The Crisis Papers After Bush/Cheney

"Change," the central theme of the Obama campaign and presidency, has likewise come to this website, The Crisis Papers, and to the projected future activity of its editors.

The Crisis Papers will remain online for the foreseeable future, and the editors will continue to write essays, originating at The Crisis Papers and also circulated for publication at other progressive websites.

However, The Crisis Papers will no longer adhere to a weekly update schedule and the appearance of our essays will be less frequent. Henceforth we will discontinue our features, "Recommended Articles of the Week" and "Audio and Video Features." However, we will update, expand and refresh our popular pages: "The Dissenting Internet" (a listing of solid websites to visit for political information), "Recommended Blogsites" (the best of the political bloggers out there on the web), and "The Activists' Page" (contacts for aiding the cause).

The Crisis Papers will also serve as an archive of the original internet essays, past and future, by Bernard Weiner and Ernest Partridge. There are now over five hundred essays in the archive.

In Retrospect: The Crisis Papers was conceived by the editors in late 2002 and launched the day before the mid-term election of that year. Our decision to join the political battle grew out of our loyalty to American democracy and our allegiance to the Constitution of the United States, augmented by our anger at how the Cheney/Bush Administration was dismantling both as it moved the country in the direction of a militarist native fascism. In addition we were motivated by our belief that the U.S. war on Iraq not only was unnecessary and incompetently waged, but was ruinous to the American soul and the long-standing international respect for the United States and its political principles.

Our audience grew slowly but steadily, peaking in 2004 and 2005, with total weekly hits routinely above 60,000 and frequently above 100,000 (unique visitors per week ranging from 7,000 to 15,000). Our best report was from the first week in September, 2005, with 152,000 hits and 24,000 unique visits. Not bad for a weekly non-profit website launched into the ether on a wing and a prayer by three retired professors, Bernard Weiner and Ernest and Elinore Partridge, with no formal training in web design and management, and with no firm sources of income to pay our bills.

In the meantime, we routinely submitted our essays to a number of progressive websites, three of which, Democratic Underground, The Smirking Chimp, and OpEd News, published virtually all of them. The audience for all these "outside" websites far exceeded that of The Crisis Papers.

Readership of our essays outside The Crisis Papers really took off when Democratic Underground offered us a publishing alliance: They posted our new essays every Tuesday on their website, under a Crisis Papers logo on their homepage, at the same time as these articles appeared on The Crisis Papers. These essays often provoked lively reactions within the progressive Democratic Underground community and beyond.

The work of the progressive internet continues, but now the heavy lifting is in the capable hands of well financed and flourishing daily websites such as The Huffington Post, Media Matters, Alternet, Common Dreams, Think Progress, Daily Kos, Salon, BuzzFlash, Scoop, After Downing Street, Democracy Now, Talking Points Memo, and Digby, to mention just a few among hundreds, which are staffed with creative web designers and professional journalists and scholars. While we will continue to submit our articles to the progressive internet, with the proliferation of so many liberal-left websites, there is diminishing need for modest weekly efforts like The Crisis Papers.

And so we now direct our efforts to other projects. In particular:

Ernest Partridge will resume concentrated work on his neglected book in progress Conscience of a Progressive and another nearly-completed book in progress, To Ourselves and Our Posterity, which deals with the moral issue of responsibility to future generations. He will also rejoin his profession by writing and submitting scholarly conference and journal papers in environmental ethics and moral and political philosophy. No doubt this effort will result in future publications for The Crisis Papers and for other progressive websites. Partridge's attention will be directed less to timely and topical issues, and more to the "deeper" philosophical concepts and issues that underlie the ongoing contest between right and left, conservatives and liberals.

Bernard Weiner will be polishing for publication his memoir as a journalist, theatre/film critic, and activist writer, Little Man Clapping; writing and directing more plays; publishing new poetry collections; consulting as a dramaturg and manuscript editor; developing his budding talents as a professional photographer; and spending more fun time hiking and biking and traveling with his wife Heidi Linsmayer.

We are grateful to those of you who have communicated with us after reading our essays in The Crisis Papers or on other websites. It was important to know that readers took our essays and arguments seriously, and that, together, we all were contributing to the movement for peace and justice and the rule of law. So please continue to visit the downsized Crisis Papers and to communicate with us at crisispapers@hotmail.com .

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D, and Ernest Partridge, Ph.D, Co-Editors
Elinore Partridge, Ph.D,  Associate Editor
The Crisis Papers