Boris Johnson’s Big Day Out
- July 23, 2016
- by
- Matt
Politically speaking, schadenfreude tends to be a consolatory emotion, whose pleasures are generally ephemeral and sharpened by defeat. Even so, the humiliation of Boris John last week was worth the price of admission. I’m referring, of course, to the car crash press conference in which Johnson appeared alongside John Kerry and found himself subject to some sharp and hostile questioning that he clearly didn’t anticipate.
The questions included gems like the following:
“You’ve accused the current U.S. president, Barack Obama, of harboring a part-Kenyan’s ‘ancestral dislike for the British empire’ while claiming, I think,...
Hillary Clinton: Your Feminist Solutions
- June 10, 2016
- by
- Matt
There’s a certain kind of feminism that gives feminism a bad name. Like Jess Phillips’s ludicrous but headline-grabbing allegation that Jeremy Corbyn was guilty of ‘low-level misogyny’. Or the way the media rallied round Laura Kuenssberg to depict those who accused her of an anti-Corbyn and pro-Tory bias of sexism.
In the first case,...
Donald Trump: American Fascist?
- June 04, 2016
- by
- Matt
Just so you know, I’m not a fan of Donald Trump. I despise his racism and xenophobia, his brutal sexism, his shallowness, vacuousness, and egomania, his cultish ‘I can fix everything because I am Trump’ policy prescriptions. I’m repelled by his sociopathic encouragement of the violence that so often accompanies his rallies,...
Truth, Lies, and Politics
- May 14, 2016
- by
- Matt
In Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, a pompous eighteenth-century professor asks the idiot-savant Kaspar Hauser a variant of the classic logical puzzle: You are traveling down a path and come to a fork in the road. One fork leads to a village where everyone tells the truth and the other to a...
The World According to Bono
- April 15, 2016
- by
- Matt
I’ve got nothing against famous people getting involved in politics or embracing political causes. On the contrary, there’s no reason why the accident of fame and the weird cult of celebrity-worship that comes with it should place anyone above politics or preclude celebrities from taking moral and political positions on issues that they feel strongly...
Darkness in Trumptown: Breaking News
- February 26, 2016
- by
- Matt
FIONA BRUCE: And now we cut to the White House to hear our political editor Laura Kuenssberg cover Donald Trump’s inaugural speech. Laura, can you tell us what’s happening?
KUENSSBERG: Well Fiona, we are really witnessing some extraordinary scenes here on what is truly a momentous occasion.
(Camera pans out to the White House, which has...
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