Author: Tom Engelhardt

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

In March, as casualty figures were starting to pile up, he labeled himself a “wartime president.” Almost two months later, with the U.S. having long outstripped every other country on Earth in Covid-19 cases read more

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Someday, America’s Afghan Wars — the first was against the Soviet Union, 1979-1989; the second began with the post-9/11 invasion of that country and has never ended — may be seen as follies of an unprecedented sort. Certainly, the wars that invasion set off across read more

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Somehow, it seemed apt to do a different kind of introduction today to TomDispatch regular Belle Chesler’s piece. After all, she’s the daughter of my first childhood friend from the building in New York City where I grew up in another read more

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The greatest American stories have always been fictions. I mean this both literally and figuratively. I mean The Great Gatsby, Moby-Dick, Invisible Man, and Little Women, but I also mean American exceptionalism, “good” wars, rags to riches, and liberty and justice for all. What, then, is the great American non-fiction story? I submit read more

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There was certainly a hint that the previous century was not going to unfold in a particularly propitious manner when World War I, “the war to end all wars” (a phrase famously attributed to American President Woodrow Wilson), proved but an introduction to a second world war that would make the first look more like a skirmish. Add in the fact that the pandemic to end all read more

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In this century, the war-fighting performance of the U.S. military has proven woeful indeed and both the Pentagon high command and key Trump administration officials have evidently been incapable of drawing obvious conclusions from that fact. Or think of it another way: even the president who can’t read more

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

Murder, He Said
The Killer-in-Chief
By Tom Engelhardt

“Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief.” So I wrote back in June 2012, with a presidential election approaching.

I was referring then to the war on terror’s CIA and military read more

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In case you hadn’t noticed — and it would have been hard to miss — for the first time in history the price of oil recently fell below zero. At one point, in fact, a barrel of West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark for U.S. crude oil, hit -$37.63. read more

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It was the wars I noticed first and, in those years, made the heart of TomDispatch’s coverage. You know, the ones that went under the label of “the war on terror,” that never were won and only seemed to expand exponentially across the Greater Middle East and Africa. Those were the conflicts that somehow lacked progress, no matter how often Americans “thanked” read more

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My dad came from Brooklyn, which meant I was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan from the start. One year, I even lost whatever I had saved up from my microscopic allowance betting on World Series games with Gus, who worked behind the soda fountain at the local drugstore. When he refused to take my money, my father made me pay anyway. (“A man,” he told me sternly, “always pays his read more