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Andrew O’Hagan: The Good Traitor, 25 September 2014

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State 
by Glenn Greenwald.
Hamish Hamilton, 259 pp., £20, May 2014, 978 0 241 14669 9
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... is the real story behind Greenwald’s tale. ‘We don’t have a domestic spying programme,’ Barack Obama said on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno in August 2013. ‘What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an email address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat.’ In truth, as Greenwald reveals, a ...

What to Tell the Axe-Man

Jeremy Waldron: Hypocrisy and Mendacity, 6 January 2011

Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond 
by David Runciman.
Princeton, 272 pp., £13.95, September 2010, 978 0 691 14815 1
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Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics 
by Martin Jay.
Virginia, 241 pp., $24.95, April 2010, 978 0 8139 2972 9
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... Runciman does not cross the Atlantic; with the exception of some musings on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama at the end of the book, it is an English tradition that he takes himself to be exploring. Runciman’s account of Orwell on hypocrisy and lying is particularly interesting. Orwell certainly understood the uses of disingenuousness in ...

Iran v. America

Patrick Cockburn: A New Deal for Iraq, 19 June 2008

... the last moment; he travels only by helicopter and has never ventured outside the Green Zone. If Barack Obama wins the election, and if Bush’s agreement can be reversed, the US could withdraw its forces over the following 18 months without provoking an explosion of violence: but only if it comes to an agreement with Iran and Syria. An increase in ...

Blips on the Screen

Andrew Cockburn: Risk-Free Assassinations, 3 December 2020

The Drone Age: How Drone Technology Will Change War and Peace 
by Michael Boyle.
Oxford, 336 pp., £22.99, September, 978 0 19 063586 2
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Drone Art: The Everywhere War as Medium 
by Thomas Stubblefield.
California, 218 pp., £70, February, 978 0 520 33961 3
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Hellfire from Paradise Ranch: On the Front Lines of Drone Warfare 
by Joseba Zulaika.
California, 289 pp., £25, June, 978 0 520 32974 4
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The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare 
by Christian Brose.
Hachette, 288 pp., £21, April, 978 0 316 53353 9
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... assassinations holds great attraction. ‘Turns out I’m really good at killing people,’ Barack Obama remarked on the day when Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, was executed by drone at his command. ‘Didn’t know that was going to be a strong suit of mine.’ Zulaika reminds us just how avidly ...

Somebody Shoot at Me!

Ian Sansom: Woody Guthrie’s Novel, 9 May 2013

House of Earth: A Novel 
by Woody Guthrie.
Fourth Estate, 234 pp., £14.99, February 2013, 978 0 00 750985 0
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... To celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009 a concert was held in Washington DC, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. ‘In the course of our history, only a handful of generations have been asked to confront challenges as serious as the ones we face right now,’ Obama said, truly, after will ...

More than a Million Names

Mattathias Schwartz: American Intelligence, 16 June 2016

Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror 
by Michael Hayden.
Penguin, 464 pp., £21.99, February 2016, 978 1 59420 656 6
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... In 2006, George W. Bush appointed him director of the CIA, where he stayed until 2009, when Barack Obama replaced him with Leon Panetta. During Hayden’s ten years at the top, the intelligence establishment assumed many quasi-judicial powers. Domestic surveillance, detention, evidentiary findings and adjudication became part of the remit, as did ...

Separation Anxiety

David Hollinger: God and Politics, 24 January 2008

The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West 
by Mark Lilla.
Knopf, 334 pp., $26, September 2007, 978 1 4000 4367 5
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... actual alignments in the debate in the United States today. Prominent among religious liberals is Barack Obama, who, while calling for a ‘spiritual awakening’ that might give secularists pause, distinguishes sharply between private motivation and public warrant: Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into ...

Cynical Realism

Randall Kennedy: Supreme Court Biases, 21 January 2021

... Alito in 2005 by George W. Bush, and Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latinx on the Court, in 2009 by Barack Obama, who also nominated Elena Kagan the following year. Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett were all nominated by Donald Trump during his single term in office.Before a nominee can take his or her seat on the court, they must be ...

The Age of Detesting Trump

David Bromwich, 13 July 2017

... years, and were half-asleep and nodding when they approved Cheney and Bush’s war in Iraq and Obama and Clinton’s war in Libya. For obscure reasons, they have been quite certain that Western dismantling of yet another Arab country, Syria, is the surest path to a sane policy in the Middle East. All the mainstream outlets, with CNN and the Times at their ...

Wrecking Ball

Adam Shatz: Trump’s Racism, 7 September 2017

... 13 years later, he continued to insist on their guilt. He built a campaign on the claim that Obama was not American, appealing to the oldest prejudices about black American rights to citizenship. He has revelled in the idea of police brutality. What, then, explains the paroxysms of Republican anti-racism in the face of Charlottesville? The purpose was ...

Green Pastel Redness

Colin Kidd: The Supreme Court Coup, 24 March 2022

Dissent: The Radicalisation of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Supreme Court 
by Jackie Calmes.
Twelve, 478 pp., £25, July 2021, 978 1 5387 0079 2
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Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months that Transformed the Supreme Court 
by Linda Greenhouse.
Random House, 300 pp., £22.50, November 2021, 978 0 593 44793 2
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... died suddenly in February that year, McConnell solemnly pronounced that the Senate could not allow Barack Obama to make an appointment to the court during an election year, though the election was then nine months away. He successfully blocked hearings for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee. Four years later McConnell ...

Policing the Police

Fredrick Harris: The Black Panthers, 20 June 2013

Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party 
by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin.
California, 539 pp., £24.95, January 2013, 978 0 520 27185 2
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... On 1 January 2009, around two in the morning, 19 days before the inauguration of Barack Obama, Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old unarmed black man, was shot in the back by a white transit officer in Oakland, California while lying face down on a train platform with his hands behind his back. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died seven hours later ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: Happiness, 23 September 2010

... of thought that feels as if it might become an idea for something. Or that day when inexplicably Barack Obama gets elected. Or after you have just bought the perfect skirt, the one you have been wasting all your money trying to find all your life. Ditto a lover. Previously happiness has been understood to be a matter of happenstance – most of the ...

Lucky Lad

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Harold Evans, 17 December 2009

My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times – An Autobiography 
by Harold Evans.
Little, Brown, 515 pp., £25, September 2009, 978 1 4087 0203 1
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... was another piece in the Guardian. Evans accused the American press of an excessive fondness for Barack Obama, which was fair enough, but also lamented ‘the persecution of Hillary Clinton’, and the ‘continuous insinuations’ that ‘the Clintons were race-baiters,’ which Evans called ‘absurd defamation’. Why absurd? When Bill Clinton ...

The Big Con

Pankaj Mishra, 4 May 2023

... by September 2014 he was being shown round the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial in Washington DC by Barack Obama, and in June 2016 he addressed a joint session of Congress on the subject of his and America’s shared ‘philosophy of freedom’.Rupert Murdoch anointed Modi as India’s ‘best leader with the best policies since independence’. Addressing ...

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