As part of last week’s provincial, sycophantic and syrupy welcome for George Bush – orchestrated with every shameless kitschy contrivance – some inspired stage-manager had a young girl offer red roses and cloyingly sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow to the big boss, who had come down from the White House to boost his own sagging prestige and that of his flunky fawning protege, Ehud Olmert. Continue reading →

George Bush’s tall ambitions for a short visit to one of the world hottest hotspots tell more about his America than they do about objective reality here. There are no equivalents in superpower annals for American idealistic naivete coupled incongruously with realpolitik cynicism – as selfish, coercive and amoral as any elaborate machinations contrived by Nineteenth Century European potentates. Continue reading →

‘Tis the season for media reviews of the just-bygone year. This is when commendations and demerits are handed out by supercilious news-purveyors. But they never subject their own performance to retrospective scrutiny. They never focus on those deliberately neglected items, which they relegated in brief to the lower margins of inside pages. Continue reading →