Tom Dooley (editor)

Tom Dooley (born 1970) was the founder of Eclectica Magazine along with Chris Lott in 1996. Dooley was born on an island in the Aleutian Chain and attended high school in Tok, Alaska, graduating in 1988. He went to college in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois, studying creative writing under Tom Churchill and Richard Stern.

For the next eleven years, he taught and coached a variety of subjects and grades in Alaska, Arizona, and Wisconsin before taking a degree in public administration and settling in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He lives there today and works for the federal government, continuing to edit Eclectica in his spare time.

Dooley also contributes to Eclectica as an op-ed writer in the magazine's Salon section, has done the occasional music review, and once interviewed well-known conspiracy theorist Michael Ruppert. His review of Willis Alan Ramsey's self-titled debut album and his discussion of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee character are popular links.

Dooley has been known to take strong political stands in his Salon articles, once comparing the second President Bush to an elderly man who drove through a street fair in Santa Monica, killing ten and injuring 63 people:

George W. Bush and the current administration is our George Russell Weller. We elected him, put him at the wheel of a very large Buick LeSabre, and with a good ol' Texas "Yee-haw," sent him into traffic. It may have been gross negligence on our part as American citizens to do it, but most of the people who elected Bush and who even now continue to support him are the farthest thing from evil. Just the opposite. They mean well. They think of themselves as the good guys, the way all well-rounded characters, heroes and villains alike, are trained to do in these days of relativist enlightenment. (http://www.eclectica.org/v8n2/dooley_salon.html)