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The Lobby Falters

John Mearsheimer: Charles Freeman speaks out, 26 March 2009

... Many people in Washington were surprised when the Obama administration tapped Charles Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council, the body that oversees the production of National Intelligence Estimates: Freeman had a distinguished 30-year career as a diplomat and Defense Department official, but he has publicly criticised Israeli policy and America’s special relationship with Israel, saying, for example, in a speech in 2005, that ‘as long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected ...

What would Plato have done?

Christopher Krebs: Plutarch’s Lives, 29 June 2017

The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives 
by Plutarch, translated by Pamela Mensch.
Norton, 393 pp., £28, March 2017, 978 0 393 29282 4
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... a cavalcade of black cars, stepped from his armoured limousine, strode up the stairs, and greeted Barack and Michelle Obama with a handshake and air kisses. Melania Trump caught up with her husband moments later, an unwieldy Tiffany-blue gift box in her gloved hands. Like numerous contemporary commentators, Plutarch of ...

I need money

Christian Lorentzen: Biden Tries Again, 10 September 2020

Yesterday’s Man: The Case against Joe Biden 
by Branko Marcetic.
Verso, 288 pp., £12.99, March 2020, 978 1 83976 028 0
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... Democrat and Republican nominees for president he isn’t a meritocrat (Dukakis, the Clintons, Obama) or an aristocrat (the Bushes, Gore, Kerry), or the son of a powerful father (McCain, Romney, Trump). Not being an egghead is his biggest asset in the fight v. Trump. With his famous love for ‘the poorly educated’, Trump often seems to be campaigning on ...

Down from the Mountain

Greg Grandin: What Happened to Venezuela?, 29 June 2017

Chávez: My First Life 
by Hugo Chávez and Ignacio Ramonet, translated by Ann Wright.
Verso, 544 pp., £30, August 2016, 978 1 78478 383 9
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... they had left behind with the end of the Cold War. The administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama pressured countries not to enter into deals with Petrocaribe. In 2006, for instance, the State Department lobbied Haiti not to take a 25-year line of credit, financed at 1 per cent interest, to buy Venezuelan diesel and unleaded fuel, even ...

Enemies For Ever

James Wolcott: ‘Making It’, 18 May 2017

Making It 
by Norman Podhoretz.
NYRB, 368 pp., £13.98, May 2017, 978 1 68137 080 4
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... space. In 2010, he announced that he would rather have Sarah Palin occupying the Oval Office than Barack Obama, and in the last election he kinda-sorta endorsed Donald Trump, which one might chalk up to perverse dotage (from Trilling to Trump, what a spiral) if it weren’t part of a decades-long pattern of hitching his cart to the most opprobrious ...

After the Fall

John Lanchester: Ten Years after the Crash, 5 July 2018

... being found are a bizarrely low 500 to 1. (Another 5000 to 1 bet offered by William Hill is that Barack Obama will play cricket for England. I’d advise against that punt.) Nonetheless, 5000 to 1 pales in comparison with the odds you would have got in 2008 on a future world in which Donald Trump was president, Theresa May was prime minister, Britain ...

Red Pill, Blue Pill

James Meek, 22 October 2020

... the CIA and the FBI, but is strongest in the Democratic Party and Hollywood. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – usually referred to as ‘Hussein’ – are among the ringleaders. Concealing his true mission by disguising himself as an ordinary president of the United States, Trump is preparing to take them on. Most of the information given by Q comes ...

Imperial Graveyard

Samuel Moyn: Richard Holbrooke, 6 February 2020

Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century 
by George Packer.
Cape, 592 pp., £25, May 2019, 978 1 910702 92 5
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... American soldier.‘Richard Holbrooke will not go away,’ Samantha Power, his protégée and Barack Obama’s human rights tsar, said a year after Holbrooke’s death. And indeed he hasn’t. In the wake of Donald Trump’s ascendancy, praise of Holbrooke reached fever pitch among members of the ‘resistance’. Yet this desperation to keep his ...

Diary

Azadeh Moaveni: Two Weeks in Tehran, 3 November 2022

... story. And as international celebrities like Carla Bruni trim their split ends in solidarity, and Barack and Michelle Obama, Melinda Gates, Balenciaga, Meghan Markle, Oprah Winfrey and Jill Biden take notice, powerful currents with an interest in destabilising Iran are also getting involved, seeking to define what Iranians ...

Where are we now?

LRB Contributors: Responses to the Referendum, 14 July 2016

... The margin between the two sides – 3.8 per cent – was roughly the same as the margin by which Obama defeated Romney in the 2012 presidential election (3.9 per cent), and you don’t hear a lot of people complaining about the legitimacy of that, not even Republicans (well, not that many). Plus, turnout in the referendum, at 72.2 per cent, was nearly 18 per ...

Nobody wants to hear this

James Meek: Ukraine’s Battle Fatigue, 21 November 2024

... like him, a rich, acquisitive, anti-woke, nominally Christian nationalist white man who loathed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and regards the EU and Nato with scorn – is well known. The Trump Republicans share the notion, widely propagated by Western pundits across the political spectrum, that it is Ukraine, and the Western backers who supply it ...

Is this the end of the American century?

Adam Tooze: America Pivots, 4 April 2019

... hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only exacerbated the lurch to the right. The Republicans in Congress put up a wall of opposition and indulged the populist right in openly questioning his legitimacy as president. The defeat of the centrist Mitt ...

Not a Tough Crowd

Christian Lorentzen: Among the Democrats, 12 September 2024

... lacrosse coach who lived in their apartment building; and her long-standing alliance with Barack Obama.Obama’s speech on the second night was a medley of his greatest hits, with passages recalling his national debut at the DNC in 2004 and his ecumenical message against the notion of red states and blue ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... floor and books about internet amateurs on the nightstand, along with David Remnick’s book on Barack Obama. Julian was cutting his nails. ‘Do you know why I’m doing this, cutting my nails?’ he asked. ‘Nope.’ ‘So the court doesn’t look at my nails and think they are the nails of someone who rips condoms’ – one of the Swedish women ...

Get over it!

Corey Robin: Antonin Scalia, 10 June 2010

American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia 
by Joan Biskupic.
Farrar, Straus, 434 pp., $28, November 2009, 978 0 374 20289 7
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... Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the retiring Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late June. Before she is confirmed by the committee, she will have to answer questions about her views on the constitution and her lack of judicial experience ...

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