As a single cloud at sea can augur a typhoon, so can a short and superficially amiable piece by conservative intellectual godhead William Kristol in The Weekly Standard describe a coming right-wing line of attack against liberals that will thunder across the airwaves and op-ed pages for months, probably right up through November 2004. So […]
Michael Tomasky
Michael Tomasky is the American editor-at-large of the Guardian (UK). He was executive editor of the Prospect from 2003 to 2006.
Posted inArticle
No Nam
The now-famous shock-and-awe strategy, which appears for the time being to have shocked and awed the American media just a little more than the Iraqi Republican Guards, was fathered chiefly by one Harlan Ullman, a former Navy pilot who spent the mid-1990s as part of a Pentagon research team known as the Rapid Dominance Study […]
Posted inFeatures
Dissent in America
The shooting may or may not have started by the time you read this. But one thing that has certainly begun is the campaign to force dissenters to keep it zipped when the shooting commences. “Once the war against Saddam [Hussein] begins, we expect every American to support our military, and if they can’t do […]
Posted inArticle
No Contradiction
True to form — on its path to a war in whose name evidence has been doctored and public rationales have been trotted out like successive Lexus ad campaigns — the administration has waited until the last possible second to attach a dollar amount to this supposedly unavoidable conflict. Or even later than the last […]
Posted inArticle
Spooky Story
On Saturday evening March 1, Daniel Ellsberg was noodling around the Web and happened across a story from the British newspaper The Observer that caught his eye under the tantalizing headline, “Revealed: US Dirty Tricks to Win Vote on Iraq War.” The paper’s Martin Bright, Ed Vulliamy and Peter Beaumont had obtained a copy of […]
Posted inArticle
Hoarse Whisperer
The more or less pleasant cajolery didn’t work. The coarse arm twisting hasn’t been doing much good, either. So now, the Bush administration — in its campaign to put the squeeze on the “Middle Six” United Nations Security Council members still on the fence with regard to a second UN resolution approving war against Iraq […]
Posted inArticle
Left Unsaid
We are pleased to introduce Michael Tomasky as a regular online columnist. His pieces will appear at TAP Online every Wednesday. Former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.) was the winner by TKO of the first major Democratic beauty pageant, held at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters over the weekend. “He just blew those people away,” […]
Posted inFeatures
Meet Mr. Credibility
The Democrats, as we know, have many political problems: their uncertainty, their inability to trade jabs with the Republicans, their likely minority status in Congress for some time to come. Checked out a map yet of which senators are up in 2004? Let’s just say that if you’re not sure you can take much more […]
Posted inFeatures
Book Review:
American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality By Myron Orfield. The Brookings Institution Press, 210 pages, $29.95 Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-first Century By Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf and Todd Swanstrom. University of Kansas Press, 349 pages, $15.95 Who among us — and I think you’ll know who I mean by “us” — has not […]
Posted inFeatures
Dems’ Fightin’ Words
There it was, the first Fourth of July after September 11: The majestic swell of a patriotism associated more with the era of the Andrews Sisters than the age of Destiny’s Child. The ritual exultations of American values. The worry, yes, that something bad might happen somewhere, but even this concern only enhanced the solemnity […]
