In sober retrospect, it seemed just too improbable that Barack Obama would go from months of running well behind Hillary Clinton in the national opinion polls to suddenly dominating the US Democratic primaries. And it was. You can take your pick from the headlines: from “McCain and Clinton Win in N.H. In Major Comebacks” (Washington Post) to “Clinton […]

Robert Kagan is the neo-conservative author of a US history called Dangerous Nation. He has argued that the United States is driven by its own unique “universalistic nationalism … Americans have never been isolationists … they have always gone out into the world to remake it in their own image.” And the Yale University historian Edmund […]

If a diplomat is a man (or nowadays woman of course) who lies abroad for his or her country, what can a presidential press secretary in Washington DC possibly be? In any case, for a few moments this week it seemed that, as an article in the Nation proposed, former George W. Bush press secretary […]

The summering partners of the counterweights editors up here in Canada have just emailed a bizarre new theory about the near-term future of American politics. They say they arrived at their propositions after a tough mid August 2007 evening, watching MSNBC TV. But, it turns out, no less than Newt Gingrich had already started the […]

Who recently told the mass media: “I was going out with someone and they said I should read Machiavelli and I was like, ‘Nah’, and then I was, ‘Ok, I’ll read it’, and now it is always with me”? If you guessed Lindsay Lohan, go to the head of the class. Niccolo Machiavelli, who died […]

No less a political analyst than Arsenio Hall made the crucial point back at the beginning. He had noticed, he told Jay Leno on TV, that George W. Bush could not talk when Dick Cheney was drinking a glass of water. Half a dozen years later a series in the Washington Post, eerily linked with […]

The death of the unusually influential American social scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, on December 31, 2006, prompted a wave of admiring obituaries in January 2007. Canadians could also join in on this party, because as CNN’s Bill Schneider explained, “Lipset’s ideas were so compelling” that he could even “make Canada interesting to Americans.” As others […]

At the opening of the new and (more or less) Democrat-controlled US Congress on January 4, such progressive luminaries as Daniel Ellsberg, Cindy Sheehan, and Gore Vidal took to the streets to urge that “the House of Representatives immediately initiate Articles of Impeachment” against President George W. Bush, for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” If Bill Clinton deserved […]

UPDATED NOVEMBER 9. According to Canada’s self-confessed national newspaper, as originally reported by the indispensable Associated Press, the “best face” George W. Bush’s spokesman Tony Snow could put on the (now altogether clear) results of the US mid-term elections was “some people saw it coming. It was not a a slap-on-the-forehead kind of shock.’” Just slapping […]

The trouble with what Bob Woodward seemed to be saying in the October 3 excerpt from his new book in the Washington Post – and on Larry King’s CNN TV show the night before – was that it reduces the whole healthy US domestic controversy over the Iraq War these days to a question of […]