Michael Tomasky

Yesterday, Aug. 26, was a day that should live in political infamy for this administration. On that date a U.S. soldier was killed in a roadside bombing, becoming the 139th GI death since May 1. More soldiers have now been killed since the “end” of the war than during it. And, by the way, this […]

Imagine that, after the failure of the health-care bill in 1994, Bill Clinton had come right back in 1995 and proposed the measure again. No, not only proposed it again but proposed a more radical version, arguing that it failed only because it was too watered down, and tried to bully its critics with reckless […]

Every so often in life you have to go out on a limb. So here goes: Arnold Schwarzenegger will not be the next governor of California. What’s more, his loss will represent an important moment in a shift in American politics that has been in gestation for some time now — toward a politics in […]

Here they come again. As if the last two and a half years have been some sort of game show with no real consequences for America and the world, the Greens signaled at their national committee meeting this weekend that they have every intention of running a presidential candidate in 2004. It might be Ralph […]

Remember back when the Taliban was evil? Sure you do. George W. Bush used that tough frontier talk of which his speechwriters are so fond, the press swooned and every decent American was made to understand that the Bush administration, unlike its morally rickety predecessor, would never give an inch to such people. So guess […]

The extent of the Bush administration’s abuse of intelligence and propagandizing on behalf of this “optional war,” as George Willcasually called it, is at this point clear to anyone watching. So are the recent and continuing lies and fictions. To take one of the most striking: Donald Rumsfeld said on March 30 that we knew […]

It may not have been one of my most important journalistic assignments, but going up to Bristol, Conn., to spend a Sunday afternoon in October 1991 with Chris Berman, Tom Jackson and the rest of ESPN’s NFL Prime Time crew still rates among the most enjoyable. I remember how agog I was as they led […]

A fresh and potentially damning revelation about pre-war manipulation of intelligence comes out, and the administration — for the first time — has to acknowledge that an “incorrect” justification for war was bruited. It’s yet another instance — the 13,862nd, I think — over which we shake our heads, imagining what the right would have […]

A leading conservative trope these days seems to be a genuine (although I wonder how genuine) puzzlement over liberal anger. For reasons we’ll get to shortly, the Fourth of July strikes me as a very appropriate occasion on which to explain that anger’s sources. Permit me, then, as a certain famous American document once put […]