Dispatches

Whom the Gods Would Destroy. . .
01.12.2006 06:28 | RUSS WELLEN
. . . they first make mad with power, wrote historian Charles A. Beard. Meanwhile, in a recent TomDispatch, contemporary chronicler Tom Englehardt wrote: ". . . when critics concentrate on any specific issue or set of administration acts, no matter how...

Empathy, Sympathy--What's the Difference?
01.09.2006 07:25 | RUSS WELLEN
On New Years Day, President Bush visited troops at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. Apparently, former advisor Karen Hughes once clued him in on this empathy thing, which she remembered from a mandatory senstivity training course during h...

Abramoff Euphoria Already Deflated by Fears of Attack on Iran
01.05.2006 07:55 | RUSS WELLEN
Nobody can ruin your day like Wayne Madsen: "Intelligence and military sources in the United States and abroad are reporting on various factors that indicate a U.S. military hit on Iranian nuclear and military installations, that may involve tactical n...

A Slippery Slope
01.04.2006 06:57 | RUSS WELLEN
After reading Sidney Blumenthal's December 30 Guardian article, "Victory in Name Only," charting President Bush's reversal of fortune in 2005, one can't help but notice that his slide has been greased by words that begin with "S". From Schiavo to Social S...

So Much for Sources
01.02.2006 10:15 | RUSS WELLEN
As if the rulings against Judy-Judy-Judy Miller and Time Magazine's Matthew Cooper weren't enough to put a damper on the use of sources. Then along comes news that the administration ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on communications betw...

Just the Facts, Ma'am
12.30.2005 06:17 | RUSS WELLEN
Journalist Mark Bowden is non-PC to a T. Famous for writing Black Hawk Down, he also wrote an article collected in Road Work about our air assault on Afghanistan called "The Kabul-Ki Dance." It's nauseating three times over: The number of sorties flown...

Vote Smart, Not from the Heart
12.27.2005 13:23 | RUSS WELLEN
As detailed by Professor Ilya Somin in "When Ignorance Isn't Bliss: How Political Ignorance Threatens Democracy," most people vote based on vague feelings about how life is treating them. (Though written for the faux-libertarian Cato Institute, his policy...

Constitutionally Incapable of a Constitution
12.23.2005 11:16 | RUSS WELLEN
One of Doug Thompson's beats at CapitolHillBlue.com is the president's psyche. He talked to three people present for a meeting Bush held last month with Republican Congressional leaders about renewing the Patriot Act. An aide informed him there was a vali...

Why a War?
12.21.2005 07:06 | RUSS WELLEN
In The Emotional Life of Nations (Other Press, 2002), Lloyd deMause, the founder of psychohistory, writes that the real reason a state prosecutes war is not to conquer another state or even jump-start its economy. In fact, the most destructive wars, measu...

Slice of Lice
12.19.2005 09:56 | RUSS WELLEN
At holiday time, the call goes out: "Remember the needy." The early sixties, prosperous for most, afforded Americans the luxury of developing a social conscience. Thus was created a climate receptive to Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. However...

American Taliban on Your Street?
12.16.2005 12:26 | CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
Delightful article by John Sugg in the latest issue of Mother Jones, in which Sugg (who I got to know from his courageous reporting on Israeli espionage) details the latest incarnation of American Taliban to poison the well of civic life. The group that...

Premiere of Freezerbox's Commentator of the Week Award
12.16.2005 07:20 | RUSS WELLEN
The first winner of the Freezerbox Commentator of the Week award goes to former CIA analyst Ray McGovern--long a leading light of the Internet--for his TomPaine.com article, "McCain's Defining Moment," on "enhanced interrogation techniques." I had just...

George Shrinks
12.14.2005 06:16 | RUSS WELLEN
At age 87, Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes, who started in 1956, may have set a record for most years spent continuously working in the public eye. He got yet more media attention for his profanity-laced interview with the Boston Globe's Suzanne Ryan. The high...

Tripping Jihadis on Ultimate Bummer
12.12.2005 08:11 | RUSS WELLEN
Tripping Jihadis on Ultimate Bummer On DefenseTech.org, a subdivision of Military.com, David Hambling reports on one Marine's blog (now protected by a USMC security screen). Titled "The Green Side," its author is Lt. Col. Dave Bellon, an intelligence o...

Christlamic Fundamentalism
12.09.2005 07:09 | RUSS WELLEN
One reason Islamism (political Islam) and the US are on a collision course is that we're too alike. This thought crystallized when I came across the passages below, from Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Metropolitan...

Banks Bear Your Interest
12.07.2005 07:20 | RUSS WELLEN
Ever wonder how banks evolved? For those of you as financially challenged as me, Ellen Brown explains in "Returning the Money to the People," an article on FinancialOutrage.org.uk. It was excerpted from her forthcoming book, The Wizards of Wall Street and...

A Bore of a War
12.05.2005 08:40 | RUSS WELLEN
James Fallows's article in the December Atlantic Monthly, "Why Iraq Has No Army" (for subscribers only, but currently available online elsewhere) is as explosive as it is comprehensive. An excerpt: "'There is still no sense of urgency,' T. X. Hammes [...

The President: On Soma--or in a Coma?
12.02.2005 08:07 | RUSS WELLEN
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, who's set a new benchmark for administration turncoats, says President Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the details" of post-war planning. In "Bush's Shrinking Safety Zone...

The Cave from Which Terrorism's Wellspring Flows
11.30.2005 08:20 | RUSS WELLEN
Lloyd deMause, the director of the Psychohistory Institute, has no qualms about spelling out the primitive impulses that fuel American foreign policy. But in The Emotional Life of Nations (Other Press, 2002), he maintains: "The roots of current terrori...

Can Democrats Turn Republican Led into Gold?
11.26.2005 18:59 | RUSS WELLEN
"I think that would cause more problems for Americans." --Senator Hillary Clinton "I'm not there yet." --Senator Joe Biden (his time) Why are Congressional Democrats balking at Representative John Murtha's call for withdrawal from Iraq (or, more a...