Tomgram: Engelhardt, An “Earned Media” Presidency

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The Donald and the Fake News Media
An Affair to Remember
By Tom Engelhardt

Face it: it’s been an abusive time, to use a word he likes to wield. In his telling, of course, it’s he or his people who are always the abused ones and they — the “fake news media” — are the abusers. But let’s be honest. You’ve been abused, too, and so have I. All of read more

Tomgram: Rory Fanning, Will the War Stories Ever End?

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Death-by-ally: now that, by definition, is a fate from hell. You might at least imagine that such “insider attacks” — in which a member of the Afghan security forces turns his weapon on his American or NATO trainers or advisers and tries to gun them down — would be the rarest of events. After all, if you’re an armed Afghan who decides to try to kill such an read more

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Unquiet Flows The Don

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Autocrats, Incorporated
Thoughts on Election Day 2018
By Tom Engelhardt

Who could forget that moment?  The blue [red] wave — long promised but also doubted — had, however modestly [however massively], hit Washington and [the Democrats had just retaken Congress] [the Republicans had held Congress] [the Democrats had taken the House].  The media, Fox News and read more

Tomgram: William Hartung, The Pentagon’s Plan to Dominate the Economy

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Back in the mid-1990s, I wrote the following in my book The End of Victory Culture, with memories of the American world of my 1940s and 1950s childhood in mind:

“The worlds of the warrior and of abundance were, to my gaze, no more antithetical than they were to the corporate executives, university research scientists, and military officers who were using a rising military budget read more

Tomgram: William Astore, The Pentagon Has Won the War that Matters

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In June, Austin “Scott” Miller, the special-ops general chosen to be the 17th U.S. commander in Afghanistan, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Like so many of the generals who had preceded him, he suggested that he saw evidence of “progress” in the Afghan war, even if he refused to “guarantee you a timeline or an end date.” Smart move, general!

As read more

Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Brett Kavanaugh, Raised by the Power of the Pack

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I felt discouraged recently when it hit home: I’ll never be a Supreme Court justice. Reviewing my life, I came to the realization that I was in no way qualified — and no, I’m not talking about my utter lack of legal experience (except as a juror). I was thinking instead of the qualifications that — as TomDispatch read more