Us politics

Hollywood tends to treat Richard Nixon as an oafish B-movie villain, so it is ambitious and original of Harry Shearer to try to convince a British audience of the very feminine side of the 37th American president. As a veteran comedy actor and the ‘voice’ of several of the Simpsons cartoon characters — including Mr Burns, Smithers, and Ned Flanders — Shearer has the vocal range to get almost anyone right if he puts his mind to it. But voice work was not the main challenge in the forthcoming Sky Arts drama. Shearer is more intrigued by the physical aspects of the central role in Nixon’s the One, which he

Phew! America has stopped banging its head against the debt ceiling. For now. The world’s pre-eminent power can carry on ruining itself for a while longer — until the next boring-but-incredibly-important fiscal crisis hits. (The dreaded sequester is next up, oh joy). There’ll be plenty more soul-searching essays about the eclipse of American power. But it’s the poor Republicans who face a more urgent existential crisis. Their party’s strategy for handling the issue has been confused and inept.  At every turn, the Democrats have managed (somehow) to present themselves as reasonable, while the Republicans have seemed at best cynical and divided, at worst leaderless and delusional. They have emerged from the

Barack Obama may not be a great president, but he is a wizard at the blame game. He has fought ‘fiscal brinkmanship’ battles throughout his presidency, and he tends to come out on top. America’s federal government is today closing down, and most pundits refuse to say it’s in any way the president’s fault. Instead, they accuse his opponents of wrecking the political system. If you read most newspapers, or watch the BBC, you would think that wicked Republicans — ‘in hock’ to their extremist tea party division —  are shutting down the federal government out of little more than a fit of pique. The Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid,

Hillary Clinton is overwhelming favourite to be America’s next President  – and this time nobody, especially not no pesky filmmaker, will get in her way. Charles Ferguson, who was working on a major new documentary about Hillary, has just announced that he’s cancelled the project. The reason? Apparently, the American political class didn’t approve. The film was absolutely not a right-wing hit job. It was being made for CNN, for starters. And Ferguson is a bona-fide progressive who has made edgily bien-pensant movies about the Iraq War and the financial crash. Indeed, the Republican National Convention assumed his work would be so fellatory towards Mrs C that it threatened to boycott CNN until the

There are a number of obvious differences between last week’s vote in Parliament and the forthcoming Congressional vote on Syria. But today when he gave his closing statement at the end of the G20 summit, Barack Obama highlighted another very interesting divergence in the way he is approaching the vote. Asked whether he understood the concerns of members of Congress who will have to vote against the will of their constituents, Obama replied: ‘Now with respect to Congress and how they should respond to constituency concerns, I do consider part of my job to help make the case and to explain to the American people exactly why I think this

The elasticity of President Obama’s ‘Red Line’ on Syria seems to be being stretched to breaking point following this week’s chemical weapons attack by Bashar Assad in a Damascus suburb, Ghouta, where up to 1,200 people, including many women and children may have died. What we all have seen on our screens is not an episode from ‘Wag the Dog’ as Assad and his chief cheer leader Putin would have us believe. In fact this is likely to have been the worst chemical attack on civilians since Saddam Hussein gassed up to 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in Halabja 25 years ago. Fortuitously the UN has a team of chemical weapons inspectors

This week’s coup in Egypt leaves President Obama’s administration in an awkward position. Although the State Department has insisted it remained neutral in the dispute, American taxpayers have been supporting the Egyptian armed forces since 1948 with more than $70 billion in military and economic aid. A further $1.3 billion of military aid is budgeted for next year. Obama has now instructed officials to review American aid commitments to Egypt. There is a delicate balancing act to be played here. Neither Obama nor the State Department called yesterday’s events a ‘coup’ because there are legal implications restricting U.S. aid to countries where an elected head of state is overthrown by