World

The President of the United States often really seems to be a kind of elected Priest-Monarch. One area in which this is obviously apparent, is his ability to reward cronies and fundraisers with agreeable Ambassadorships overseas. Matt Yglesias, who is too wise to buy the wisdom himself, offers the official justificatory fig-leaf for this patronage: I had always just thought of this is a kind of casual, widely accepted corruption. But recently I did learn the official story as to why this is good practice, namely that an important political supporter or a friend of the president is likely to have a much easier time of getting access to the

Bruce Schneier suspects we’ll probably learn the wrong ones. After all, as he points out, there’s very little you can do to stop 18 men with guns and grenades once they’ve begun their attack. I suspect John Robb would agree. Well-planned low-tech attacks that “leverage” a city’s own infrastructure are one of the nightmare scenarios. Yet since this kind of mission is more likely than not to end in the deaths of the terrorists themselves (cf the Chechen attack on a Moscow theatre) it remains, happily, an unpopular career choice. And for that one should be truly thankful. Imagine how easy it would be to cripple the railways, or, armed

Little to no blogging over the next few days, I’m afriad. I’m in East Lothian tonight, speaking at a St Andrews dinner, thence to Hawick to bid farewell to a cousin who is emigrating to Melbourne (an order for Boxing Day Ashes tickets has already, fear not, been placed) and then have a deadline to meet on Sunday. So, talk amongst yourselves peeps: now that counter-terrosim police have taken to arresting opposition politicians for the crime of embarrassing the government, is this government the worst we’ve endured in more than 50 years or merely one of the worst? Meanwhile, American readers are invited to speculate upon arguments in favour of,

There’s something splendid about this. Brent Whelan, an American in Paris, runs, as you do, into yet another demonstration. There was the… sound truck and chants, flags and banderoles, a regular labor action. But I missed the front of the cortège where the leafleters and signs were, so I couldn’t tell what it was about. So I asked a guy on the corner, who told me, “It’s the archaeologists.”  And that’s just who it was: several hundred archaeologists marching down the street, shouting and chanting, demanding that the government withdraw plans to disperse the headquarters of its national archaeological service from Paris. Only, I think, in Paris. And long may this

Sure, last month Barack Obama was an un-American, terrorist-coddling, muslim threat to every American Ideal every true-blooded, stout-hearted, tub-thumping patriot held dear. Now, however, things are a little different. We can seem more clearly these days, now the nonsense has receded. Ross Douthat offers a prediction: Among right-wing hawks, there will be strange-new-respectful talk about Obama’s centrist instincts, his Scoop Jackson-ish tendencies, his Reaganesque blend of idealism, pragmatism and strength. Meanwhile, the rest of the right-wing coalition will be getting steamrolled. Quite so. Viewed from outside the United States, the foreign policy “debate” in Washington is a curiously curtailed affair. It concentrates on means, not ends and this rather tends

Time to return to TP O’Connor’s Sketches in the House, his account of the 1893 parliamentary session. Back then, happily, the government could not yet guillotine a bill and so obstructionism – or filibustering – was a legitimate, if infuriating, parliamentary tactic. Much to Mr O’Connor’s irritation… Again I repeat, obstruction is a matter not of intellect, but temperament. Intellectually, I should put Jimmy in a very low place, even in the ranks of the stupid party. Temperamentally he stands very high. A brief description of his methods of obstruction will bring this home. First, it should be said that he is entirely inarticulate and, beyond rough common sense, destitute

One thing I’d like to do next summer (if, that is, we have a summer) is devote some time to doing some proper BBQ. No surprise, then, that I was a sucker for Calvin Trillin’s New Yorker piece on the small Lexington BBQ-joint hailed by Texas Monthly as the home of the Best BBQ in the Lone Star state. As a longtime editor, though, he knew a Cinderella story when he saw one. It wasn’t just that Snow’s had been unknown to a Texas barbecue fancy that is notably mobile. Snow’s proprietor, Kerry Bexley, was a former rodeo clown who worked as a blending-facility operator at a coal mine. Snow’s

Gabriel Sherman’s written a very entertaining piece on the furious competition between Washington’s elite private schools to enroll the Obama daughters next term. Enjoyable as it is, you may find yourself wishing they could all lose. However, the piece reveals one of th egrubbier, more ghastly sides of the city. Nonetheless, the issue of where the Obama girls go to school is interesting. Back in 1992 the Clintons toyed with the notion – perhaps even promising? – that Chelsea would attend a bog-standard public (ie, state) school. That didn’t survive a recce of the DC public school system (though I suspect that the Secret Service had a say too) and

Jonathan Freedland warns Guardian readers today that Obama is not a dove but, rather, a “smarter hawk”. Fine. Here’s how he summarises Obama’s approach to Iran: The new disposition on Iran is similarly nuanced. The noises are much less warlike. Obama promises diplomacy and dialogue, and relegates force to where it should be: a last, not a first, resort. But his own advisers counsel that Obama is firm on this matter. He has concluded that Tehran cannot be allowed to become a nuclear power, not least because it would trigger a regional arms race. He will use negotiation to thwart that possibility. But if that fails, the use of force