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.

A Formula for Slaughter

One of the true scandals of media coverage of the war in Iraq has been the simple fact that you – relatively small numbers of you anyway – had to visit TomDispatch.com, or Juan Cole’s invaluable Informed Comment blog, or Antiwar.com, or other Internet sites to find out anything about the fierce (if limited) ongoing … Continue reading “A Formula for Slaughter”

Bush’s Botched War on Terror

Peering ahead into what will certainly be a lively New Year: One aspect of the president’s generally poor polling numbers – which bumped up modestly thanks to a holiday propaganda onslaught about democracy, progress, and victory in Iraq (and, in the first poll to arrive in January, are already sinking again) – remains striking. What … Continue reading “Bush’s Botched War on Terror”

Back to 1214

In my last dispatch, The Unrestrained President, I suggested that what we were dealing with in Washington was a virtual cult of the presidency and that its believers were more fervent than any religious fundamentalists in their focus on the quite un-Christian attribute of total earthly power. Their urge to create a president accountable to … Continue reading “Back to 1214”

A Cult of Presidential Power

As 2006 begins, we seem to be at a not completely unfamiliar crossroads in the long history of the American imperial presidency. It grew up, shedding presidential constraints, in the post-World War II years as part of the rise of the national security state and the military-industrial complex. It reached its constraint-less apogee with Richard … Continue reading “A Cult of Presidential Power”

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”