful media apparatus and the other side – the Left – does next to nothing on meda infrastructure.

Read on.