One thing you often hear said about Vice President Kamala Harris is that she has a terrible laugh. Indeed, if you believe its critics, you’d think her laugh is a big reason why she was such a poor candidate for …
Who is behind Kamala Harris?
The centre of gravity in Democratic politics quaked on Sunday — and in a flash, everything changed. Barring an act of divine intervention, Kamala Harris will become the party’s standard bearer in Chicago in less than a month’s time.
Her …
Searching for Britain’s JD Vance
A recurring theme in C.P. Cavafy’s poems is of the elites in some Hellenistic city in the Near East, long subsumed into the Roman empire, anxiously awaiting news from the imperial centre of the outcome of a great …
How Biden blindsided Netanyahu
There are lame duck administrations. And then there is Washington DC in July 2024. There isn’t even a term for it: what do you call an administration whose leader just exited stage left before his own party could lower the …
What Biden got right
It is fitting that the departure of Joseph Biden Jr. was defined by his trademark stubbornness. For weeks, he held out against those within his party who were calling for his immediate withdrawal. But then came the Republican convention in …
Kamala Harris is painfully out of her depth
Following Joe Biden’s belated withdrawal from the presidential race, the onslaught of felching flattery about his heroically sacrificial character and his administration’s astonishing, unprecedented, better-than-FDR-scale accomplishments began within minutes. From the Democratic party’s grand poohbahs and their lickspittles in the …
Why liberals envy JD Vance
If you want to know the secret of J.D. Vance’s meteoric rise, at the age of 39, to Donald Trump’s choice for vice president should he win, just glance at some of the more overheated liberal analyses of Vance’s success. …
What America can learn from 1924
In the summer of 1924, the Democratic Party gathered in New York City for what turned out to be one of the ugliest conventions in US history. It not only revealed the fractures within the party, but also those in …
Why I’m sticking with Joe
Remember Kamala Harris laughing throatily on the phone to Joe Biden after they’d dumped Trump in 2020? “We did it, Joe. We did it. You’re gonna be the next President of the United States.”
Erotic, I thought. The hottest words …
The case for a millennial president
As Capitol Hill groans under the weight of panicking Democrats, there is one sign of hope for those caught in the disarray: once regarded as a political impossibility, Joe Biden’s decline has cleared the way for a replacement candidate — …
How Joe Biden should abdicate
In times of crisis, a certain sort of cynicism tends to set in: a citizenry’s belief that, despite feeling dissatisfied with the state of affairs or the leadership of the country, none of it actually matters. Because surely, those who …
Starmer is turning Britain into a vassal state
It seems fitting that Keir Starmer’s international debut should be the Nato summit that kicks off in Washington, DC today. Ostensibly scheduled as a celebration of the alliance’s 75th anniversary, it will no doubt be remembered as the moment that …
The true President of America’s Fifth Republic
The fireworks in America this Fourth of July will be fuelled by the country’s imminent election, in which a convicted felon faces off against a doddering old man who is too senile to know that he isn’t really the President. …
Will Biden share Bannon’s fate?
All eyes are naturally fixed upon Joe Biden in the aftermath of last week’s “debate”. Will he stay in the race or bow out? Yet there is another, smaller political drama playing out inside the American political system at present, …
The Big Air Con
Airport world is a parallel dimension. No matter where they are geographically, all airports are essentially the same place, with a simplified “international English” and a time zone only loosely tethered to its location. Airport world even has its own …