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WHO RULES: THE ISRAEL LOBBY
OR UNCLE SAM?
The answer
at last! Uri Avnery, former Knesset member, assesses the Lobby's
power. "If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow
annulling the 10 Commandments, 95 U.S. Senators (at least) would
sign the bill forthwith." But, yes, in the end the dog wags
the tail.Fifty
years ago Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" blew the cobwebs
out of millions of young minds and drove a stake through the
heart of Eisenhower's America. Lenni Brenner remembers Ginsberg
in the East Village.Dr Mengele died in exile, in disguise. Dr Ishii
died rich and recognized, in his own Tokyo home. Christopher
Reed on Japanese WW2 medical tortures and how the U.S. covered
them up.CounterPunch
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The
Beltway Gang Didn't Get Colbert, But Nearly Everyone Else Did
Colbert's Moment
By CHRIS DOLS
An old friend of mine with a penchant
for Marxist jargoneering takes every opportunity to remind anyone
who will listen that, 'the American ruling class is the dumbest
class ever to rule.' After speaking in front of the most representative
audience of the American ruling class that he'll ever land --the
White House Press Correspondence Dinner --Stephen Colbert proved
it. Colbert impaled them and they were dumb enough to claim,
as Noam Scheiber of the New Republic did "that he just wasn't
very entertaining." Of course, comments like this just vindicate
Colbert. Josh Orton of huffingtonpost.com was one of the few
in attendance who shared Colbert's contempt for the evening's
collection of Generals, judges, politicians and the press that
parrot them. "The real reason for this circle-jerk,"
Orton wrote was, "affirmation of continued reporting mediocrity."
We've all day-dreamed similar
scenarios: "What if I had 20 uninterrupted minutes to say
whatever I wanted to the mainstream media, George W. Bush, Supreme
Court Justice Scalia, and a handful of the US Military's ranking
generals?" Now we can be certain we'll never get the chance;
Colbert zinged them all so perfectly that John Stewart has a
better chance of landing Wolf Blitzer's job than any of us has
of getting invited to such a gala ever again.
Colbert is the host of the enormously popular satirical Daily
Show spin-off, "The Colbert Report." His detailed study
of the talking head circuit is apparent immediately: He submits
Bill O'Reilly as his closest influence, and has even made O'Reilly's
habit of cutting guests' mics a part of his own repertoire. They
stand together in the war to defend America against the "secular,
liberal media elite."
Unlike John Stewart, who would be far too polite in front of
this crowd, Colbert's character doesn't know how to hold back.
In countless blogs and columns Colbert's performance is being
compared to Stewart's now-famous appearance on Crossfire during
which he called Tucker Carlson "a dick," compared mainstream
political debates to professional wrestling and managed to get
the show pulled from CNN's programming. But Colbert's mockery
went one step further: his satire showed each one of them --from
the scrappiest press correspondent to the president himself --what
they look like to the rest of us. That's why they weren't laughing
at his jokes.
Displaying his credentials to fill Scott McLellan's old job as
White House Press Secretary, Colbert --referring to the press
--told Bush, "I have nothing but contempt for these people."
He could have said the same thing out of character.
"Over the last five years
you people [in the press] were so good --over tax cuts, WMD intelligence,
the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know
and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good
times, as far as we knew."
Rumor has it that John Stewart
is popular among right-wingers. I don't know why they like him,
but I can believe it. I can't accept however that any significant
numbers of Bush-supporters have even the slightest tolerance
for Stephen Colbert; he hides his disdain for Bush-supporters
about as well as his disdain for the man himself.
"Pay no attention to the
people who say the glass is half empty, because 32% means its
2/3 empty. There's still some liquid in that glass is my point,
but I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash."
After comparing Bush's legacy
to Rocky Balboa's ("The heartwarming story of a man who
was repeatedly punched in the face") Colbert rebutted the
pundits who charge that the administration's recent personnel
changes are tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on the
Titanic:
"That is a terrible metaphor.
This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring.
If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!"
And just in case you were afraid
that Colbert might share some of John Stewart's political naïveté,
John McCain finally heard what Jeffrey St. Clair has been dying
to tell him
"John McCain is here ...
what a maverick! Somebody find out what fork he used on his salad,
because I guarantee you it wasn't a salad fork. This guy could
have used a spoon! There's no predicting him. By the way, Senator
McCain, it's so wonderful to see you coming back into the Republican
fold. I have a summerhouse in South Carolina; look me up when
you go to speak at Bob Jones University."
Generals were told, "If
you're strong enough to go on one of those pundit shows, you
can stand on a bank of computers and order men into battle."
Justice Scalia was flipped off, "just talking some Sicilian
with my paisan." And he took the opportunity to welcome
New Orleans' Mayor Nagin to Washington DC, "the chocolate
city with a marshmallow center. And a graham cracker crust of
corruption. It's a Mallomar."
Watching Colbert, I thought
about how H L Mencken must have felt at the Scopes Monkey Trial
where he narrowly escaped a mob-lynching at the hands of those
fundamentalists he ridiculed so scathingly. Mencken, who posted
Scopes' bail and shaped the legal strategy in his living room,
acknowledged that their defeat to whom he called "evangelist
mountebanks" was "a tragedy in a way but I might add
it was not a tragedy to me I enjoyed it tremendously." Colbert
knows better than anybody the tragedy he satirizes so eerily
well. But because he enjoys it so tremendously, he helps us find
some joy in it, too.
On his own program, Colbert
often plays to his audience --as if they're Bush supporters --saying
"you people get it," knowing that they actually do
get it; the satire, that is. At the press dinner, Colbert knew
that he didn't have his usual audience; and that crowd just doesn't
get it.
Chris Dols is a civil engineering student at
University of Wisconsin --Madison and editor of the nascent www.northpinckney.com;
Chris can be contacted at chris@northpinckney.com
Now
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Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
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