Vietnam was, for the United States, the war that never ended. Administration after administration has tried, with remarkable lack of success, to wipe it from memory or turn it, at least, into a curable medical condition ("the Vietnam syndrome"). After that war, a...

In the 1940s and 1950s, when the generation of men now ruling over us were growing up, boys could disappear into a form of war play – barely noticed by adults and hardly recorded anywhere – that was already perhaps a couple of hundred years old. In this kind...

In every way they could imagine – unnoticed in broad daylight and in the darkness of eternal secrecy – the president and his top officials have been hardest at work not at governing the country but at bulking up presidential powers. This, it now seems, was...

In April 2005, I posted a dispatch in which I claimed that "a senior official in one of our intelligence agencies" had slipped me an unpublished manuscript by "the president." I added that I believed it genuine and had done my best to vet it. My source, I mentioned,...

2006 is sure to be the year of living dangerously – for the Bush administration and for the rest of us. In the wake of revelations of warrantless spying by the National Security Agency, we have already embarked on what looks distinctly like a constitutional...

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...

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...

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...