Hillary clinton

Must we live in perpetual fear of being named and shamed?

You should feel thoroughly ashamed of reading this infamous rag. Or else you might decide to revel, shamelessly, in its critics’ prim disapproval. From political squalls to global wars, David Keen argues that a ‘spiral of shame’ and shamelessness now traps individuals and societies in arid cycles of pain, rage and revenge. Manipulative actors – ‘advertisers, warmongers, terrorists, tyrants and charlatans’ – sell us ‘magical solutions’ to the anguish of the shame they themselves stoke. But they merely pass the burden to other groups, leaving us with more suffering. Keen writes: ‘Such actors do with shame what the Mafia does with fear.’ The author teaches conflict studies at the LSE.

Is there any defence against the tidal wave of online disinformation?

Whether you’re left, right or just somewhere vaguely in between, wherever you’re coming from you may well have a sense that things are somehow not quite right, that the country is headed in the wrong direction, that our various problems and crises seem to be multiplying. You may well have concluded that this is because our institutions have been taken over by an out-of-touch elite who run the government, the judiciary, the media and goodness knows what else, and that the only way to discover the real truth is to do your own research, which involves scrolling through the internet because you no longer trust the ‘mainstream media’. Pizzagate, in

After Biden, who?

Joe Biden is telling everyone he will seek re-election in 2024 – including those who don’t want him around. After Barack Obama gave him the cold shoulder at an April White House event, sources revealed to the Hill that Biden had told his former boss he planned to go for it in 2024. You get the sense the leak did not come from Obama’s camp. ‘I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,’ Biden said at a Michigan rally in March 2020. ‘There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country’. Every candidate sounds a conciliatory tone in victory, particularly when

Is Anna Wintour human?

Apparently Anna Wintour wants to be seen as human, and Amy Odell’s biography goes some way to helping her achieve that aim. Nearly all the photographs show her smiling, looking friendly, even girlish. And the text quite often mentions her crying. On 9 November 2016 she cried in front of her entire staff because Hillary Clinton lost the election. But then she immediately set about trying to persuade Melania Trump to do a Vogue shoot. Melania, another tough cookie, refused unless she was guaranteed the cover. Dame Anna has been the editor of American Vogue since 1988 and holds a position of extraordinary power in the fashion world. Designers, photographers,

Hillary Clinton’s latest masterclass

It’s been a tough few years for poor old Hillary. Since losing the 2016 contest to Donald Trump, the ‘most qualified candidate in history’ has mostly dedicated herself to collecting honorary degrees and blaming the Russians for Brexit. But now the former Senator has sallied forth for her biggest blunder since Benghazi to present her own ‘Masterclass’ on the skills she’s developed throughout her career. Lesson one: how to lose a presidential election. In a short trailer released yesterday, Clinton gushed about how she intended to publicly read for the first time the victory speech she would have given had she not, er, lost to Trump. Hand clutched to heaving bosom, eyes welling

Hillary Clinton’s new thriller is a paranoid fever dream

You already know that State of Terror, Hillary Clinton’s new novel, written in collaboration with the best-selling author Louise Penny, is going to be awful. You want to why. If the novel is a corpse then let this critic be the coroner. To be fair, State of Terror offers as much literary competence as you would expect from the sort of weighty thriller you’d pick up in a train station if you’d forgotten your charger. Penny is a pro. The pacing is respectable. The characters are numerous enough that you forget that none of them are especially well-developed. There are stylistic howlers — a Russian dictator has ‘a coldness that

Playing with fire — did QAnon start as a cynical game?

On Easter Monday 2018, Donald and Melania Trump stood on the balcony of the White House next to a giant bunny. It’s part of the job: since 1878, presidents have hosted a children’s Easter egg hunt on the south lawn. Usually they rhapsodise abut what fun the kids are going to have. Trump, true to form, told his young guests to ‘just think of 700 billion dollars, because that’s all going into our military this year’. And he also said that the White House was an amazing place, in ‘tip-top shape’. The liberal media rolled their eyes about Trump boasting to children about military spending but quickly moved on. The

What Hillary Clinton doesn’t understand about Brexit

Is anyone else watching Hillary Clinton’s whirlwind trip to the UK and thinking to themselves: ‘Thank God she didn’t become president?’ All her worst traits have been on display. Her arrogance. Her penchant for lecturing foreign countries (in this case ours). Her harebrained conspiracy theories. Her belief that loads of people are racists — or ‘deplorables’, as she once put it. Can’t we organise a protest or something? I’ll make the placards. ‘GO HOME, HILLARY.’ She’s here with her daughter Chelsea — the dictionary should replace its definition of the word nepotism with just a photograph of Chelsea Clinton — to promote their book, The Book of Gutsy Women. That’s

The mesmerising mediocrity of Trump’s opponents

If you believe the headlines, President Donald Trump is in deep trouble. The great impeachment saga is gathering pace. House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff has been conducting closed-door interviews as part of his investigations into whether the President abused his executive power in his efforts to dig up dirt on his political rival, Joe Biden, the former vice president under Obama. Did Trump threaten to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless its government told him what he wanted to hear? More leaked transcripts this week suggest that he did. Gordon Sondland, a US ambassador to the European Union and a Trump ally, has now dropped his Commander–in-Chief in it

Britain’s political system is broken. America’s isn’t

American liberals perceive it as a jarring inconsistency: my opposition to Trump and support for Brexit. Especially outside the UK, these two phenomena are perceived as identical twin expressions of an alarming ‘populism’, whereby the animals take over the zoo. I’m one of the curiously few political voyeurs who think the American electorate’s preference for an incompetent president and the British electorate’s preference for leaving a power-hungry erstwhile trading bloc have little in common. Dizzying events in the UK this month bring out one vital distinction in relief. In 2016, certainly Donald Trump’s unanticipated victory triggered an immediate consternation among America’s power brokers that rivalled if not surpassed the British

Stephen Daisley

What happened to Hillary Clinton? She lost

Eleven months on from foisting her second grabby megalomaniac on the United States, Hillary Clinton has resurfaced. Not to apologise for losing the presidency to an angry hairpiece who mimicked the disabled for laughs at campaign rallies — no, Clinton has a book to spruik. What Happened is published by Simon & Schuster and will be on the shelves from Tuesday. Clinton appeared on CBS Sunday Morning to promote what, if the trails are to be believed, will be a standard Clinton exercise in self-justification and blame-shifting. It takes a village to take the fall. She will blast primary opponent Bernie Sanders for enabling Donald Trump’s ‘Crooked Hillary’ meme and

Trump’s re-election campaign never stopped

 New York The great ceremonial game of poll dancing is gearing up for its quadrennial orgy. Headlines across the fruited plain bark out numbers and percentages in mystic confabulation. Votaries sway back and forth as the modern magi of the press repeat the results of this contemporary incarnation of taking the auspices. Was any medieval or ancient devotee of numerology more besotted by the task of squeezing significance out of numbers than our pollsters and their marks, or clients, are today? I doubt it. During the First Punic War at the naval battle of Drepana in 249 bc, the commander Publius Claudius Pulcher grew impatient when the sacred chickens failed

The women lining up against Trump

 Washington, DC It’s no secret that President Donald Trump has women problems. His relationship with his wife seems strained. Feminists loathe him. His popularity among the opposite sex is lower than ever, according to the polls. And, to rub salt into his wounded machismo, he appears to have just lost a fierce political battle over the government shutdown to Nancy Pelosi, the newly reinstalled Democratic speaker. All week, the commentariat has gushed over the way Pelosi ‘schooled’ Trump in the art of politics by forcing him to reopen the government without giving him the funds he wants to build a wall on the Mexican border. She ‘spanked him’, they say.

American nightmare

 Washington, DC As if American politics were not scary enough, the prospect of President Hillary Rodham Clinton has once again reared its frightful head. The woman is a proven horror, politically speaking. One senior Democrat strategist calls her the ‘kiss of death’. She loses elections she ought to win because people don’t like her. Just over a week away from the midterm elections, Democrat candidates in various states are said to be relieved that she isn’t conducting one of her vanity tours of the country. She has even fallen foul of the #MeToo movement, after she dared to say her husband, Bill, had not abused his power over Monica Lewinsky.

A bipartisan bungler

Americans forget their corruption in order to savour their innocence. When Republicans and Democrats are struggling to find ways forward and the presidency is all over the road, the combat of ex-FBI director James Comey and reality television star Donald Trump is almost heartening. For, despite partisan division and the rise of China, the drama of the American psyche survives. The puritan grips the porn-ographer, and the spirit of the civil servant contends with the flesh of the president. The excitement over last Sunday’s ABC News interview with Comey was almost as much as that around Michael Woolf’s Fire and Fury. So much has happened since that worthy mishmash of secondhand

Politics at play

David Haig’s play Pressure looks at the Scottish meteorologist, James Stagg, who advised Eisenhower about the weather in the week before D-Day. The play works by detaching us from our foreknowledge of events. We’re aware that the landings went off smoothly on 6 June in fine conditions. However, D-Day was originally scheduled for 5 June, and for the preceding month southern England had basked in a prolonged sunny spell. According to Eisenhower’s American meteorologist, this was set to continue. But Stagg believed a storm was about to engulf the channel. Eisenhower trusted Stagg and postponed D-Day. The storm arrived, albeit tardily, which vindicated Stagg who then foresaw a brief period

‘And now for my next guest – Adolf Hitler!’

Having thoroughly enjoyed Graham Norton’s recent forensic cross-examination of Hillary Clinton on BBC1, I’m thrilled that the corporation intends to use Graham for yet further heavyweight political interviews. Here’s an exclusive preview of one coming up soon: GN: ‘Halllllllo! How lovely to see you all! I hope you’ve been behaving yourselves. [Audience titters.] Well, do we have a feast for you this evening — so let’s get started. My first guest needs no introduction. Probably the most famous man from the 20th century — ladies and gentleman, please welcome, Adolf Hitler!’ [Hitler makes his entrance, waves, shakes Graham’s hand and sits down next to him. Audience cheers wildly.] GN: ‘It

High life | 19 October 2017

I may have spoken too soon last week when I defended my old friend Harvey Weinstein. It now looks very bad for him, with even Hillary Clinton joining the Greek chorus condemning him. It is not just boorish behaviour towards the fairer sex that he now stands accused of; it is also rape, something that he and his lawyers strenuously deny. Mind you, I’ve always thought that someone was innocent until proven guilty — but that does not appear to be the case in these hyper-feminist times. And the idea that Bill and Hillary were unaware of Harvey’s shenanigans — not to mention the sleazy bunch that is Hollywood —

There’s still no smoking gun in the Trump-Russia story

Political scandals sometimes throw up deliciously eccentric minor characters. Trump-Russia — a scandal or merely a crisis, according to taste — now has one: Rob Goldstone. He is described as a British former tabloid journalist, a music promoter, former Miss Universe pageant judge, and friend of the Trumps. Facebook videos reveal a short, tubby man with a northern accent and voice that seems a couple of octaves too high for his bulk. Twitter photos show him in a black shirt with a shiny gold tie; or holding velvet loafers up to his double chin, the word ‘Sex!’ embroidered on the toecaps; or wearing a gold baseball hat bearing the legend

High life | 18 May 2017

At a chic dinner party last week, a Trump insider gossiped about an American president having had an affair with a former French president’s wife. Actually, Carla Bruni has denied the rumours concerning her and the Donald, although they did have a date once upon a time. It seems that everything about Trump is controversial and some of us are having a rough time defending him. If only he’d shut his mouth and stay away from Twitter once in a while. Mind you, his enemies have become so desperate, and their charges so outrageous, that the 45th president of the good old US of A might even become popular —