Search Results

“... To those of us who hoped that Barack Obama’s election marked a departure from right-wing rule, the president’s failure of leadership has been stunning. Seldom have insurgent expectations – even sceptical, guarded ones – been deflated so swiftly. From the moment he announced his staff and cabinet appointments (Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates et al) it was clear that Obama meant to play by the same Washington rules that created the policy disasters he inherited from George W ...”

“... of Transport. And David Miliband ingeniously contrives to include a dig at Sarah Palin, praise for Barack Obama, and a paean to the ‘best instinct of American liberalism’ in 60 words that purport to recommend a book called Counselor. In this suspicious context, one person shines out for his truth-telling. ‘The book I’ve enjoyed most this ...”

“... US reinforcements in order to ‘finish the job’ that President Bush began but left undone – Barack Obama has implicitly endorsed Bush’s conviction that war provides an antidote to violent anti-Western jihadism. By extension, Obama is perpetuating the effort begun in 1980 to establish American dominion over the ...”

“... was one of the sponsors of a similar bill in the Senate only three years ago. And her then rival, Barack Obama, was even more outspoken on the issue. ‘America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides,’ he proclaimed on the campaign trail in January 2008. ‘I intend to be that ...”

“... Who​ was Barack Obama? The man himself seems troubled by this question and his notably introspective memoir offers up some surprising answers. Was he, for instance, the same person as Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president? When Obama met with Medvedev in 2009 at a dacha outside Moscow, he was surprised by how familiar it all seemed ...”

“... Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack ...”

“... passed a healthcare bill that had been promoted for a year and brokered in many particulars by Barack Obama. This marked a victory for a substantial piece of social legislation, the first of its kind in more than three decades; and the result appears to have given the president and his party fresh confidence in their efforts at comprehensive ...”

“... is the responsibility of parents, not ‘government workers’, otherwise known as teachers. When Obama proposed a plan to make universities more affordable, he commented: ‘President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob!’ Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush. The voters could have picked Rick Perry, the ...”

“... One​ of the minor disappointments about Obama was that he played golf. It’s true that most modern American presidents have liked to play golf – just about everyone from Taft to Trump can be seen with a club in his hand – but Obama was not most presidents. His immediate predecessor, George W ...”

“... by Ken Liu, a Chinese-American sci-fi writer – is Chinese science fiction’s best-known work. Barack Obama is a fan, and the forthcoming movie adaptations are already being described as ‘China’s Star Wars’. The trilogy concerns the catastrophic consequences of humanity’s attempt to make contact with extraterrestrials (it turns out that the ...”

“... who also directs the film, is mainly an object of dream and desire rather than a person, like Barack Obama at the time of his election. He becomes a person late in the film, but that is only when the plot forces him to become political with a small p – a very small, even mean p. In the play the candidate himself doesn’t even figure except as a ...”

“... trapped in the ice. Timbers from its hull were later retrieved and a desk was built from them; Barack Obama now sits behind it in the Oval Office. As a souvenir of another voyage, the Reverend W.H. Holman collected a narwhal tusk, which he donated to the museum in Canterbury, which made it the centrepiece of the Cabinet of Curiosities in what is now ...”

“... hailed him in his Telegraph blog as ‘the effective leader of the Anglosphere’. Although Barack Obama is leader of a one-time British colony with more native English-speakers than all the others put together, Hannan doesn’t for some reason consider him a candidate for the – fantasy – position of Anglosphere ...”

“... Autobiography of Malcolm X and Spike Lee’s subsequent biopic, the O.J. Simpson mediathon, and Barack Obama’s ‘A More Perfect Union’ speech, as well as his entire presidential campaign. Taken together, these comprise a multimedia discourse on the mythology of black-white relations in the US. Indeed, as Stokes shows, The Birth of a Nation grew ...”

“... president to win a majority among Southern whites was Roosevelt in 1944. It might be thought that Barack Obama, who won by 365 electoral college votes to 173, and took 52.9 per cent of the popular vote to McCain’s 45.7, really did make a success of his ‘post-racial’ theme. His was the biggest Democratic victory since 1964. Yet in ...”