World

But if you want to see something that really is antithetical to the idea of the American Idea then this, from Glenn Greenwald, should dp the job nicely: [T]he bill recently introduced by Joe Lieberman and John McCain — the so-called “Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act” — now has 9 co-sponsors, including the newly elected Scott Brown.  It’s probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act.  It literally empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect — including American citizens

I enjoyed Ross Douthat’s column this week in which he contemplates the inadequacies of Hollywood’s response to the Iraq war. (Hey – at least Hollywood has responded: has the British film industry? There haven’t been too many British stories told, as opposed to Britishers telling American stories. Which is a little different.) The narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told, resembles a story out of Shakespeare. You had a nation reeling from a terrorist attack and hungry for a response that would be righteous, bold and comprehensive. You had an inexperienced president trying to tackle a problem that his predecessors (one of them his own father) had left to fester

Thanks to Matt Welch for spotting this splendid piece of “What me?” nonsense from the President: As we were driving in, I was saying, boy, it’s just good to be back in the Midwest, this is about as close as I’ve been to home in a while.  And part of the reason it’s just good to be back is because Washington is a place where tax dollars are often treated like Monopoly money — they’re bartered and traded, and they’re divvied up among lobbyists and special interests, and where waste — even billions of dollars of waste — is accepted as the price of doing business.  When we proposed, by

I agree with Melanie Phillips that the principle reason there’s no middle-east preace prcess worth the name is the Palestinian’s reluctance to recognise and guarantee Israel’s security. I believe there are other reasons too, mind you, that help to obstruct any path towards a proper and just settlement. Still, since Melanie doesn’t believe there should be a Palestinian state, what does she think should be done? However much some people might wish it, the Palestinians cannot be wished away. They’re not going anywhere. Right? And if this is so, then at some point some kind of a deal will have to be reached. Perhaps not for many years, but sometime

More on the “exciting” debates between Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg that are, inevitably, going to become the most “important” moments in this year’s election campaign. As I suggested at the Daily Dish, these are problematic for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that they won’t be debates at all – at least not in the sense that anyone who’s ever taken part in any real debating would understand the term. Mr Eugenides puts it well: What’s ironic about this is that in the debating I know, it’s usually the quality of a team’s arguments that wins the day, not their style. Beyond a

Some readers don’t think it’s fair or reasonable for people living in rural areas to talk about immigration. Fair enough, though it’s not as though I’ve always lived in the countryside. Anyway, some country dwellers don’t much like immigrants either. Here’s a note from a Dordogne correspondent: I live in the countryside and have pretty strong views on some immigrants. I’d like some of them to hop back over to the other side of the channel seeing they can’t be bothered to learn French or even be polite enough to say Bonjour (or even Bonn Jaw) when they go into shops etc. l think many of them think they are

More on this essay on American exceptionalism in due course, but first Conor Friedersdorf: In a post on President Obama and American exceptionalism, Victor Davis Hanson explains why he thinks our nation is different from all the others: Perhaps it would be better, when speaking of an early rural society, to talk of an absence of peasantry: We had no concept of a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs; instead, yeomen agrarians were the Jeffersonian ideal, a nation of independent farmers rather than peasants. Odd that a historian should forget about American slavery! Quite.

Last year, this column relayed a story about a civil servant who entered a room containing the Prime Minister and narrowly avoided being hit by a missile thrown by Mr Brown at another official who was departing. It occurs to me that when Mr Brown says that he has never hit anybody, he is telling the literal truth: he always misses. In his claim of lifelong non-violence, Mr Brown is being disloyal to the grand old Labour tradition of thumping people. His protestations leave John Prescott, who punched a voter in the 2001 election, out on a limb, if that is the right phrase. And Neil Kinnock, Labour leader from

Increasingly I suspect that George HW Bush may be one of the most under-rated American presidents since the Second World War. Politically, sure, he wasn’t the smartest, sharpest or smoothest and some of his greatest achievements – most notably the management of post-Soviet eastern europe – owed something to a policy of what was, in some senses and to some extent, benign neglect. But there’s a certain old-fashioned, perhaps patrician, wisdom in that too. The first Bushies got some things wrong and they got some kinds of lucky too but their reserve also helped them avoid too many self-inflicted mistakes. It wouldn’t be quite right to say that the Obama