Two Wings, Four Despotisms by PAUL STREET Counterpunch, January 31, 2020 Republican Tyranny, Orange Menace Democracy is trumped in the United States by multiple, overlapping, interrelated and mutually reinforcing forms of despotism. The Trump administration and the Trumpified Republican Party, backed by a cult-like base, embody a creepy, neofascistic variant of the disease. The Republican White [...]
A Letter From Iowa by PAUL STREET Counterpunch, January 24, 2020 “Sanders is a Threat” I rode back out to Iowa to observe and even participate on behalf of Bernie Sanders’ progressive-populist candidacy in this state’s pivotal first-in-the-nation presidential Caucus. It’s a pivotal moment. A recent Des Moines Register poll has Sanders in lead among Iowa Democratic Party [...]
Truthdig, January 21, 2020 America’s political authoritarianism comes in different, yet combined, mutually reinforcing forms. We have the neofascist authoritarianism of the white nationalist Republican Party, its Great Dog-Wagging God in the White House and his cultish, white-Amerikaner base. Donald Trump may well not leave the White House without a dangerous fight if he is bested in the [...]
Trump Showed Us Who He Was Before He Became President by PAUL STREET Counterpunch, January 24, 2020 When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. – Maya Angelou “It’s amazing,” fellow CounterPuncher Eric Draitser recently wrote me, “that people ever thought a Trump administration would be something other than this.” “This” is the demented [...]
Assassination, Lies and the Trump Difference by PAUL STREET Counterpunch, January 10, 2010 United States presidents have long lied about the pretexts for, and the nature of, their murderous and criminal foreign policy actions. Remember George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s fraudulent claims that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq government possessed vast stocks of “weapons of mass destruction” [...]
The Inauthentic Opposition is “Stunned” by a Crime it Encouraged Counterpunch, January 6, 2020 by PAUL STREET Top Democrats are “stunned” that Trump impulsively ordered the killing of “the commanding general of a sovereign government” (New York Times) – Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassim Soliemani –on the sovereign territory of Iraq without the permission of Iraq’s government. [...]
The Democratic Party’s Campaign to Re-Elect President Trump by PAUL STREET Counterpunch, January 3, 2020 Anyone who hoped that the terrible experience of a neofascistic presidency might jolt the Democratic Party media and politics establishment into embracing the basic lesson of the 2016 election – that running a dismal, dollar-drenched centrist well to the right of [...]
Counterpunch, January 24, 2020 “Sanders is a Threat” I rode back out to Iowa to observe and even participate on behalf of Bernie Sanders’ progressive-populist candidacy in this state’s pivotal first-in-the-nation presidential Caucus. It’s a pivotal moment. A recent Des Moines Register poll has Sanders in lead among Iowa Democratic Party Caucus-goers. CNN just released a poll [...]
Truthdig, December 20, 2019 You don’t have to be a leftist or a liberal to worry that the demented fascist oligarch Donald Trump might try to negate the United States republic’s electoral process and term limits. Consider the following statement from the distinguished conservative scholar and American Enterprise Institute fellow Norm Ornstein last week: It seems clear [...]
Counterpunch, December 16, 2019 United States President Donald Trump is a racist, a nativist, a narcissist, a bully, a classist, an authoritarian, an eco-exterminist, and a neofascist. Given all that and the front-page impeachment drama sparked by Trump’s arms-for-dirt shenanigans, it can be all too easy to forget that he is also – consistent with [...]