Tom Engelhardt

An editor in publishing for the last 25 years, Tom Engelhardt is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War era, now out in a revised edition with a new preface and afterword, and Mission Unaccomplished, TomDispatch Interviews With American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. He is at present consulting editor for Metropolitan Books, a fellow of the Nation Institute, and a teaching fellow at the journalism school of the University of California, Berkeley. Visit his Web site. This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

The Political Folly Awards of 2005

[Note to readers: TomDispatch returns in the New Year full of hope and with as complete an account as possible of the Political Folly Awards of 2005, sponsored, of course, by the full TomDispatch team. It was a resplendent event – you had to be there to fully appreciate it (and to catch the parties … Continue reading “The Political Folly Awards of 2005”

Shoot the Moon and Forget About the Bell Curve

Consider this latest piece by former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, who writes regularly for TomDispatch on the Plame case and Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation, as my way of signing off with good cheer until the New Year. In our embattled American world, De la Vega suggests just the kind of optimism that … Continue reading “Shoot the Moon and Forget About the Bell Curve”

The Forgotten Anthrax Attacks of 2001

[Note: This is the second of two pieces focused on reevaluating the costs of the Sept. 11 attacks. In the first, “Shark-bit World,” I took the New York Times back to the week before Sept. 11, 2001, time-machine style, and found a forgotten world in which the Bush administration, with its poll numbers dropping and … Continue reading “The Forgotten Anthrax Attacks of 2001”

For the Jingo Who Has Everything

We all know the feeling. After your last minute holiday gift-giving near-disaster in 2004 (surprisingly similar to the one in 2003), you made that firm New Year’s resolution yet again – this time you were determined to buy those Christmas presents in July. The Monday after Thanksgiving at the absolute latest. They would all be … Continue reading “For the Jingo Who Has Everything”

An Increasingly Aerial Occupation

From the destroyed Japanese and German cities of World War II to the devastated Korean peninsula of the early 1950s, from the ravaged South Vietnamese countryside of the late 1960s to the “highway of death” on which much of a fleeing Iraqi army was destroyed in the first Gulf War of 1991, air power has … Continue reading “An Increasingly Aerial Occupation”

Shark-bit World

The “usually disengaged” president, as columnist Maureen Dowd labeled him, had just returned from a prolonged, brush-cutting Crawford vacation to much criticism and a nation in trouble. (One Republican congressman complained that “it was hard for Mr. Bush to get his message out if the White House lectern had a ‘Gone Fishing’ sign on it.”) … Continue reading “Shark-bit World”

War Crimes Made Easy

Typically, when faced with a problem, the first thing Bush administration officials do is reach for their dictionaries to pretzel and torture words into whatever shape best suits them. Then they declare themselves simply to be following precedent (which turns out, of course, to be whatever they’ve wanted to do all along). In this way, … Continue reading “War Crimes Made Easy”

Ten Ways to Argue
About the War

What a couple of weeks in Iraq (and at home): Withdrawal was suddenly on everyone’s lips, while tragedy and absurdity were piling up like some vast, serial car wreck of event and emotion. Before a massed audience of midshipmen at the Naval Academy, our president announced a new war goal beyond finding weapons of mass … Continue reading “Ten Ways to Argue
About the War”

How (Not) to Withdraw from Iraq

On the Sept. 27 Charlie Rose Show, interviewing New Yorker editor David Remnick, Rose brought up the question of what the United States should do in Iraq. Should we “get out” – or, as Remnick so delicately put it, should we “bolt”? Here was how Remnick ended their discussion, while talking about those who had … Continue reading “How (Not) to Withdraw from Iraq”