US elections

It seems ANC chicanery can bring deeply divided US parties together

You have to hand it to the ANC and our spectacularly misnamed department of international relations and co-operation (Dirco). Both have achieved the rarest of rare feats: uniting the bitterly factitious and brutally acrimonious Democrats and Republicans in the US Capitol. The two major parties, which control the three branches of the US government, agree [...]

Democracy is slowly chipping away at the denialists in the US

Last Tuesday, election day for the mid-terms in the US, found famed American historian and presidential envoy Deborah Lipstadt thousands of kilometres from home. Instead, she was addressing a seminar at the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town. Lipstadt, who achieved celluloid fame via her portrayal by Rachel Weisz in [...]

Ramaphosa’s meeting with US president a non-event, just like his reforms

One of Queen Elizabeth II’s favourite aphorisms was, apparently, “I have to be seen to be believed”. Yesterday, after the pomp, circumstances and flummery of her state funeral at Westminster, and later, her final committal at Windsor, her grandson Prince William, the Prince of Wales, tweeted “5.1 billon people watched the queen’s funeral, 63% of [...]

Babbling while Ukraine burns

For the least populated area in America, the Mountain West state of Wyoming has received outsize attention across the world in recent days. That’s because it was the site of the landslide defeat in a primary election of US congresswoman Liz Cheney, a three-term US Representative. Cheney is the daughter of a Republican dynasty headed by [...]

Slow and sedate Ramaphosa, so unlike fast and furious Trump

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 [...]

Are the EFF’s tiresome tactics comparable to those of the Nazis?

US President Donald Trump’s conniptions and conspiracy theorising over last week’s presidential election defeat recall the “we wuz robbed” ringside shout-outs of late Johannesburg boxing supremo Alan Toweel. They also find a slight echo here in the tactics and strategy of the EFF. The party on these southern shores has unavailingly and with more violence, [...]

By |2020-11-11T07:40:41+00:00November 11th, 2020|EFF, Uncategorized, US elections|0 Comments

No mention of Africa in US election, but it will still strongly affect us

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 [...]

By |2020-10-30T07:14:26+00:00October 30th, 2020|Donald Trump, Opinion, US elections|0 Comments

Trump’s Carter-shaped omen might keep SA’s foot in the US door

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. [...]

By |2020-10-14T08:13:54+00:00October 14th, 2020|Donald Trump, US elections|0 Comments

Poetic justice in the way court-stacking is so often foiled

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, [...]

By |2020-09-27T07:56:57+00:00September 27th, 2020|Donald Trump, US elections, World Politics|0 Comments

In the US, it’s dog-whistle Daddy against a soft Mommy

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 [...]

By |2020-08-30T07:46:25+00:00August 30th, 2020|Donald Trump, US elections|0 Comments
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