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Stop Trump! Stop Clinton!! Stop the Madness (and Let Me Get Off)!
Another bummer indeed. It’s been nearly four and a half decades since His Majesty, Dr. Gonzo, wrote those words…and my oh my has the rot turned putrid, the stench overwhelming.
Were it only the fact that a corporate imperialist sociopath and a raving pseudo-fascist gasbag are competing to become the Murderer-in-Chief, one could simply retreat to the friendly confines of the Hobson’s Choice Inn. There, among the carpets and curtains carrying the stains of elections past, one would watch the political circus in peace while doing the work of organizing against both Tweedle Bum and Tweedle Bummer. More
The Thrilla at Hofstra: How Trump Won the Debate
He won the debate. I know it runs counter to conventional wisdom – that’s so rare for me! – but I award the first 2016 presidential debate to Donald Trump.
This isn’t to say that I disagree with what the mainstream men and women of the pundit class said they witnessed. Like them, I watched a well-prepared Clinton outmaneuver a political amateur who showed up to class after a night of partying following a year of refusing to crack open a book. Trump rambled, repeated himself, interrupted and bullied. He conflated NATO and the EU. He even unleashed a fat joke. More
Cliché and Banality at the Debates: Trump and Clinton on the Middle East
Watching them both yacking on about the Middle East as a pink dawn glowed from behind the Lebanese mountains above Beirut, I found the Trump-Clinton show a grimly instructive experience. In the few hundred miles east and south of Lebanon, hundreds are dying every week – in Syria, in Yemen, in Iraq – and yet there were the terrible twins playing “I can beat Isis better than you can beat Isis”. Was this what the Arab world really meant to the reality show participants at the unpronounceable university campus on Long Island?
What was it Trump said to Clinton? “You’ve been fighting Isis your entire adult life!” And what did Clinton say? “Well at least I have a plan to fight Isis!” After an hour, I was praying that the Lebanese slept on amid the mountains. Please God there would be electricity cuts in Aleppo and Baghdad and Sanaa – just for these 90 minutes, you understand – so that the people enduring the Middle East tragedy did not witness how the next US president was using their homelands as a movie back-lot. More
Top Stories
Exclusively in the New Print Issue of CounterPunch
How Hillary Could Provoke a Nuclear War
Alan Nasser digs into Hillary Clinton’s horrifying nuclear weapons policy, where the use of a new generation of nukes is viewed as a legitimate tactic for conventional warfare. Hillary’s Mother Complex: Ruth Fowler dissects Hillary’s strange brand of feminism. Inside Our Camps: Lee Ballinger recounts the appalling history of the US internment camps for Japanese Americans; Up in Smoke: Josh Schlossberg investigates how the corporate environmental movement quietly promotes biomass energy; Beyond Progressivism: Andy Smolski charts how the progressive movement got coopted by Big Capital. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on melting glaciers; Yvette Carnell on the meaning of Colin Kaepernick; Paul Buhle on Margaret Sanger; Mike Whitney on Janet Yellen and Big Money; Ed Leer on the films of John Carpenter; Chris Floyd on ISIS and the new neocons; Daniel Raventos and Julie Wark on Europe’s Rebel Cities; and Alan Wieder on Studs Terkel on Third parties.
