Michael Tomasky

Is Hurricane Katrina a transformative political moment? Is this finally the time when Americans appraise the failure of the Bush administration — that is, the failure of modern conservatism — and say, “Enough”? Can liberals seize the opportunity those failures represent to make a case for a different society, in which repeated warnings about the […]

This September 11 will mark the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States. The media will focus on the ceremonies at the former World Trade Center site, the Pentagon, and other cities and towns around the country that will honor the dead. The Bush administration, meanwhile, will do its best to remind […]

Deborah Pearlstein has offered an excellent summation on this site of the perverse judicial legacy of William Rehnquist, the man who preached “judicial restraint” while running perhaps the most activist Supreme Court in history. And here’s another aspect of the Rehnquist file that deserves an honest look: The man had a problem — a real […]

The first reports on levee breaks in New Orleans starting moving across the wire services just after dawn on Tuesday, August 30. Radio and television were reporting the same: “The levees in New Orleans have been breached,” said National Public Radio’s Melissa Block that same morning. The potential for catastrophe was clear enough, early on […]

E.M. Forster famously said that if he “had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” The novelist’s quote — which I believe he delivered apropos the Cambridge spy quartet, two of whom (Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess) had been Cambridge Apostles, […]

Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten of the Los Angeles Times reported on July 18 that top White House aides were in a state of mania around this time two years ago, “intensely focused on discrediting” Joseph Wilson after he wrote his now-famous New York Times op-ed piece. Hamburger’s and Wallsten’s sources tell them that Karl […]

The humiliating — to George W. Bush, and to us, the citizens of the United States — prospect of John Bolton becoming ambassador to the United Nations through a recess appointment is reason enough at this point to oppose the man. Such an appointment would signal contempt for both the constitutional advise-and-consent process and for […]

Far from the revulsion experienced by New York Post columnist John Podhoretz as he read Ed Klein’s The Truth About Hillary, my chief reaction was of tedium: at the warmed-over, thrice-told anecdotes rendered in a prose so purple that one wonders how Klein and Sentinel (the publisher) forgot to link the book’s publication to the […]