Author: Tom Engelhardt

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Honestly, it’s been hell on earth for grown-ups. Thanks largely to Donald Trump and crew, we’re in the country with by far the read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

<Pardon me?

No, no, I don’t actually need a pardon. I wasn’t ransacking read more

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Progress? Let’s see. We’ve gone from unending wars in distant lands against enemies capable of little more than wielding firearms and roadside bombs — and those conflicts were disasters — to the possibility of a war in the European heartland between nuclear-armed foes. I mean, honestly, what could possibly go wrong?

And it was all fated to happen in Europe because of read more

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Think of the U.S. military-industrial-congressional complex as a remarkably self-contained system. It’s capable of funding itself at staggering levels, producing weaponry (however inefficient, read more

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Whatever the U.S. military may be considered, it isn’t usually thought of as a scam operation. Maybe it’s time to change that way of thinking, though. After all, we’re talking about a crew with a larger “defense” budget than read more

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America’s Two Pandemics And How They Mixed and Matched By Tom Engelhardt

Imagine that you were experiencing all of this (and by this, I mean our lives right now) as if it were a novel, à la Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.  The famed author read more

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Sometimes the unconscious mind tells us just what we truly want to say about our world. That happened to Senator Mitch McConnell only the other day. He was speaking to reporters after fellow Senate Republicans (with the read more

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Heroes? When I was a kid, among my heroes — and I was joined in this by so many Americans — was Jackie Robinson. Yes, he was the first Black ballplayer to break into the segregated major leagues. But the main thing for me was that he was the stellar second baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers and I was a mad Dodgers fan. My dad grew up in Brooklyn, so no surprise there.

But read more

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It was more than 20 years ago, but I still remember the shock I felt when the word “homeland” first entered our culture in a big way. That was soon after the 9/11 attacks and, in the end, it would be attached to what became known as the Department of Homeland Security. For me — and I read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Who even remembers when President Bush — no, not George W. but his father! — exclaimed, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome!” That was in the wake of Operation Desert Storm (aka the First Gulf War of 1991) and it was indeed true that the U.S. military had kicked Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait with remarkable ease. And yes, visually, read more