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...
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...
[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...
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...
[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...
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...
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...
Last week and this one at TomDispatch are devoted to a look back at the period before and after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and at the ways in which, ever since, our world has shut itself down and sealed itself up. On that sealing up, Behzad Yaghmaian is an expert....
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...
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...
