Joe Bageant

The Covert Kingdom

Thy Will be Done, On Earth as It is in Texas

Not long ago I pulled my car up alongside a tiny wooden church in the woods, a stark white frame box my family built in 1840. And as always, an honest-to-god chill went through me, for the ancestral ghosts presumably hovering over the graves there. From the wide open front door the Pentecostal preacher's message echoed from within the plain wooden walls: "Thank you Gawd for giving us strawng leaders like President Bush during this crieeesis. Praise you Lord and guide him in this battle with Satan's Muslim armies."

Staring Down the Jackals

Liberal Roadkill Along the High Road to Baghdad

By Joe Bageant

Somewhere in hell tonight, the Devil’s wife is setting out an extra dinner plate for America, where presumably we will be toasted by history’s other war criminals. Let’s face it. When we backed a maniac killer like Saddam Hussein, funded the Taliban, and slept with the treacherous Saudi Princes as the price of our national narcotic -- oil -- we’d pretty much bought a place at the dinner table. But when we embraced that murderous old sack of guts, Ariel Sharon, as international brother and accomplice in all things Middle Eastern, we were not merely displaying sick taste in friends; we acceded to becoming war criminals. The entire world sees that, and has seen it for years.

John Ashcroft, Keep Your Mouth Off My Wife!

Talking the Homeland Security Blues with Bingo the Philosopher Dog

By Joe Bageant

I'd be the first to admit that sitting here in this garden shed drinking Jim Beam and feeding pork rinds to my dog Bingo (a black mutt of the type we call a "piss hound" around here) may not be the best vantage point from which to examine national security affairs. However, it must be said that when the nebulous tendrils of U.S. security policy begin to reach down this far into everyday life, far enough to rattle a 57-year-old pee dribbler such as myself, it sure as hell can be called pervasive, at the very least. Not only pervasive, but also downright personal too. John Ashcroft publicly insulted my wife. I kid you not. I never thought I'd see the day when I would be ready for a balls-to-the-wall scrap with the Attorney General of the United States.