All the hoopla in the media over Bob Gates’ scathing criticism of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in his new memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, has missed the mark. Obama can be criticized legitimately for his deplorable policy of piling...
The Golden Age of Journalism?
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It was 1949. My mother – known in the gossip columns of that era as “New York’s girl caricaturist” – was freelancing theatrical sketches to a number of New York’s newspapers and magazines, including the...
The Blind Alley of J Street and Liberal American Zionism
Since its founding six years ago, J Street has emerged as a major Jewish organization under the banner "Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace." By now J Street is able to be a partial counterweight to AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The contrast between...
Sean Wilentz – Court Historian, NSA Shill, and Lickspittle ‘Liberal’
So you thought progressives would rally ‘round Edward Snowden’s and Glenn Greenwald’s crusade to rid us of the NSA incubus that’s attached itself to our computers and our daily lives. Well, you were wrong: dead wrong. With a few notable exceptions, the...
Iraq Executes 26; Attacks Leave 21 Dead, 28 Wounded
What Did Our Wars Win?
"He ended one war and kept us out of any other," is the tribute paid President Eisenhower. Ike ended the Korean conflict in 1953, refused to intervene to save the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and, rather than back the British-French-Israeli invasion, ordered them...
Obama’s Lies, NSA Spies, and the Sons of Liberty
President Obama has managed, with singular assistance from Congress and the courts, to mangle the Constitution through repeated abuses, attacks and evasions. This is nothing new, as I’ve documented in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police...
Why We Fight
The most decorated Marine in the history of the Corps Major General Smedley Butler once wrote that "War is a racket." That was in 1935. If only he could see it now. The cash flow enabling the global war on terror which was launched in 2001 is astonishing,...
Anbar Clashes, Baghdad Bombings: 73 Killed, 111 Wounded
Down Mexico Way
As the US continues and expands its worldwide "war on terror," extending its militarized tentacles into Africa as well as the Middle East, a festering threat looms closer to home: the ungluing of Mexico and its rapid descent into the status of a failed...