COMMENT

...While the Labor Party is at least willing to talk about the possibility of "trading land for peace" in the Occupied Territories, Likud's answer to the Palestinian intifada is a simple and stark "Never...

...Every doubt about nuclear safety, whether in atmospheric weapons tests or private utility plants, has been suppressed if possible or dismissed if it came to light...

...During Ronald Reagan's first two years in office, the Energy Department (which has jurisdiction over nuclear-weapons production) reduced its 'The gutless, no-good 100th Congress...

...Almost every serious charge leveled by critics (including The Progressive) at the nuclear program over the years turns out to have been an understatement...

...Shulamit Aloni, the courageous Israeli defender of justice for the Palestinians who heads the Citizens Rights Movement, observes that the prospect is for turning Israel into "a Khomeinistic country...

...How to account for such contemptible indifference to human health and safety on the part of officials supposedly serving the public interest...

...Fortunately, they have already begun...

...It is indicative of the low state of Israeli politics that this might well be regarded, under the circumstances, as the most desirable possible resolution...

...nuclear-energy and nuclear-weapons programs amount to a horrifying indictment of the nuclear industry and its faithful patrons in the Federal Government...

...military advisers have fired on the guerrillas since the Reagan Administration stationed officers there early in the 1980s...

...The likelihood of a Middle Eastern bloodbath has been substantially increased...

...Dukakis was attacked, successfully, for being weak on "defense...

...215 were arrested, including Daniel Ellsberg...

...To give up ground is to give up the battle...

...This is where the Left comes in...

...John," said the President, "I was there, and I did...

...a fascist country...

...No," persisted Poindexter, "you couldn't have...

...It is time for Americans—Jews and non-Jews alike—to speak out against Israel's march toward disaster, and to end U.S...

...First there is Government's persistent role as enthusiastic propagandist for nuclear technology, dating back to the early days of the Atomic Energy Commission forty years ago and eagerly supported by the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy...

...Government, was unmoved...

...that's what made the campaign so scary...

...These apparatchiks would have the Democratic Party choose a conservative Southerner—someone like Bentsen, Sam Nunn, or Charles Robb—as its Presidential candidate...

...But John," replied Reagan, "I did agree to that...

...In the wake of Bush's attacks on the ACLU, some liberals and leftists have sounded the retreat...

...That's the good news...

...Civil liberties must be defended, and defended wholeheartedly, for we are at the cusp of an illiberal movement...

...However, more and more Americans, and more and more American Jews, are coming to realize that such support does not serve the best interests of the United States, of peace in the Middle East, of justice for the Palestinians, or even of Israel's own security and democracy...

...For every person willing to get arrested now," Ellsberg said, "a hundred or thousand are willing to get arrested if they escalate this war...

...support for Israel's brutal policies...

...To stack the deck against these constituencies would be a signal that the time has finally come to mount a broadly based third-party effort...

...George Bush will be a weak President...

...In that context, the rapidly rising star of the ultra-Orthodox parties is merely another ingredient in a recipe for disaster...

...On September 13, three U.S...

...Still, the Democratic Party's inept "professionals" continue to draw the wrong lessons...

...They could produce propaganda damning to the government...

...In this increasingly dangerous situation, American Jews and the U.S...

...He failed to uphold the faded banner of liberalism, let alone to articulate a vision of a better America freed from the shackles of the Cold War and runaway capitalism...

...Somehow, we must do a better job of transmitting our beliefs to the American people...

...The peace movement, environmentalists, consumer activists, community organizers all have a stake in ending the nuclear menace once and for all...

...One reality confronts any new government that may emerge in Israel: The nation is not economically viable without massive assistance from the United States, which pours $3 billion a year into military and economic aid to Israel...

...Recent events demonstrate that the U.S...

...They attacked the National Guard headquarters, exploded a rocket at the offices of the U.S...

...military advisers fired their M-16 rifles at rebel guerrillas who attacked a Salvadoran army brigade the advisers were training...

...ush's triumph does force the Left to reexamine 'its positions and its tactics, for it is in the war of ideas that the Left has been losing out...

...But if the Democratic Party tries to amputate its left wing, it will have a bloody mess on its hands...

...In fact, they were barely mentioned by Michael Dukakis—for perfectly understandable reasons...

...The only thing that will stop him is organized mass protests...

...George Bush won only 54 per cent of the voting public...

...Many of these nonvoters stayed home because they were fed up with the choices offered them...

...The steady rightward progression of Israeli politics is an inescapable result of the festering oppression of the Palestinians...

...Consequently, another Likud-Labor coalition government would be installed, perpetuating the state of paralysis that has prevented Israel's government from coming to terms with the ever-more-insistent demands of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories...

...President," said Poindexter, "we've got to clear up this business about you agreeing to get rid of all nuclear weapons...

...This was the first time the Pentagon has admitted that U.S...

...indeed, the 1988 election saw the lowest voter turnout in half a century...

...One might assume that such damnable disclosures, coming at the height of a Presidential election campaign, would figure prominently as a political issue...

...And that's exactly what they are planning to do...

...With their eighteen Knesset votes added to Likud's forty-seven, the religious parties would enable Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to form a new government free of even the feeble constraints imposed by Labor in the last few years...

...It took Duarte's government one month to admit that army officers had committed the atrocities...

...What is far more likely, however, is that the next Israeli government will consist of a coalition between Likud and the right-wing religious parties which surged to new strength in the November balloting...

...The Left needs to face the issue and talk sense about the causes of crime and the solutions to the crime problem...

...Dukakis was attacked, successfully, for being too soft on crime...

...election campaign made clear, blind backing of Israel is still mandatory for most American politicians...

...These are the voters the Left can reach and organize...

...Articles in The New Republic and In These Times have faulted the ACLU for defending individual liberties too ardently at the expense of community rights...

...But to claim that this sentiment is shared by a majority of Americans is to succumb to a political hallucination...

...Already, they are concocting schemes to make the nominating process less inclusive—less democratic—next time around...

...This is the wrong way to go...

...H At Rocky Flats, Colorado, critical violations of safety procedures in the production, storage, and shipping of nuclear materials have been systematically kept from public knowledge...

...It's a battle the Left can win...

...Conceivably, such a coalition might still emerge in the process of government-formation now under way...

...Agency for International Development, and set off car bombs in wealthy neighborhoods...

...In fact, there is a suspicion that at least part of the sorry record was allowed to come to light just to provide the rationale for a new binge of nuclear spending...

...The band played "California, Here I Come," and mothers, wives, and girlfriends squealed in delight as the 373 men debarked from the cruise.' —The New York Times The dreary, vacuous, and mean Presidential election campaign is over...

...For those of us on the Left, the election proved particularly disturbing...

...The guerrillas, meanwhile, have staged their strongest offensive in years, taking the battle to San Salvador...

...But the Left should not coddle the conservatives...

...Israel's Road to Disaster The gloomiest forecasts that preceded the recent Israeli national election were for a continuation of the status quo...

...Government have a unique opportunity to play a constructive role...

...aid and the largely uncritical support of the American Jewish community make it possible for Israel to maintain its intransigence toward the Palestinians...

...Of some seventeen major nuclear weapons plants scattered around the country, two have been shut down and production at two others has been sharply curtailed in recent weeks in the wake of rapidly mounting disclosures of management malfeasance, technical failures, safety-rule violations, and hazardous emissions of radioactive substances...

...policy of supporting the repressive government in San Salvador may prove not only embarrassing but extremely costly in the years to come...

...The hapless campaign of Michael Dukakis provided no inspiration and leaves no solace...

...They shot them with bursts of rifle fire and threw grenades at them," one villager told Lindsey Gruson of The New York Times...

...Jose Napoleon Duarte, president of El Salvador and favorite puppet of the U.S...

...The Left needs to spell out in convincing terms how ending the Cold War would make the country more—not less—secure...

...They went on firing at those poor people for ten minutes...

...once again, pessimists predicted, neither the conservative Likud bloc nor the Labor coalition would achieve a clear-cut majority in the 120-member Knesset, the Israeli parliament...

...At the same time, the religious parties will demand a heavy price for their collaboration...

...In its implications if not in its immediate casualty toll, the American scandal makes the Soviet nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl look like a minor mishap...

...The record of systematic disregard for health and safety spans Democratic as well as Republican Administrations, and the Democrats no less than the Republicans have been boosters of nuclear arms and nuclear power...

...William A. Vaughan, who served as Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environmental Protection, Safety, and Emergency Preparedness during much of Reagan's first term, told The New York Times, "Every penny that went to safety programs was a penny taken from manufacturing nuclear warheads...

...No, You Didn't Excerpt from The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988, by Jane Mayer and Doyle Mc-Manus, describing a meeting between national-security adviser John Poindexter and Ronald Reagan shortly after the Reykjavik summit: "Mr...

...Many pundits, especially conservative ones in both parties, gleefully conclude that there is no hope...

...Back to Salvador One of the first challenges for "the man at the desk," as George Bush likes to call the person in the Oval Office, will be El Salvador...

...Do not rock the boat.' —Senator Steve Symms, Idaho Republican The Israeli public 'has been struck by shock and fear by the ultra-Orthodox intifada that is liable to take us back several generations.' —The Israell newspaper Hadashot budget for environmental, safety, and health programs from $62 million to $42 million, and its force of safety experts from 162 to 128...

...Half of the potential electorate exercised its right not to vote...

...Before they can do that, of course, they must ace out Jesse Jackson...

...Sensitive Israelis have long recognized their country's inexorable move toward a garrison-state mentality...

...du'Pont de Nemours & Company, officials suppressed news of serious accidents over a period of twenty-five years...

...It's going to be a. lot harder because of the strength of someone like Jesse Jackson...

...Obviously, if in that area there are people aligned with the Marxist sectors, the family members could lie," Duarte said...

...The Democratic Party needs "major surgery" to remove its left wing, Penn Kemble, an official of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, told The Wall Street Journal...

...They were only defenseless peasants...

...Their agenda calls for conversion of Israel into a primitive theocracy...

...One week later, Salvadoran soldiers massacred ten peasants in a village thirty miles from the capital...

...And what this Administration was all about was making warheads...

...Those who responded to Jackson in the 1988 primaries included not only blacks (the most sizable and loyal group of Democratic voters), but other minorities, the unemployed and underemployed, liberals, and leftists...

...That's exactly what it may take...

...Though Lloyd Bentsen failed to deliver Texas, though Dukakis gained ground only by taking a more populist stance in the last three weeks of the campaign, the Party hacks insist that the Democrats must move to the Right...

...He is bound to fail, and when he does, many Americans will be looking for answers and for hope...

...As the comments of both major-party Presidential candidates in the recent U.S...

...This should become the first great new political campaign of the post-election period...

...will write off freedom in Nicaragua, throw them to the alligators, and hope the alligators will eat someone else and eat us last and they can peel off a slice of that salami and they will not bother us for now...

...The civil war is clearly heating up, and George Bush's every impulse will be to send more money and guns to shore up the regime in San Salvador...

...H At the Savannah River nuclear-weapons plant in South Carolina, operated for the Government by E.I...

...Next, there is the Government's determination, accentuated in the Reagan years, to spend every possible dollar on weapons, even at the expense of safety...

...On October 17, more than 1,000 demonstrators blockaded the Pentagon...

...Because of the hazards that have now come to light, the new Administration is sure to ask Congress for billions of dollars in appropriations to refurbish and rebuild the Government's nuclear plants and to make them "safe...

...Vincennes returned home today to a hero's welcome, regretful about the deaths but convinced that they had acted properly in combat...

...The inclination in Congress will be to go along...

...But if even a wan liberal like Dukakis gets clobbered for being too left-wing, what hope is there for the Left in America...

...Shut Down the Nukes Recent disclosures of reckless disregard for human safety in the U.S...

...With all of the formidable public-relations resources at its command, the Government has pushed the notion of a safe, cheap, joyous nuclear future...

...Now that the moral bankruptcy of public policy in this area has been exposed, the only new funds appropriated should be those required for safe and speedy moth-balling of this inherently dangerous technology...

...11 At the Fernald plant near Cincinnati, Ohio, where the Government processes uranium for use in nuclear weapons and military reactors, officials knew for decades that they were discharging many tons of radioactive waste into the environment, exposing thousands of workers and nearby residents to life-threatening contamination...

...George Bush has discovered what Ronald Reagan learned many years before, not only in the Republican Party, but in the country as a whole: There is an anti-liberal majority," Howard Phillips told James Ridgeway of The Village Voice...

...Certainly, Bush played shamelessly to anti-liberal sentiment...

...He faces strong opposition in both houses of Congress, and he inherits an economy ready to combust...

...The bad news is that George Bush will be President for the next four years—if we're lucky...