This new raunch culture didn't mark the death of feminism; it was evidence that the feminist project had already been achieved. We'd "earned" the right to look at Playboy; we were "empowered" enough to get Brazilian bikini waxes.

Women had come so far, I learned, that we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny. Instead, it was time for us to join the frat party of pop culture where men had been enjoying themselves all along.

If male chauvinist pigs were men who regarded women as pieces of meat, we would beat them at their own game and be female chauvinist pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves.

I tried to get with the programme, but I could never make the argument add up in my head. How is resurrecting every stereotype of female sexuality that feminism endeavoured to banish good for women? Why is labouring to look like Paris Hilton empowering?

And how is imitating a stripper or a porn star - a woman whose job is to imitate arousal in the first place - going to render us sexually liberated?   more »

Cheney is the laughing stock of America now. The way things work in Washington, that might be just what it takes to stop him from his present collision course with Iran.

The accident was bad enough. Getting a guy whom he shot, while hunting in Texas, to take the blame was, well, just one bit too much. Trying to prevent the public even knowing about it was brain-dead.

The best way to demolish a dangerous man is to make him look stupid. He whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make foolish.

I mean, if the incident was important enough to merit a phone call, wouldn't it have occurred to someone to ask whether the team of highly paid professionals at the White House press office should possibly, maybe, provided-it's-ok-with-the-VP-of-course get involved--especially since, as Cheney has noted, he didn't have any press people traveling with him?

It doesn't take a screaming liberal Bush-hater to see how the White House's no response feeds the image of Little Georgie as Cheney's dancing monkey.   more »

SETTING THE WORLD ON FIRE

A militarist state must have war: to justify its draconian rule (and those $550 billion "defense" budgets), to find new fields for dominion and swag, and to seal with blood its illegitimate compact with the people, seeking to make them complicit in its crimes, which are committed in their name, for their "security."

The kindling has been piled high, stuffed with tinder and doused with gasoline. The match has been lit. All it will take is the slightest flick of the wrist to set off the conflagration.

We are now living in the interval, the few heartbeats left before the great flame ignites.

The heap of kindling has been a long time building, but in recent weeks, the work has intensified to a fever pitch. With relentless urgency, the American people are being habituated to the prospect of several interrelated upheavals -- new war, new terror attacks -- and the predetermined result of these events:

The final, open establishment of presidential tyranny, a militarized "commander state" where executive power is beyond the law, and endless war endlessly prolongs the "emergency measures" of the authoritarian regime.   more »

Over the next few weeks and perhaps even months, the propaganda used to vilify Iran will intensify, just as it was prior to the Iraq War.

We will be forced to hear, repeatedly, the evils of the regime, the wicked intentions of the new president and the manufactured threat to our security.

We will be told over and over again how Iran has been a pariah on the world stage, that they overthrew our puppet dictator a few decades back, held America’s embassy hostage, support most of the world’s terrorists...

That they are a tyrannical regime, want to destroy Israel, are a clear and present danger to our national security and, if we are lucky, that they even harbor the bogeymen of the moment, Al-Qaeda.

The newspapers of importance and prestige, those in New York and Washington, will be used to conjure up false intelligence and bogus news reports, most manufactured by the war marketers using cherry-picked intelligence.

The false reporting of reporters with vested interests, concocted documents and reports from foreign intelligence services, and the false accusations by so-called Iranian dissidents and defectors.   more »

ON MY LIST OF 'AMERICA'S MOST-HATED'

A right-wing ideologue levels the charge that dangerous radicals have infiltrated college campuses across the U.S. in a plot to corrupt America’s youth and undermine the U.S. government.

It sounds like something straight out of the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s. But this red-baiting is happening right now--as the latest project of ex-leftist-turned-rabid-right-winger David Horowitz.

This week, Horowitz released The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, a book he claims exposes what amounts to a left-wing plot, based on college campuses, to destroy America.

“Coming to a Campus Near You: Terrorists, racists and communists--you know them as The Professors,” reads the book’s inside cover.

The long list of leftist sins contained in the book is laughable coming from Horowitz--a man whose biography describes him as a “lifelong civil rights activist,” but who once wrote a column titled “Guns don’t kill Black people, other Blacks do” and who has pushed ads in college papers claiming that Blacks “benefited from slavery.”   more »

Europe's contempt for other cultures can't be sustained. A continent that inflicted colonial brutality all over the globe for 200 years has little claim to the superiority of its values.

Is the argument over the Danish cartoons really reducible to a matter of free speech? Even if we believe that free speech is a fundamental value, that does not give us carte blanche to say what we like in any context, regardless of consequence or effect.

Respect for others, especially in an increasingly interdependent world, is a value of at least equal importance.

Europe has never had to worry too much about context or effect because for around 200 years it dominated and colonised most of the world.

Such was Europe's omnipotence that it never needed to take into account the sensibilities, beliefs and attitudes of those that it colonised, however sacred and sensitive they might have been.

On the contrary, European countries imposed their rulers, religion, beliefs, language, racial hierarchy and customs on those to whom they were entirely alien.

There is a profound hypocrisy - and deep historical ignorance - when Europeans complain about the problems posed by the ethnic and religious minorities in their midst, for that is exactly what European colonial rule meant for peoples around the world.   more »

CHENEY'S CHAPPAQUIDDICK

There were more important factors than sex behind my Chappaquiddick analogy. That analogy seems to drive conservatives insane, by the way.

The hate mail and even threats I've received are beyond anything I've ever seen. I guess the word's been such a treasured icon of hate for them that the possible loss of it drives them into a frenzy.

Here are some of the "C" (for Chappaquiddick) factors in the Cheney shooting:

1. Someone with a documented history of drinking problems causes a serious accident, and then avoids the authorities for a period of time - one that happens to be long enough to get the alcohol out of his system.

2. The first stories of the accident are confusing and self-contradictory. (In this case, since Cheney didn't speak himself, the most glaring inconsistencies are Armstrong's.

Specifically, she - and now Cheney - describe her as an eyewitness, although she told the Associated Press she thought at first Cheney had suffered a heart attack. That would mean she never saw the shooting.)

3. A powerful figure holds himself out as being above the law, and - at least for a time - appears to get away with it.

4. When the powerful person finally speaks, allegedly to 'come clean,' there are still inconsistencies and glaring contradictions in his story.   more »

Never-published photos, and an internal Army report, show more Iraqi prisoner abuse -- evidence the government is fighting to hide...View the gallery of photos

ABU GHRAIB REPORT REVEALS FULL EXTENT OF ABUSE

· 1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse

· 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse

· 660 images of adult pornography

· 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees

· 29 images of soldiers in simulated sexual acts

Nearly two years after the first pictures of naked and humiliated Iraqi detainees emerged from Abu Ghraib prison, the full extent of the abuse became known for the first time yesterday with a leaked report from the US army's internal investigation into the scandal.   more »

16 FEBRUARY

Guantánamo: America's Disgrace

Bin Laden's Game Plan

Bob Herbert: Bloodletting in the White House...Cheney Will Go

Bush Regime Starts Huge Propaganda Campaign Against Iran

This Site Will Continue to "Glorify Terrorism"

William Blum: "My 15 Minutes of Fame - Thanks to bin Laden"

Cheney Scandal: Booze, Sex and Shooting Quail

Young Republicans at Play: Pearls, Blazers and Bigotry on the Loose