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“... by the speeches themselves. In the first and most recent series of debates (Kennedy/Nixon in 1960, Bush/Kerry in 2004), the supposedly decisive factors were a stance and a stutter. One debate was decided by a man looking at his watch, another by an off-screen sigh. It is also generally agreed that debates are not won but lost, which means that they have become ...”

“... Mueller teaches in Ohio, one of the now-famous ‘red states’ that elected the warrior-president George W. Bush to a second term, he seems largely oblivious to the fact that a clear majority of Americans consider war to be anything but obsolete. Political elites in the United States came away from the Cold War enamoured of ...”

“... 11 September but America’s increasingly bloody occupation of a turbulent Iraq. So why did the Bush administration shift its attention from tracking down Osama bin Laden and a limited number of al-Qaida fugitives to reordering the Iraqi political system in line with American interests and values? This diversion of resources from a clandestine war against a ...”

“... the new edition of My Search for Warren Harding, Robert Plunket remembers being in the room with George W. Bush when he was told that a second plane had hit the Twin Towers. Bush was reading to a group of schoolchildren in Florida and Plunket, then a journalist on the Sarasota ...”

“... that it looked like a slanging match between a cartoon figure named Saddam and another named Bush. At the same time Secretary of State Baker, with his instinctive concern for domestic political approval, publicly stated that the purpose of American intervention was simply ‘jobs’. Mindful of the need to persuade the voters to support the huge troop ...”

“... to take a while. And the American people must be patient. I’m going to be patient.President George W. Bush, 17 September 2001The Taliban regime already belongs to history.Jürgen Habermas, December 2001I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan or Iraq.Donald Rumsfeld, 8 September 2003I will venture ...”

“... Administrations, and now it seems that the necessary technology may soon be within reach. George W. Bush wants to push ahead with the scheme, and has committed the US to constructing a National Missile Defense system, at a cost of more than $60 billion. A successful test was carried out in July. Canada’s ...”

“... in a live debate), Obama concluded by locking himself to the middle classes and John McCain to George Bush. Neither McCain’s folksiness nor his jokiness rang true (a quip question about a $3m federal programme to study the DNA of bears in Montana and whether it was about criminality or paternity fell flat). His repeated message was that Obama ...”

“... in one Beltane burn. Ca’ the yowes to the knowes . . . I am the bad shepherd. Follow me. George Bush, Environmentalist Fuck off, you tired, you poor, you huddled masses! Toxins R Us. We give you greenhouse ...”

“... peoples that want to be free just trust in the u s a’ e.e. cummings, ‘Thanksgiving (1956)’ We in Iraq are losing our minds. War does that to people, even to us in the North who have yet to see one. All that we have observed are B52s roaring through the skies to bomb cities south of here and a sideshow offensive to ...”

“... to much of what they were urging us to see. In societies ‘saturated’ with pornography, we see domination as sexy, violence and torture as sex, coercion and abuse as ‘choice’ or ‘speech’; in prevailing liberal approaches to law and philosophy, inequality appears as ‘mere difference’, and what reflects and serves the interests of men ...”

“... to think of presidents like Ronald Reagan and – not that anyone wants to remember this now – George W. Bush inheriting the mantle of Winston Churchill. Robert Conquest, presenting a relatively sophisticated, unmilitaristic and tolerant version of the Anglosphere (it included Nigeria and India) in Reflections on a ...”

“... Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel, American Wife, based on the life of Laura Bush, and sympathetic to her political non-choices, has been getting attention alongside the self-exonerating memoirs and withering insider analyses piling up in the final weeks of the Bush presidency. In its positive assessment of the couple’s marriage (fictionally presented as healthy, affectionate and hot), its willingness to leave ethical issues open to interpretation, and its warnings of the gap between the public and the private person, American Wife is being contrasted with the Oliver Stone movie, W ...”

“... the king of insults. He’s been pretty good at it: ‘Little Marco Rubio’, ‘Low Energy Jeb Bush’, ‘Birdbrain Nikki Haley’ doomed them in the primaries. But Kamala Harris had him flummoxed. He tried recycling some of the old Hillary Clinton epithets – ‘Crooked Kamala’, ‘Lyin’ Kamala’ – but they didn’t stick, since Harris is ...”

“... as his friends turned against him. Not only is every episode gone through in surprising detail but we soon learn why each colleague who disapproved of his op-ed was a hypocrite for doing so. He lingers with especial bitterness on the presenter Dan Rather – second only to the Clintons as a demon figure for the American Right – retailing a series of facts ...”