The Obama era
Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the 26th in his new series on the Obama era. ‘…the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporal advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief’ (Nathaniel Hawthorne) It’s diverting to watch [...]
The Obama era
Danger signs Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the24th in his new serieson the Obama era. Almost as soon as it hit the newsstands, last week’s edition of The Washingtonian sold out. Reason: the magazine featured a cover photo of President Obama bare-chested in swimming [...]
The Obama era
Worse than Vietnam ‘The good news: Obama understands what’s wrong in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The bad news: He can’t fix it.’ (Fred Kaplan, ‘The AfPak Puzzle’ RealClearPolitics, May 7, 2009) For most of the ’60s — until the 1968 Tet Offensive, in which for the first time the Vietcong attacked in force, swarming into more [...]
His people, our people
The Obama era Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the23rd in his new serieson the Obama era. “Another Democrat, Lisa Fleming, 49, who is white, said that even in the small Illinois town, Potomac, where she lived, she noticed ‘people of different races being kinder [...]
The Obama era
Heart of darkness ‘The trouble with torture is that sometimes it works; and when it does, the devil sings. -Simon Jenkins (UK Guardian, April 21, 2009) As those who have followed Barack Obama’s meteoric rise over the past 28 months will have realized at some point, he is the consummate political animal. Indeed, what separates [...]
The Obama era
‘All Obama, all the time’ Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the 21st in his new series on the Obama era. That headline, cribb-ed from a headline by Politico’s Roger Simon, represents a fair guess as to how the Summit of the Americas, held over [...]
The Obama era
Considering Obama’s America Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the twentieth in his new series on the Obama era. It can be argued that the wise deployment of American power is indispensable to the peace and stability of the world. But the question that comes [...]
The elephant in the room
The Obama era Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the eighteenth in his new series on the Obama era. A year ago, the elephant in the room of the Democratic primary campaign was the US economy. No one in the MSM (the mainstream media) was [...]
The Obama era
Suddenly, ‘crunch time’ If this column has a doppelganger, it’s that of the NYT’s columnist Bob Herbert. It’s striking how often, on a given Sunday, Mr Herbert and this columnist turn out to have written essentially the same column; or else one predates the other by a few days. When this column beats Mr Herbert [...]
The Obama era
Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the sixteenth in his new series on the Obama era. Obama threading the needle Six weeks after his historic inauguration, both the tenor and the thrust of Barack Obama’s administration are becoming clear. Obama, it seems, is above all [...]
In Obama’s America, racism fights back
The Obama era Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the fifteenth in his new series on the Obama era. Three decades ago, Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK between them put paid to the economic and financial world of FDR’s [...]
The Obama era
Obama overreaching? Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the fourteenth in his new series on the Obama era. Last week, in a new Harris poll, Americans named President Obama as their ‘No 1 hero,’ ‘followed by Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King.’ And columns appeared [...]
The Obama era
What’s in a word? History teaches that, in times of crisis, ingrained prejudices can, by themselves, make all the difference between success and ruin. In the Second World War, Hitler’s assessment of the US as a “Jew-led, mongrelized” nation led him to scant both American resolve and American power — until the Marines arrived on [...]
The Obama era
Fiddling while Rome burns Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the twelfth in his new series on the Obama era. Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the twelfth in his new series on the Obama [...]
The Obama era
Obama’s Muslim toss As the reader may have noticed, what usually passes for the real world has wasted no time in brusquely overrunning the celebratory mood of Barack Obama’s inauguration. An hour before the new President was scheduled to meet with them last week, Senate Republicans put their heads together and vowed to oppose his [...]