This week’s articles of note
“Obama’s shaky Libya narrative,” The Daily Beast, by Eli Lake
“America’s last politically contested territory: the suburbs,” The Daily Beast, by Joel Kotkin
“The next panic: Europe’s crisis will be followed by a more devastating one, likely beginning in Japan,” The Atlantic, by Peter Boone and Simon Johnson
“How ...
The real losers in this election are the voters
Romney’s videotaped dismissal of swathes of the electorate will hurt him, but Obama remains a lame duck, too.
Read my spiked article in full here.
Romney’s troubles
Mitt Romney’s statement to donors¸ in which he complains that almost half the country is “dependent on government” and thus won’t vote for him, was badly argued and just plain dumb. It has damaged him politically. But the situation as ...
Giving the green light to grievance
The Obama administration seems to see free speech as a bigger problem than attacks on its overseas embassies.
Read my spiked article in full here.
This week’s articles of note
“The day the roof fell in,” The American Interest, by Walter Russell Mead
“The deafness before the storm,” The New York Times, by Kurt Eichenwald [Alleges George W. Bush ignored pre-9/11 warnings]
“The disappeared: how the fatwa changed a writer’s life,” The New Yorker, by Salman Rushdie
“Obama’s way,” Vanity ...
US response to Middle East protests: validating grievances, sacrificing free speech
Once again, we see images of demonstrations and rioting in the capitals across the Middle East. But unlike the “Arab spring”, these protests are explicitly anti-American: gathering at US embassies, with placards denouncing the US and ...
Shouting ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire!’ is not serious politics
The rise of a tyranny of fact-checkers in the US election, who constantly call out politicians on their ‘lies’, is a very unhealthy development.
Read my spiked article in full here.
The tyranny of the fact checkers
The election season in America has seen two new and related developments: constant accusations of “lies” and the rise of “fact checkers” as the arbiters of political debate.
For the past two months or more, both the Obama and Romney camps have engaged in tit-for-tat accusations of lying. At the outset, ...
That Eastwood routine again
Like many, I referred to Clint Eastwood’s skit at the Republican National Convention as “bizarre”. In a tweet, I called it a “debacle”. I still hold to those descriptions, but as comedy, it “killed”, as Bill Maher put it.
Watching it again (see video above), ...
This week’s articles of note
“Barack Obama’s new Chicago politics abandon Bill Clinton’s winning coalition,” The Daily Beast, by Joel Kotkin
“Inside story of Obama’s struggle to keep Congress from controlling outcome of debt ceiling crisis,” Washington Post, by Bob Woodward [Excerpt from Woodward’s new book, The Price of Politics]
“Let’s be friends: two ...
ABOUT SEAN COLLINS
I write about American current affairs for Spiked, the online magazine. I am a native New Yorker, and I divide my time between New York City and upstate New York.
In addition to articles for Spiked, The Australian and other publications, I contributed an essay, "BDS: Demonizing Israel, Destroying Free Speech," for the book Unsafe Space: The Crisis of Free Speech on Campus (2016). I also wrote a chapter on New York City's economy for the book London After Recession: A Fictitious Capital? (2012).
My writings have been cited in American Conservative, Arts & Letters Daily, the Financial Times, Fox News, the Huffington Post, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the New York Times, Real Clear Politics, and the Times of London, among other media.
For more about The American Situation site, go here.
