Author: Tom Engelhardt

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In early October 2016, as the most staggering presidential election campaign of our lives was nearing its end, I wrote this about the man whom, I suggested, heartland working-class whites might consider dispatching to the White House as an American version of a “suicide bomber”:

“In relation to his Republican rivals, and now Hillary Clinton, he stands alone in accepting read more

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If Donald Trump Is the Symptom…
Then What’s the Disease?
By Tom Engelhardt

Don’t try to deny it! The political temperature of this country is rising fast. Call it Trump change or Trump warming, if you want, but grasp one thing: increasingly, you’re in a different land and, whatever happens to Donald Trump, the results down the line are likely to be ever less pretty. read more

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It’s been almost 18 years of “infinite” war, carnage, the mass displacement of peoples, read more

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I watch NBC Nightly News regularly to get a sense of what version of our world a slice of America is regularly offered. In recent weeks, most of those newscasts — which usually begin with Lester Holt exclaiming, “Breaking news tonight!” — led with unprecedented rainfall, read more

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How about a little round of Auld Lang Syne? After all, when it comes to war crimes, whatever he ends up doing, Donald Trump will still be a johnny-come-lately. Remember, for instance, that top officials in the administration of George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, reportedly read more

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In those pre-seat-belt years — it might have been 1953 — I can remember being in the back seat of the family car with our dog. My dad was driving, my mom sitting next to him. And I can still practically hear them launching, with remarkable gusto, into the first verse of the Air Force song:

“Off we go into the wild blue yonder,
Climbing high into the sun.
read more

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We’re plunged into a world in which yesterday’s strangeness is instantly overwhelmed by today’s, which, in turn, is guaranteed to be overshadowed by tomorrow’s. Our president regularly regales his infamous base while mocking his enemies in ways that, not long ago, would have been presidentially inconceivable. It’s a world in which he recently flew to Japan and presented read more

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Think of U.S. policy in the Middle East as the proverbial broken record. Explain it as you will, Washington’s focus always comes back to Iran. Seldom has a country that remains anything but a superpower (even a regional one) loomed larger. It all started in 1953 when the CIA read more

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Call it strange, but call it something. After all, never in history had there been such active opposition to a war before it began. I’m thinking, of course, about the antiwar surge that, in the winter and early spring of 2003, preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Starting in the autumn of 2002, in fact, the top officials of President George W. Bush’s administration couldn’t read more

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Today, TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, focuses on the sole memorial in this read more