Michael Tomasky

I seem to have kicked up a little dust at Tapped yesterday with my post expressing disquiet at the fact that John Edwards didn’t know who James Q. Wilson was (according to George Will’s Sunday column). Some of my attackers went after my “elitism,” a charge of which I think I made short work. But […]

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS (DOMESTIC AFFAIRS) For $200: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. warned of making common cause with the “doughfaces” of the far left in this 1949 classic. What is The Vital Center? For $400: Whenever Franklin Roosevelt barked to his aides, “Clear it with Sidney,” he meant that they should run the […]

There will be those who will ape the line put out yesterday by White House spokesman Trent Duffy with regard to the pre-Katrina videotape obtained by the Associated Press. They will say that the tape shows merely that George W. Bush was “engaged,” taking charge, discussing the matter days before Katrina made landfall. They’ll say […]

Back in April of this year, Anthony Lewis wrote a review-essay in The New York Review of Books on the decision by The New York Times to publish the Pentagon Papers. Discussing the impact of the papers’ publication, Lewis quoted Harold Edgar and Benno Schmidt Jr. who had contributed an article to the volume Lewis […]

Watching and reading George W. Bush’s Veterans’ Day speech last Friday confirmed my belief that it’s a good thing Karl Rove wasn’t indicted. If this is the best these people can do, Rove is doing Bush a lot more damage from his White House office than he would as an indictee. The speech was humiliating […]

On today’s New York Times op-ed page, both in-house columnists, Nicholas Kristof from the liberal side and John Tierney from the conservative end, deliver the view that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had better not bring charges unless he has something serious. Secondary allegations, both write, will amount to the criminalization of politics, to use the current […]

Last Wednesday, October 19, was the day that Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell at the State Department, decided he couldn’t take it anymore. In a lunchtime talk to the New America Foundation moderated by Steve Clemons, Wilkerson ripped into the Bush administration “cabal” that was guilty of “aberrations, bastardizations, […]

Some of you are going to think the dog spiked my cactus juice when you read this, but I have to say I actually admire some of the conservative dissent on Harriet Miers. Yes, the vast majority of the criticism centers on the fact that Miers doesn’t appear (to them, anyway) to be a reliable […]

Think it’s fair to say that the combination Sunday of the Walter Pincus-Jim VandeHei piece in The Washington Post and George Stephanopoulos’ bombshell on television’s This Week felt like a tug on the noose around the White House’s neck? The Post article noted that Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor looking into the Valerie Plame investigation, could […]

Five months ago, Michael Tomasky argued that Tom DeLay’s downfall was on the way, but that his personal corruption was only the tip of the disastrous iceberg DeLay represented. The disgraced majority leader’s sins should have been seen — and stopped — long ago. On successive days in mid-November 2002, Tom DeLay was elected House […]