Author: Thom Hartmann

House Republicans have revived the infamous Swiftboat lie strategy that helped defeat John Kerry in 2004. In essence, it involves relentlessly lying about a candidate and smearing his or her name and reputation in the hopes it’ll shave a few points off their popularity with independent voters. While virtually 100 percent of the men who served with Kerry in Vietnam spoke glowingly of his service, a group who did not serve with him made up lies and exaggerations. And the Swiftboat effort was well funded: Clarence Thomas’ sugar daddy Harlan Crow threw big bucks into it in 2004. Kerry and those...

Today is 9/11, the event that first brought America together and then was cynically exploited by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to have a war against Iraq, followed by their illegal invasion of Afghanistan just a bit more than a year earlier. Yet the media today is curiously silent about Bush and Cheney’s lies. Given the costs of both these wars — and the current possibility of our being drawn deeper into conflict in both Ukraine and Taiwan — it is an important moment to discuss our history of wars, both illegal and unnecessary, and those that are...

The first Republican debate of the 2024 election cycle took place in Milwaukee on August 23. While all the drama seemed focused on whether or not anybody beyond Chris Christie would take a serious swing at Trump, much of the evening’s time was devoted to trashing President Joe Biden. So, for anyone still clinging to their sanity after enduring all the lies, here is a quick summary of the things that Biden has accomplished with a little help from Democrats in Congress in his first two-and-a-half years in office. First of all, Joe Biden has restored trust, confidence, and...

Dear Trump-loving Friends, Donald Trump and the fascist-supporting, billionaire-funded rightwing have been lying to you about these indictments, particularly the federal one that charges Trump with trying to overturn the 2020 election in defiance of the Constitution and federal law. His lawyer has been all over TV telling anybody who will listen that Joe Biden ordered this prosecution and that it’s all about “denying Trump’s free speech right to question an election.” Both are lies, being spun to try to justify a criminal conspiracy of shocking proportions that nearly ended the American Experiment after 247 years. First off, Joe...

In June of 1954, Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance because his ex-wife had been a member of the Communist Party and he had described himself as a “New Deal Democrat,” which, to his inquisitors, meant “communist.” The Soviet Union had brought down the iron curtain on their people, after all, and millions of Russians lived behind it. The USSR also had the world’s second-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, and Americans lived in fear of nuclear war: I still remember the “duck and cover” drills from elementary school in the 1950s. Now the GOP is reprising their infamous McCarthyite...