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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...


