Author: Tom Engelhardt

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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

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Election-Meddling Follies, 1945-2019
Living in a Nation of Political Narcissists
By Tom Engelhardt

In this country, reactions to the Mueller report have been all-American beyond belief. Let’s face it, when it comes to election meddling, it’s been me, me, me, 24/7 here. Yes, in some fashion some set of Russians meddled in the last election campaign, whether it was, as read more

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As William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger reported at TomDispatch recently, the national security budget has reached $1.25 trillion annually without evidently peaking, while the U.S. military fights wars read more

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Back in 2012, I stumbled across figures on the U.S. government’s classification of documents and was stunned. In 2011, 92,064,862 of them had been sequestered and 26,058,678 of those given “top secret” status. (Who even knew that so many documents could be generated read more

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The man who is the most unpredictable American president of all time lives in what is, if you stop to think about it, a remarkably predictable world. Each of his seemingly strange and unexpected acts, tweets, bizarre read more

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Recently, at a rally in Wisconsin, President Trump implicitly attacked the late Senator John McCain over Obamacare: “We should’ve had health care, but one man decided to vote against it.” He was referring to the Republican Senate’s 2017 attempt at a “skinny repeal” of the Affordable read more