Category: US Politics

  • Powell's endorsement

    I’ve always been interested in the personality and politics of Colin Powell. As far back as the first Gulf War (I was only 10 at the time), I remember being impressed by his own oratorial skills. And I was equally shocked by his 2003 address to the United Nations – I didn’t believe anything he…

  • Nir Rosen and the Taliban

    Nir Rosen, veteran of reporting from Fallujah at the height of the insurgency in Iraq, writes in the latest issue of Rolling Stone about the Taliban. Or rather, he writes about his time spent with the Taliban in Afghanistan. By the time we reach the town of Salar, only 50 miles south of Kabul, we…

  • John Cleese on Sarah Palin

  • McCain losing it?

    My fellow prisoners…

  • Matt Damon on Palin

    And thank you to Mr Damon for saying the most sensible stuff about Palin thus far.

  • Palin's speech in Wordle

  • Clinton speech in Wordle

  • Vice President Joe Biden

    It’s looking like an Obama/Biden ticket. Steve has called it. I was impressed with Joe Biden’s speech back in 2005 at a conference I attended in Washington. I blogged a little about the conference here. You can watch videos from the conference here. You can also watch Biden’s speech here. I guess we can expect…

  • Obama back in the day

    Cian points to a video of Obama dug up from 1995. In 2004 this wouldn’t have happened in the same way, YouTube has changed the dynamic. Part I Part II Part III

  • Hitchens is waterboarded

    Believe me, it’s torture, says Hitchens. Which returns us to my starting point, about the distinction between training for something and training to resist it. One used to be told—and surely with truth—that the lethal fanatics of al-Qaeda were schooled to lie, and instructed to claim that they had been tortured and maltreated whether they…