Alexander Cockburn's Blog, page 5

Mitt Romney Flip-Flops His Way to the Top for 04/06/2012

Mitt Romney will be the Republican to face President Obama in the fall. Tuesday night was the clincher, as the former Massachusetts governor won in Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington D.C. He may stumble on, but the Catholic zealot Rick Santorum is finished, wiped out by Romney's vast financial resources.

Eight years ago, Romney began his bid to win the Republican nomination, only to be c ...

Updated: Fri Apr 06, 2012

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Trayvon Martin and the Doom of the Republican Party for 03/30/2012

Like most things that happen in America these days, the Trayvon Martin case is turning into yet another hearse trundling the Republican Party to its doom in November.

Here's a brief outline of the facts. It's Feb. 26. Trayvon Martin is a 17-year-old black kid watching a big basketball game in the home of his father's fiancee in Sanford, a small-town outlier of Orlando, Fla. Sanford has a ...

Updated: Fri Mar 30, 2012

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The Myth of the 'The Knowledge Economy' for 03/23/2012

Only 25 percent of all Americans go to college, and only 16 percent of those actually try to learn anything. Welcome a nation of helots.

"In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a first-class education," President Obama famously declared in his 2010 State of the Union address, just as millions of high-schoolers across the nation were going through the annua ...

Updated: Fri Mar 23, 2012

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The Lost-Cause War in Afghanistan for 03/16/2012

Americans have been expressing bafflement that there has not been more outrage in Afghanistan about the lethal rampage of a U.S. Sergeant who killed 16 Afghans, including nine children, in the early hours of March 11. As with the burning of the Qurans last month, the Pentagon has been groveling in contrition. The acting commander of the U.S.-led coalition, Lt. Gen. Adrian Bradshaw, expressed &q ...

Updated: Fri Mar 16, 2012

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Romney's Republican Death March for 03/09/2012

In the end, Mormon money and organization has stopped crusading papism in its tracks. In the crucial state of Ohio, millionaire Mitt Romney beat Rick Santorum. In the nine other Super Tuesday races, Romney won in Massachusetts, Idaho, Alabama, Virginia and Vermont; Santorum in Oklahoma, Tennessee and North Dakota. Newt Gingrich swept his home state of Georgia.

The primaries run until the ...

Updated: Fri Mar 09, 2012

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Witnessing the Death of the Republican Party for 03/02/2012

A week ago, Rick Santorum looked as though he might give Mitt Romney a thrashing in the Michigan primary, which would have unleashed a wave of grim assessments of the Mormon's prospects: his failure to lock up the race for the Republican nomination, his inability to connect with the common man or woman, the looming possibility of a brokered convention.

Romney's put such a fate behind him ...

Updated: Fri Mar 02, 2012

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Over the Top With Rick Santorum for 02/24/2012

Surely Rick Santorum is the most fanatical Christian to run for the Republican nomination in the modern era, maybe any era. Next to him, Pat Robertson, billionaire founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, who ran for the nomination in 1988, has the tolerant, glassy-eyed bonhomie of Dean Martin. Robertson has always been in show business. Four years ago, we had Mike Huckabee, the evangelis ...

Updated: Fri Feb 24, 2012

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Hypocrisy and Assad for 02/17/2012

Few spectacles have been more surreal than senior U.S. officials — starting with the president, the secretary of state and the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. — solemnly lecturing Bashar al-Assad and his beleaguered Syrian government on the need to accommodate rebel forces whose sponsors are intent on slaughtering the ruling Alawite minority or driving them into the sea.

At one g ...

Updated: Fri Feb 17, 2012

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Time for the Tumbrils! for 02/10/2012

Back in the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse pointed out in one of his books that the Pentagon had given up on verbs. Pentagonese consisted of clotted groups of nouns, marching along in groups of three or four. Verbs, which connected nouns in purposive thrust, were regarded as unreliable and probably subversive. They talked too much, gave too much away.

Despite the Pentagon's best efforts, linguis ...

Updated: Fri Feb 10, 2012

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The Port Huron Statement -- 50 Years on for 02/03/2012

Fifty years ago, a group of students in the American Midwest issued a document rather portentously titled "The Port Huron Statement." It was the founding manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society and became one of the most famous documents of that momentous and creative decade.

Read any history of the upsurges in the United States in the 1960s written over the past three d ...

Updated: Fri Feb 03, 2012

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