16 Apr 2011

16 April 2011

In this issue

Featured articles

This President should be beatable. But the real Republican contender won’t get in the ring for another five yearsFloridaBy rights, Barack Obama should be on the ropes. After what he himself described as a ‘shellacking’ in the midterm elections, he was given a mandatory count and still managed to stay on his feet. That ‘hopey-changey thing’ hasn’t worked out as advertised. America’s debt mountain is of Himalayan proportions.

A right mess

Observing French politics in the run-up to next spring’s presidential elections is like watching one of those slow-motion films of controlled car crashes in which a dummy and its vehicle are rammed into a wall. Nicolas Sarkozy is the dummy, who will make one last ungainly gesticulation as he lurches into catastrophe, and the coalition of liberals, centrists, free-marketeers, pro-Americans and careerists that carried him to power in 2007 is splintering as the laws of political aerodynamics wrench it apart.

Even Conservative councils now think like the left

The right-wing historian Niall Ferguson is very handsome, isn’t he? If I were a woman, or a homosexual, I would certainly set my cap at him; I would let him order for me in restaurants and handle me brusquely in the bedroom as he revealed to me the full tumescent glory of his ‘killer app’, as he would undoubtedly put it.The right-wing historian Niall Ferguson is very handsome, isn’t he? If I were a woman, or a homosexual, I would certainly set my cap at him; I would let him order for me in restaurants and handle me brusquely in the bedroom as he revealed to me the full tumescent glory of his ‘killer app’, as he would undoubtedly put it.

Fighting spirit | 16 April 2011

How does the army of a liberal, multicultural and often secular society develop in its soldiers the spiritual resilience to cope with war, to face trauma, death and bereavement, and to fight opponents who have the advantage of a strong and common religious faith?That’s the question the Pentagon has been grappling with, as it confronts the apparent epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder affecting a fifth of its troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Where there’s a will …

Why haven’t ladies challenged male primogeniture?When the Labour MP Keith Vaz introduced a private member’s bill in January ‘to remove any distinction between the sexes in determining the succession to the Crown’, he mentioned that, although not one of those in line for the throne, he did need to declare an interest. Vaz is a fervent monarchist who believes that in order to save itself, the monarchy must change; that it must fall in line with modern Britain’s values on gender or die.

Nannies v. nudgers

Colonel Gaddafi and his mad bald son are not the only has-been regime desperately clinging to power. In Britain, too, a gaggle of once-powerful but now isolated authoritarians is doing everything it can to continue dominating people’s lives. These unelected know-it-alls exerted an extraordinary and baleful influence over public life during the 13 years of New Labour rule — banning things they didn’t like, scaring the public witless, demonising fat kids as the great evil of our age — but they have seen their power wane in the Liberal-Conservative era.

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