Stories by David Corn
David Corn is the Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones and the co-author of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush. He writes a blog at davidcorn.com.
Instead of news, the mainstream media has been churning out a new political soap opera -- "As the Clintons Turn." Will Bill and Hillary survive or be voted off? Will they succumb to temptation? What will those rascals do next?
Posted on Feb 16, 2001, Source: AlterNet
With the Democrats tied up in knots, the GOP has a chance to demolish the party of Clinton with an unlikely but sound strategy -- championing campaign finance reform.
Posted on Feb 9, 2001, Source: AlterNet
The media has devoted more ink and airtime to George W. Bush's punctuality during the past two weeks than to puncturing the many misrepresentations and mischaracterizations of his initial policy initiatives.
Posted on Feb 6, 2001, Source: AlterNet
A piece of Hollywoodish sex intrigue in the nation's capital was recently leaked to me by an anonymous tipster; but was the tipster more of a story than the tip?
Posted on Jan 26, 2001, Source: AlterNet
George Bush II, though he has tried to bill himself as a New Republican, is acting along stark and familar conservative lines -- and so far is living up (or is it down?) to not-so-high expectations.
Posted on Jan 23, 2001, Source: AlterNet
The US Army's new advertising slogan -- "an Army of one" -- is crafted to appeal to Generation Y, a group raised on a diet of Internet individualism. But the new Army campaign has more truth to it than its authors and the Army may have realized.
Posted on Jan 12, 2001, Source: AlterNet
There's a dangerous and wily foe lying in wait for George W. Bush on Capital Hill: Senator John McCain, who promises to push his campaign finance bill on to the Senate agenda as soon as Bush takes office.
Posted on Jan 8, 2001, Source: AlterNet
John Ashcroft, Bush's nominee for attorney general, could conceivably be asked some hard questions by Democrats about his religious right ties. But in reality, he has to worry more about facing spitballs than live ammo.
Posted on Jan 2, 2001, Source: AlterNet
In the opening pirouettes of Campaign 2004 -- yes, it is under way -- the Republicans wiped the Democrats by choosing Colin Powell as secretary of state, while the Democrats chose cash-man Terry McAuliffe as their party's chairman.
Posted on Dec 27, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Bush and his comrades are attempting to use calls for healing and bipartisanship to advance their quite partisan goals.
Posted on Dec 15, 2000, Source: AlterNet
What would have happened in Election 2000 if the Democrats had a scandal-mongering machine like the Republicans?
Posted on Dec 8, 2000, Source: AlterNet
It isn't 1984, but the post-election spin coming out of the Bush campaign would put Big Brother to shame.
Posted on Dec 1, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Though it is fun to watch a media feeding frenzy that does not involve sex or grisly murder (at least not yet), the lesson of Chadgate is clear: in national discourse, plot beats policy.
Posted on Nov 27, 2000, Source: AlterNet
With the grandest political prize at stake, every utterance from the bipolar political class is suspect. Is there any doubt that if the circumstances were reversed the Democrats would be arguing the case for finality and Republicans would be praising the noble, age-old tradition of hand-counting ballots?
Posted on Nov 20, 2000, Source: AlterNet
On election night, the pundits were constantly rewriting the script of why Bush/Gore won/lost. In the end, they could have come up with either of the two following scenarios, trying to divine big meaning about political trends and the nation itself...
Posted on Nov 10, 2000, Source: AlterNet
The real shocker in the '00 presidential election was the ungodly amount of money that poured into the campaign coffers of George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Posted on Nov 6, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Anti-Nader Democrats are asserting that people who want to vote for principles have an obligation to stick with the party that craves their votes but has no room for their ideals. Accusing Nader of causing Gore's downfall is akin to blaming a warning label for a product that fails.
Posted on Oct 27, 2000, Source: AlterNet
What explains how George W. Bush can get away with sounding so dense? Perhaps after the past seven years, many Americans actually are eager to have a president they do not have to take seriously.
Posted on Oct 24, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Debates over the safety of irradiated food -- like beef that is shot with the equivalent of 150 million chest x-rays -- can become enmired in scientific jargon. What's a consumer to do? Has the FDA and the food industry actually endorsed a procedure that boosts profits at the expense of the public?
Posted on Oct 9, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Infectious disease is a more likely danger to Americans than a lone North Korean nuclear ICBM. Yet political discussions regarding national security still focus on comic-book threats of nuclear annihilation.
Posted on Oct 2, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Too often, presidential debates are just one more place for the candidates to give their stump speeches. ("Glad you asked. My twenty-seven-point plan on that subject covers this....") So why not ask some of these hardcore questions that could force Gore and Bush out of their rhetorical boxes?
Posted on Sep 25, 2000, Source: AlterNet
It has not been a good season for the national security crowd. Star Wars goes splat. Espionage cases fizzle out. Clinton orders documents declassified that damn the CIA's involvement in Chile. Might the military-industrial spycatchers and warriors have a bead or two of sweat on their furrowed brows?
Posted on Sep 18, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Joe Lieberman is right: the public should know more, not less, about politicians' personal faith. If religion is a crucial part of a leader's life, the public should know that fact, and ponder how it may sway his or her decision-making.
Posted on Sep 11, 2000, Source: AlterNet
The liberals are out to stop Ralph Nader. Fearful that he may take away a significant number of votes from Al Gore, many lefties are attacking Nader -- their long-time consumer-rights and environmental hero -- as a selfish spoiler.
Posted on Sep 1, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Poor Al Gore. He offers the most tepid populism in his convention speech -- which he probably won't even stand by -- and he's assailed as engaging in "class warfare." But the policies of the GOP are far more likely to pit class against class, with the rich as the inevitable winners.
Posted on Aug 28, 2000, Source: AlterNet
The Democratic convention in Los Angeles was an affair of disconnection. It revealed that Al Gore and the Dems want to use reform and mild populism as clubs in their battle against George W. Bush, but they do not want to acknowledge the consequences of their own relationship to the money of the powerful.
Posted on Aug 18, 2000, Source: AlterNet
The mainstream media has been spouting volumes about Joe Lieberman's "moral authority," but what about his involvement in sketchy campaign contributions, his silence on recent genocides or his own divorce?
Posted on Aug 11, 2000, Source: AlterNet
George W. Bush hasn't changed the core positions of his party -- tax breaks for the rich, no new gun control, no campaign reform, etc. -- but through lies and hypocrisy, he has made the GOP look warm and fuzzy.
Posted on Aug 7, 2000, Source: AlterNet
George W. Bush is still fighting an undeclared war against the 1960s, which embodied many values that he loathes. And he's surrounding himself with right-wingers who have been on the same crusade for generations.
Posted on Aug 2, 2000, Source: AlterNet
A recent Organization for African Unity report shows that the Clinton administration did nothing to stop the genocide of 500,000 to 800,000 Rwandans, even though it knew full well the extent of the mass murders.
Posted on Jul 25, 2000, Source: AlterNet
George Bush senior predicted that his son would triumph in the Presidential election due to his pledge to "restore honor and integrity" to the Oval Office, in a recent interview with the New York Times. On the subject of honor and integrity," David Corn recalls the Iran-contra affair and a few other Reagan-Bush era scandals.
Posted on Jul 17, 2000, Source: AlterNet
"Forget C-SPAN, the network news, CNN, and the newspapers, I can track in near real-time the Bush-Gore contest for high school president everytime I log on to the Internet." Their e-mail missives foreshadow the tactics of future political campaigns -- audio and video messages customed designed for each voter.
Posted on Jul 10, 2000, Source: AlterNet
The group that oversees who gets which Internet domain names is electing officers -- which may allow public-interest representatives to sit beside corporate honchos -- and anyone with a computer can vote.
Posted on Jul 4, 2000, Source: AlterNet
At the same time as the Democratic and Republican Conventions, political heavies including Ralph Nader, John McCain and Jesse Jackson will attend high-profile "Shadow Conventions" to discuss the issues that are MIA in mainstream politics.
Posted on Jun 23, 2000, Source: AlterNet
After David Corn found a 1978 newspaper article that quoted George W. Bush supporting a woman's right to choose, the Bush campaign went into spin overdrive to justify Bush's comments. And there's nothing worse for a veteran journalist like Corn than being spinned.
Posted on Jun 20, 2000, Source: AlterNet
After having chased numerous sex-and-the-powerful stories during my thirteen years in Washington, I've concluded that it is damn hard to report such stories -- even when they're 100 percent true.
Posted on Jun 13, 2000, Source: AlterNet
"The House intelligence committee released a report that declared the CIA had nothing to do with the rise of crack in Los Angeles in the 1980s. This was a response to a controversial series by reporter Gary Webb, which exposed a group of California-based Nicaraguan drug-dealers supporting the Nicaraguan contra rebels battling the leftist Sandinista regime. But the case is not closed -- that is, it should not be closed."
Posted on Jun 5, 2000, Source: The Nation
Clinton will soon decide whether the US should build a national missile defense system with a pricetag of at least $25 billion.
Posted on May 29, 2000, Source: AlterNet
After the A16 protests, activists are re-huddling and global capitalists are bracing for further product boycotts, demonstrations and shifts in public opinion.
Posted on May 1, 2000, Source: AlterNet
Months of campaigning in the presidential primaries have told us exactly what we should have expected: the system works. After Super Tuesday, each party has nominated the fellow embraced by its elites, by its main money people and by its prominent lobbyists. Now what? Eight months of boring Gore and gushy Bush? The best of this campaign may be behind us already.
Posted on Apr 1, 2000, Source: The Nation
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