I was in New York the day after the November 2004 US presidential election. George W Bush’s re-election — by a far wider margin than the polls had predicted — was of immediate interest. However, it was a column by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof, published that day in the New York Times, that set out for [...]
Having placed three bets on a Joe Biden presidential win, I was greatly relieved when the US networks called his election last week, even if the votes are still being counted and recounted, and Donald Trump refuses to concede and proclaims he was cheated out of victory. Six bottles of France’s finest bubbles have already [...]
In 2014, two years before the last US presidential election, Lord Robin Renwick, former British ambassador to SA and the US, published a book. Time has not smiled kindly on the slim work Ready for Hillary?, and even less so on its subtitle: Portrait of a President in Waiting. Of course, only with “the lordly perspective of retrospective [...]
For the first time in 40 years, on Tuesday night a US presidential debate was televised from Cleveland, Ohio. Since this debate is scheduled for just after the deadline for this column, it is impossible to know if the result of it will move the dial on the outcome of the election on November 3. [...]
Back in the early 1930s, SA, perhaps in echo of those times, had a Hitler-admiring, German-speaking minister of justice. History does not remember kindly, or perhaps at all, the name of Oswald Pirow. Still, in the momentous drama of events in the US following the death of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last weekend, [...]
At the Republican national convention, the keynote speaker on its first night delivered a thunderous address. He declared: "This election is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical [...]
Senator J. William Fulbright occupies a place in the political Pantheon reserved for a breed now extinct: he was a Southern Democratic Senator who staunchly opposed the war in Vietnam in the 1960’s and 1970’s. He lost his re-election bid in 1974 for being too out of touch with his conservative voters. But he did [...]
It is both uniquely national, even intensely parochial on any given day, and yet it really matters hugely to the world, even here, beset though we are with our own problems. I refer to the current spectacle of the US presidential election, which still has nearly eight months to go until voting day on November [...]
In life the opposite of shame is shamelessness. In public life the antonym of shame is impunity. In both cases, it means you act unbound by the norms of decency, accountability, moral probity and ethics. Consequences for wrongful acts are for dummies and dupes. In a country where shamelessness and impunity are the norm, the [...]
Misery loves company, as the old saying goes. So however depressed the local weather, the stuttering economy or the winning loss of the Proteas exit makes you feel, spare a thought for Sir Kim Darroch. He enjoys the dream diplomatic posting as British ambassador to the United States. But right now, despite residing in one [...]
