Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. He not only lost, he lost bigly, at least in terms of the popular vote, despite record numbers of voters turning out for him, wishing for four more years. Trump’s response has been entirely predictable. Like the proverbial spoilt child in the sandbox,...
One of the sillier notions advanced during this US presidential election campaign was that if Joe Biden were to win, he and his party would transform the United States into the promised land of socialism. I guess not even the Republican strategists who promoted this canard seriously believed it to...
The Senate hearings on Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court did not sit well with American feminists. An ultra-conservative judge belonging to an ultra-conservative Catholic faith group vehemently opposed to abortion and anything gay was hardly a candidate one would expect feminists to endorse. Interestingly enough, feminists zeroed...
One of the best-known of Donald Trump’s many campaign promises in 2016 was that “he” would build a “big, beautiful wall” along America’s southern border with Mexico to prevent illegal migrants from “shithole countries” crossing into the United States. And the best thing about it? The Mexican government was going...
Another American election has come and gone. And, once again, enlightened pundits on both sides of the Atlantic are scratching their heads. How is it possible that some 70 million American voters would cast their vote for a boorish, incompetent, lying buffoon, a misogynist racist hypocrite, devoid of the most...
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a man on a mission. The goal: to make Turkey great again. Making Turkey great again, I guess, means wiping history clean of a series of humiliations, from the ignominious decline of the Ottoman Empire, dismissed as the “sick man upon the Bosporus” in the late...
Abraham Lincoln is generally credited with a famous adage that you can fool all the people part of the time, or you can fool some people all the time, but you cannot fool all people all the time. Until today, it is unclear whether or not Lincoln ever uttered the...
Germany is a federation, and so are Belgium, Spain and Austria. Switzerland is a confederation — something of a federation plus. Federations consist of relatively autonomous entities, like states in the US, states and territories in Australia, provinces in Canada, Länder in Germany and Austria, cantons in Switzerland. Until recently,...
Every year, the movers and shakers of our times come together for a few days in Davos, a swanky resort of literary fame in the Swiss Alps thanks to Thomas Mann, who made it the setting of his magnum opus, “The Magic Mountain.” Today, the economic, political and academic high-flyers...
After four years of the Trump presidency, it is still not entirely clear why a substantial number of voters in 2016 cast their ballots for a candidate who made it glaringly obvious that he lacked many of the most basic character traits needed to qualify for America’s highest political office....
