World

John McCain wants to suspend campaigning until Congress has sorted out how to bailout Wall Street. What does this mean? Simple: he’s losing and he knows he is.

With ads like these, how did Adlai Stevenson lose to Eisenhower in 1952? Marvellous stuff.

How much experience does a candidate need to have? What qualifies as experience anyway? According to this JFK ad, Nixon’s years as Vice-President didn’t count as qualifying experience…

From 1980. Jimmy Carter: Christianist! (OK, there is a reference to the seperation of church and state, but still…)

In at the deep end. That’s how Intelligence Squared likes to kick off, and the first debate of the new season plunged straight into the perilous waters of the Israel–Palestine conflict. David Lindley, the chair, asked each speaker to present ideas for a workable peace. Dan Gillerman, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN, opened on a note of gloomy optimism. There were dark signs on the horizon, yet he was encouraged because ‘never have so many parties been so desperate for a settlement’. Tehran is the key problem. And if we doubted his word, ‘just listen to Ahmadinejad denying the Holocaust while planning the next one’. He deplored the

Richard Nixon in 1968: “Decisions”.

Christ. The US government seems to have, more or less, bought AIG. Like most bloggers/journalists I don’t for a second pretend to understand these matters. But Megan McArdle doesn’t merely pretend to know something about all this, she actually does. Accordingly, I recommend you read her blog for a smart, savvy, properly sceptical take on matters.

Visiting friends or family with small children? Stuck for a present (toy drums and trumpets are not, I believe, generally considered thoughtful)? Well, my default gift is a collection of Jean de Brunhoff’s wonderful Babar books. You cannot, in my view, and that of most tiny children, go wrong with Babar. So, amidst all the sturm und drang on Wall St and the hurly-burly of the American presidential campaign, it was a relief to be able to turn to Adam Gopnik’s lovely essay on Babar in this week’s edition of the New Yorker. It’s a fine, perceptive piece, not just on Babar, but on French culture, colonialism, the bourgeoisie and

The military-backed President Musharraf of Pakistan has been dragged, screaming and kicking, into retirement. He doesn’t know how lucky he is. How power maddens people! In 5th-century bc democratic Athens, on average two out of the top ten officials every year were found guilty on a capital charge and either fled or were executed. It never stopped men putting themselves forward. The prospects were even worse for Roman emperors. From the start of the principate in 27 bc till the technical end of the empire in the West in ad 476, there were 90 emperors. Of these nearly three in four were killed, usually by their own troops, or committed

I’ve a piece up at Culture11 considering some of the problems Europe may face when confronted by the next American president. Snippet: The election of a new American President is also a test. One which will determine, as is sometimes avowed, if European discontent is merely a manifestation of anti-Bushism rather than a more virulent, infectious anti-Americanism. In truth, the two cannot be so easily disentangled. Yet Europeans may one day reflect that, unlikely as it may seem, Mr. Bush was a better friend to Europe than they ever imagined. Politics is always a matter of style and substance. Mr. Bush’s style permitted Europe to turn away from and reject

Radley Balko says that, yes, perhaps she is. At least sort of. At least more so than her running-mate and, it must be said, more so than Barack Obama. True, Radley has to dig quite deep to find the ore to be refined into a “Sarah Palin, Friend-to–the-Libertarians” bracelet, but there’s at least a trace of the stuff to be mined: But what I like about Palin should bother McCain. Palin actually has staked out unorthodox positions on a number of interesting issues, and they’re issues that McCain and the Republican base that has embraced her would probably find troubling. Palin’s taken a lot of heat, for example, for her

Democrats have abandoned the idea of avoiding Sarah Palin to concentrate on John McCain. Oh dear. Let’s see what Joe Biden has been up to: Exhibit A: In Wisconsin, Biden is asked if Sarah Palin represents a step forward for women. His response: “well look, I think the issue is what does Sarah Palin think? What does she believe? I assume she thinks and agrees with the same policies that George Bush and John McCain think,” Biden added. “And that’s obviously a backward step for women.”Exhibit B: Biden, again, “I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the

If that nice Mr Medvedev is right, and Russia is indeed braced for a new cold war, then the spooks must be on a recruitment drive. Ours, obviously, but theirs too. So spare a thought for the Russian intelligence human resources office, because a career in post-KGB espionage can’t be an easy sell. The modern British teenager merely believes himself to have a God-given right to be an Arctic Monkey. His Russian counterpart, by contrast, surely considers himself a failure if he reaches the age of 21 without a majority stake in the world’s third largest steel corporation, a medium-sized British football club and a girlfriend who looks like a