Local News & Opinion

Ref.: Civic Events

Ref.: Arts & Education Events

Ref.: Public Service Notices

Travel

01.13 Hawaii, the Unique State

Books, Films, Arts & Education

01.24 Can Apple “Rescue” US Education? (Graphics)

01.23 What You (Really) Need to Know

01.22 How to Forecast Weather Infographic w/Simple Explanations

Letters

Ref. : Letters to the editor

Health Care & Environment

02.10 LET’S REMAKE THE WAY WE MAKE THINGS

02.09 Obama shouldn’t compromise on birth control with GOP, religious leaders or an unpopular Congress - video

02.09 Cancer rates triple among New York police officers who responded to 9/11

02.08 The seed emergency: The threat to food and democracy

02.07 Bill Gates backs climate scientists lobbying for large-scale geoengineering

02.04 Your Day at the Beach Could Soon Lead to a Night at the Hospital

02.03 Obama Won't Touch Climate With a 10-Foot Pole

02.03 Komen reverses decision to cut Planned Parenthood funding

02.03 Reforming EU Deep-Sea Fisheries Management

02.02 Obama’s Support for Natural Gas Drilling "A Painful Moment" for Communities Exposed to Fracking- video

02.02 By defunding Planned Parenthood, the Susan G Komen Foundation betrays women

02.02 Ohio Tries to Escape Fate as a Dumping Ground for Fracking Fluid

01.31 Eleanor Smeal dissects Obama vs. Catholic Church controversy over birth control coverage - video

01.30 Report: Small planes still pour lead into skies

01.30 Scientists Call on Obama Administration to Use Science as Guide for Arctic

01.28 Universal health care proposal stalls in California Senate

01.27 Apple, Electronics and Environmental Ills

01.25 Solar Cheaper Than Diesel Making India’s Mittal Believer: Energy

01.24 Sounding an Alarm on Birds and Mercury

01.24 Why Don’t We Have Abundant Solar Power? Blame Financing, and Industry, not Science

01.22 The Money Traps in U.S. Health Care

01.22 Looking Inside the Twinkie

Ref. Dollars for Doctors - How Industry Money Reaches Physicians

Ref. 2010 Comparative Price Report Medical and Hospital Fees by Country - Graphics

Ref. Health at a Glance 2011 - OECD Indicators

Ref. : Why is Healthcare Absurdly Expensive in USA (Part 2) [Graphics] (Part 1 is here)

Video Health Care Systems in Less Corrupt Countries

“News” Media

02.07 Did Obama make the economy worse? Not according to most statistics

02.03 Media Watch: CNN's Erin Burnett regurgitates right-wing talking points to scare retired people - video

02.02 ABC's Iran Propaganda

02.02 The Ongoing “Foxification” of the Wall Street Journal

01.30 While temperatures rise, denialists reach lower

01.29 Fox News psychiatrist: Newt Gingrich's affairs 'mean he might make a strong president'

01.22 ‘Shocking victory’: With SOPA shelved, Markos Moulitsas on a way forward for Internet policy - video

Daily The Daily Howler

Justice Matters

02.05 Why the AGs Must Not Settle: Robo-signing Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

02.04 THE CAGING OF AMERICA

02.03 Senate Votes To Ban Its Members From Insider Trading... Kind Of

01.31 Senate clears way for vote on insider-trading ban

01.25 Why all the robo-signing? Shedding light on the shadow banking system

01.25 In Iraq, Haditha case is reminder of justice denied

01.22 Still Not Clear on SOPA & PIPA? Infographic w/Simple Explanations

US Politics, Policy & Culture

02.10 The Cancer in Occupy

02.10 How Opus Dei Influenced Rick Santorum

02.10 People Are Not Leaving the Labor Force

02.09 Obama, Explained

02.09 OPED: The White Underclass

02.09 EDITORIAL: A Terrible Transportation Bill

02.09 THE OBAMA MEMOS

02.06 Are Conservatives More Fearful Than Liberals?

02.04 Soaking the Poor, State by State

02.04 Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian's Rosy Outlook On The Future of Politics

02.03 SUPERBOWL XLVI: Are You Ready for Some Football???

02.03 Buffett rules: Sheldon Whitehouse introduces the Paying a Fair Share Act - video

02.02 Secrecy Shrouds ‘Super PAC’ Funds in Latest Filings

02.02 Steve Israel condemns GOP Keystone XL ‘stunt,’ cheers Democratic Drive to 25 to reclaim the House - video

02.01 Rich Patrons Are Major Source of Romney’s Cash

01.31 How Newt Gingrich Crippled Congress

01.30 The Truth About the Conservative Mind: Why Reactionaries from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin Have Fought Real Liberty

01.30 Corporate Rule Is Not Inevitable

01.30 Clashes in Oakland: 400 Arrests, Tear Gas, Flash-Bang Grenades

01.30 A European look at the US primaries - video

01.29 Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton

01.25 Inside Romney’s Tax Returns: A Reading Guide

01.24 ILLUSIONS: Being Led Down the Primrose Path...???

01.24 Science Bulletins: Whales Give Dolphins a Lift - video

01.24 Buffett On Why Romney Should Pay Higher Taxes: He’s Just ‘Shoving Around Money,’ Not ‘Straining His Back’

01.24 THE OBAMA MEMOS

01.22 Three Takeaways From South Carolina

01.21 Why Is There So Much God in Our Politics? The Religious Right's Theocratic Plan for the 2012 Election

High Crimes?

Economics, Gov't. & Business

02.10 This is no bailout for Main Street America

02.10 Why the Foreclosure Deal May Not Be So Hot After All

02.10 Matt Taibbi assesses the $26 billion settlement designed to aid victims of foreclosure fraud - video

02.10 Foreclosure Deal to Spur U.S. Home Seizures

02.08 Banks Paying Homeowners to Avoid Foreclosures

02.07 App Stores Create 500,000 U.S. Jobs

02.07 The Payroll Tax Fight

02.07 Obama super PAC decision: President blesses fundraising for Priorities USA Action

02.06 How Privatizing Government Shovels Cash to Parasitic Corporations and Undermines Democracy

02.05 We’re More Unequal Than You Think – Graphic: Unequal rise in income

02.03 PRIVATE INEQUITY

02.02 The New American Divide

02.02 American Airlines proposes to end all four pension plans

02.01 Economics 101

01.30 New Strategy, Old Pentagon Budget

01.30 Where Did All the Workers Go? 60 Years of Economic Change in 1 Graph

01.29 The Apple Boycott: People Are Spouting Nonsense about Chinese Manufacturing

01.29 Made in the World

01.28 Matt Taibbi ponders whether Obama’s embrace of populist rhetoric is already impacting Wall Street - video

01.28 Sugar daddy Adelson could save $500 million in taxes if his boy Gingrich wins - video

01.28 How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’

01.27 Unemployment in Spain Rises to 22.9%

01.27 Chinese Company Continues Plan To Replace Workforce With 500,000 Robots

01.27 Details Emerge of New Financial Fraud Unit

01.27 Not all jobs are equal

01.27 The Shift from Manufacturing to Service Economy - Graphic

01.25 Billionaires Occupy Davos as 0.01% Bemoan Inequality

01.24 Germany has the economic strengths America once boasted

01.23 State Capitalism: The visible hand

01.22 How Big Money Bought Our Democracy, Corrupted Both Parties, and Set Us Up for Another Financial Crisis - video

01.22 How U.S. lost out on Apple's iPhone work

International

02.03 What the Occupy movement must learn from Sundance

02.02 US plans to halt Afghan combat role early surprise Kabul

01.31 TABLE TALK

01.30 With its deadly drones, the US is fighting a coward's war

01.30 UN panel aims for 'a future worth choosing'

01.26 Iran is ready to return to nuclear talks

01.24 Reagan’s Hand in Guatemala’s Genocide

We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.

You can also mail a check to:

Baltimore News Network, Inc.
P.O. Box 42581
Baltimore, MD 21284-2581

Kerry and Bush: The Joke's on Us

COMMENTARY:

Kerry and Bush: The Joke's on Us

by DAVE LINDORFF

Republicans should be taking no pleasure in this. While it's always fun to see a stuffed-shirt like Kerry get exposed and humiliated, the president is in no position to mock.

There are so many things to say about the John Kerry gaffe, it's hard to know where to start.

Just the idea of President Bush’s scolding Kerry and telling him that "words are important" is beyond belief. This, after all, is the guy who for five years has been warning Americans about various "nookular" threats facing us. A guy who has his every utterance scripted for him and yet still manages to screw up his lines with regularity. A guy who had to have a cueing device hidden in his ear canal during his debates with that selfsame Kerry, so he'd avoid just standing at the lectern and saying "duh" in response to questions.

But let's not stop there. Kerry himself was right in character. He clearly didn't write his own joke, and was too slow-witted to get the joke he was supposed to deliver, which reportedly was that if students didn't work and study hard might end up someday being ignorant incurious leaders like President Bush, and getting the country into another mess like Iraq. It wasn't much of a joke, but by bunging it up, Kerry revealed his Boston Brahman snobbishness, saying instead that if students didn't study hard, they'd end up in Iraq--the clear implication being that he thinks that the US troops fighting and dying in Iraq are there because they’re uneducated.

Kerry, the candidate who voted for the war but opposes the war, who voted for funding for the war and voted against it, is now trying to say that the joke he told is not the joke that was written for him, but that's not going to work. He certainly should have understood instantly what he was saying when he said it, and realized how smarmy it was. What we're left with is the unavoidable conclusion that Kerry doesn't know anything about what he's saying when he says it. Like Bush, he's just reading a script, and like Bush, he's bungling it badly.

That said, Republicans should be taking no pleasure in this. While it's always fun to see a stuffed-shirt like Kerry get exposed and humiliated, the president is in no position to mock.

Besides, there is the reality that most of the men and women fighting and dying for the US in the deserts and urban jungles of Iraq and Afghanistan are there, not because they are stupid or intellectually lazy, as Kerry said, but because they were too poor to pay for their college or to have their parents pay for their college the way Bush's and Kerry's parents did for them. They're there because Bush and his Republican Congress have for six years slashed federal aid for higher education, driving students into ROTC programs, where they became easy pickings for Bush's wars upon graduation. They're also there because people like Bush and Kerry have conspired to encourage American firms to ship well-paying jobs overseas, leaving students with little but retail clerical work and waitering to help them pay their bills.

As for the active duty troops fighting alongside them, while some may just be patriotic kids from military families who wanted a little excitement, and some may be sadists with a passion for killing, torture and fancy weaponry, most are there because there were no other jobs available. They're not stupid, John. But neither are they happy to be there, George. They're there because both of you have betrayed them in the name of "globalization."

In the end, the joke's really on us, because ever since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, we Americans have accepted uncritically the idea that our political leaders will be simply animated noisemakers for transmitting the carefully scripted "talking points," sound bites, polemics and yes, even jokes written for them by a backroom group of political strategists--all presented as though they were coming from the brains of the people doing the talking.

We get the government, and the politicians, we deserve.

Let’s at least be thankful for the laughs they give us, inadvertently.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns, titled This Can't be Happening!, is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's latest book is The Case for Impeachment, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky. Visit his website for more information. Lindorff may be reached at dlindorff@yahoo.com. This story is published in the Baltimore Chronicle with permission of the author.

Copyright © 2006 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved.

Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.

This story was published on November 2, 2006.

Public Service Ads: