Bush – remember him? George Bush the Younger, I mean. There’s a strange story about him out now, picked up by @Zpravy (why hasn’t it gained wider circulation?):

prvnizpravy.cz: Bushovi krátce po 11. září řekli, že byl otráven: Exprezident George W. Bush dostal několik týdn… http://t.co/W5VNMsuY

November 1, 2011 9:44 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

I’ll translate the part before the colon (the part after is incomplete anyway): “Shortly after 9/11 they told Bush he had been poisoned.”

Yes! And we get more details in the article referenced in that tweet, from tiscali.cz. This all comes from the interviews former National Security Advisor/Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is now doing to push her memoirs. In particular, this story is from an interview she recently did with ABC News – the American, not Australian, one presumably.

Apparently there were serious fears that the White House had been contaminated in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks with botulin toxin – that’s right: Botox! – which, when not being used to smooth over face-wrinkles, is also one of the most deadly toxins known in nature. During a trip Bush made to attend an APEC summit in Shanghai, the jolly face of Vice President Dick Cheney, back in Washington, came up on the video-conference screen to say that Botox had been detected at the White House and all who worked there were going to die. “What’s that? [CZ: Cože?] What’s that, Dick?” was Bush’s first response.

Of course, this needed to be checked out at the laboratory, where several lab mice were infected with the White House material. As her aid Steven Hadley then advised Rice: “Let me put it to you this way. If those mice are legs-up, we’re done for. If they are legs-down, we’re OK.” Naturally, after a tense 24 hours of waiting – all while carrying on with the summit as if nothing was wrong – Bush was whispered the message “Mice are legs-down,” no doubt mystifying the eavesdropping Chinese over the Americans’ new code system, but leaving the American delegation hugely relieved.

Hey, former President George W. Bush was hanging out at a few selected US media outlets last week, did you know? Granted, you had many more important things to do during that time – by definition – than to notice, but it’s true. He got himself out of his comfy Dallas townhouse and back into some degree of public exposure, mainly on the Today Show, on Oprah, and with Sean Hannity on Fox. He didn’t have much of interest to say – to the sharpest questions from his friendly, hand-picked TV hosts he usually replied with a plug to buy his newly-issued memoires, Decision Points to get an answer – but anyway, there he was again.

Over at the leading German daily the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung it was Nils Minkmar who drew the short straw to actually pay this man some token amount of the attention he was seeking in order to write about the brief book-tour. The result is The week of the retread (my own interpretation of the German word Wiedergänger), which turns out to be an excellent bit of coverage even as Minkmar’s distaste with the whole exercise comes through loud and clear. Of course he wouldn’t welcome George W. Bush’s reappearance: most of the European continent held Bush in rather low regard throughout most of his presidency and certainly do now, when they can be compelled to think about him at all. The lede:

The preparation for the TV appearances on the occasion of his book lasted two years. After three days no one talked about them anymore. The comeback with his memoirs was a PR-disaster, as is only fitting for George W. Bush

Minkmar does brieflly go into the bizarre “scoop” Bush had ready with which to reward his TV-hosts, namely the strange tale of his mother showing him the preserved-in-formaldehyde remains of a stillborn sibling. But it is rather two other elements that stand out. The first is rapper Kanye West; apparently it was his “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” remark in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster which moved NBC to invite West on the air after the Bush-Matt Lauer “Today” interview to give a response. There West managed to deliver a reasoned message on racism that completely overshadowed anything the ex-president had just said! If there was one name on people’s lips as a result of this book-tour, Minkmar claims, it was “West” and not “Bush.”

The second notable bit which Minkmar emphasizes is the torture issue, which inevitably reared its ugly head no matter how much Bush might have preferred to send such questioners off to consult his book about it instead. Minkmar asks, Wasn’t a government prosecutor listening in when Bush explicitly confirmed and defended his approval for torture techniques during his time in office? When, in response to questions of “Isn’t that illegal?”, he responded that, in fact, it must have been legal because his lawyers told him that it was? This hiding-behind-your-lawyer defense is particularly ironic, he notes, when contrasted with the tough, no-nonsense “Decider” persona which Bush was using the book and this book-tour to try to establish as how he will be remembered through History.

And indeed, that is what is important: not this brief and cynical publicity campaign, but George W. Bush’s historical legacy. Minkmar:

His appearances were deeply saddening for all friends of the United States. Here was a man challenged above his abilities, who took over at the beginning of the century an admired, young superpower and in just eight years plunged it into a financial, political and above all moral ditch. The judicial working-out of this era has hardly yet properly begun. That must change after this week.

The memoirs of Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s supposed “Brain,” are now out. (Sigh . . . yes, I give you the link there to Amazon, even though they gravely miscategorized the work by not filing it under “fiction.”) The European reaction to this event is so far disappointing, in terms of any demonstrated willingness to call out pure hooey, bunk, baloney, poppycock for what it is, using any equivalent term in the local language.

We do have at least a start, with Marcus Ziener in the German business newspaper Handelsblatt of all places (The president’s eternal string-puller). He zeroes in (as does Rove in his book, apparently) on the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina – two of the George W. Bush administration’s biggest blunders, but not to hear Rove tell it. No, they were just unfortunate misunderstandings. Bush’s “Heck of a job, Brownie!” was nothing more than a gesture of morale support to a staff-member under pressure. And as for Iraq, the President was certain Saddam had WMD – he certainly would not have invaded the country at all had he known that he didn’t.

Up in his piece’s lede, Ziener makes the rather obvious observation that, with this book and the new publicity tour designed to sell it, Bush’s former leading political strategist is out to rehabilitate not only the reputation of the president he served, but also his own. Actually, it probably goes rather beyond that: when it comes to waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Rove (along with some other involved officials, especially former VP Dick Cheney) apparently feels the need to take some pre-emptive action to ward off a potential criminal indictment for conspiracy to torture – a crime against humanity all of us can recognize when we see it, and contrary both to the Geneva Conventions and US law. This lashing-out is what we see in his statement yesterday to the BBC in which he asserted he was even “proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists.” (You can click the video on that BBC page to hear the words come out of “Turdblossom’s” very mouth; for me, hearing his voice this morning was all I needed to quickly switch to some other radio station.)

And again, reaction in the European press is disappointing so far. (Of course, less time has elapsed since Rove went on the BBC.) What there is, is generally just a straight transmission of his remarks, suitably translated. At least we do have Lidové noviny of the Czech Republic (Waterboarding is not torture, assets former Bush advisor). Yes, the report itself (from the Czech news agency CTK) just passes on what Rove has to say. But some on-line editorial assistant has also shrewdly inserted counterpoint in the form of a brief YouTube video about waterboarding from Amnesty International. (Check it out, if you want: it’s not so very shocking, even as it makes the point.)

UPDATE: Look, I don’t intend to touch Rove’s book with a ten-foot pole. But if you’re interested, I do have to admit that it’s still available from Amazon (at that link I gave you at the top of the post) for $16.50 with free shipping and mishandling (h/t to late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon).

It was inevitable: ex-president George W. Bush was never going to do the decent thing and just stay home and keep quiet, you have to know that he would eventually start looking around to see if anyone was willing to offer a healthy chunk of change to hear him speak. As Denmark’s Politiken now reports (Bush makes an appearance to pay for a new house), the first venue to do so turned out to be in Calgary, Canada. Let me give you journalist Flemming Ytzen’s lede:

A jocular American ex-president gives a talk for the first time since the transition-of-power in January: his new house needs to be paid for.

Note that this “gotta pay for the house” schtick is not Ytzen trying to be snarky; rather, Bush himself brought up that particular meme at the event, trying to be jolly for the audience, and added “I just bought a house in the fall. I might be the only American who dared to buy a house in the fall of 2008.” Hyuk-hyuk.

He also let slip that “I am flattered that there are people at all who want to listen to me,” and whether or not this was another attempt at humor, it rather hits the Truth nail straight on the head. But as Ytzen notes in his piece, it’s probably not so surprising that the Canadian state of Alberta would offer the venue for Bush’s first public-speaking engagement: it’s supposedly known as the “Northern Texas” for its oil industry and is Canada’s most conservative state. But that did not stop a group of protestors from gathering outside the event itself anyway, holding banners with slogans such as “Canada is no Bush-land!” and “Throw a shoe at him, make him go away!”

The event’s organizers did not care to disclose how much the ex-president was paid for the appearance, although admission for what was billed as “Conversation with George W. Bush” did cost a cool C$3,100 (= $2,441 or €1,857) per person. For anyone who cares, it seems Bush’s inevitable book will be shaped around his “12 hardest decisions.” Despite what people were paying, he declined while in Calgary to go into any further detail about which decisions those were.

UPDATE: And what would any George W. Bush public appearance be without at least one accompanying malapropism? Scott Horton from Harpers has the details here. The Politiken article did not mention this (the English vocabulary at issue was maybe too advanced); I had read of Bush’s “authoritarian” comment elsewhere, but not from the European press.

Yes We Can! Barack Hussein Obama is now 44th president of the United States!

Time to assess reactions to that historical event from over on this side of the Atlantic. I’m tempted just to see what the Netherlands press has to say, particularly because of the great cover on today’s editions of the local quality free paper, De Pers: The black Jesus has landed! (Careful with that link: it will download for you the PDF of the entire issue.) “And now Barack Obama, since yesterday the new boss of the world, must really get to work,” the headline continues. “He is being looked to for carrying out wonders for every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

I like that sort of irreverent, tongue-in-cheek attitude (at least I think that’s what the De Pers editors intended there), but let’s briefly survey instead coverage from the French press, to which it seems I traditionally turn first in the wake of some significant global event. (more…)

Here’s another retrospective analysis of the George W. Bush years that I have come across, this time from one of the foremost USA-experts within the Danish journalist ranks. I refer here to Martin Burcharth, correspondent in America since 1996 for the Danish weekly commentary newspaper Information; his piece is entitled An obsessed Bush read each morning about new terror threats.

The key element of Burcharth’s analysis here, as he assesses the two Bush presidential terms, is the radical change brought to the course of that presidency by the attacks of September 11, 2001. (more…)

So now Israel has unilaterally decided to stop bombarding the Gaza Strip. Gee – why just now? Could it have anything to do with the inauguration of an entirely-new American administration on Tuesday? And could the timing of whole episode from the attacks’ very beginnings on 27 December be somehow connected to a desire to take advantage of the “hands-off” attitude of top American leaders while Israel still could?

For all the evident excitement about Inauguration Day, people need to stay on the alert on Monday, tomorrow: Pardon Day. That is the last day of George W. Bush presidential power, and so surely the day he will issue a set of shocking and unprincipled pardons to protect himself and his underlings from, among other things, war crimes charges. Isn’t this clear? Doing so at any point before would have spoiled the effect of (and probably increased the volume of flying shoes at) his rather pathetic “farewell tour” of self-justifying interviews and press conferences. So stay tuned.

Oh, and Obama has a fresh foreign policy crisis waiting for him as soon as the inauguration euphoria winds down. Yes, it’s Gaza too, but I’m referring more here to North Korea’s new “all-out confrontational posture” towards South Korea (the latter’s military is now on high alert) together with its claims to have procured enough plutonium for four or five nuclear weapons.

UPDATE: Well now, on the question of further pardons it looks like I was wrong!

As we near Barack Obama’s inauguration, it naturally becomes time to look back and assess George W. Bush’s eight-year tenure as American president. (Check that: it’s time first to gather up one’s courage and brace oneself, and then look back in anger.) One such assessment that I can recommend comes in a 17-minute video from the UK’s Guardian newspaper. The Guardian is well-known for its political positioning somewhat to the left, and thus for its long record of hostility to Bush. Still, that video presents discussion from not only Mike Tomasky, the Guardian’s American editor, but also a couple of personalities you might find more credible, namely David Plotz, editor at Slate (on-line) magazine and Adrian Wooldridge, American editor for The Economist. (The fourth and final panelist is Sarah Wildman, from the New York Times. A quick consultation reveals that she is mainly a travel writer there, occasionally contributing pieces on the arts.)

But what about, say, the Dutch? Fortunately, we can now discover their valedictory attitudes towards George W. Bush, and that even from the “People’s Newspaper,” De Volkskrant (Netherlanders give Bush a 4.7).

That’s right, as a final over-all grade ol’ George gets a 4.7, but keep in mind that is on the customary Dutch academic grading-scale of 0 (worst) to 10 (best), where you usually need a 6 to pass. This comes from a survey among 500 Dutch respondents over 18 conducted by the firm Synovate, which further reveals the curious paradox that, while 73% are willing to characterize the departing American president as “friendly,” 71% call him “untrustworthy.” When it comes to free association (i.e. what immediately comes to mind when you hear a word), most of the respondents think “Iraq” at the mention of his name. It further emerges that you are a better bet to dislike him the more educated and older you are, and the more to the left you are on the Dutch political spectrum (also if you are female). Of the various policies associated with his name, these Dutch judge approvingly only his reaction to the September 11 attacks. Everything else they disapprove of, especially his attitude towards climate change.

Finally, the survey-participants were asked what sort of going-away present they would be willing to give. Among the responses: a course in self-knowledge, a week spent among the poor, and “a kick in the ass.”

Here’s a tactic they don’t teach you in “Marketing 101” about how to re-package your product to help its appeal to skyrocket world-wide: as ammunition! If you have been following at all the continuing story of the Baghdad shoe-thrower, Muntadar al-Zaidi, you will have already heard about how the offers of money for those very two shoes that President Bush had to duck have reached very high figures, mainly from various wealthy Gulf individuals. But we lesser mortals can at least be content with purchasing a pair of the very same type of shoe which al-Zaidi used, available from the original Turkish manufacturer. This word comes today from the Belgian paper Gazet van Antwerpen – “Bush shoes” immensely popular with Americans. (In fact, the story happens to be placed within the “She” sub-section of GVA’s site, devoted to women-relevant subjects like “Fashion and Beauty.” You ask why? Shoes, man – women can’t get enough of shoes!)

Yes, the shoe-company (or -person, I don’t know; I’ve no facility in Turkish, it’s not a European language, sorry) is “Ramazan Baydan,” and it/he has already received more than 300,000 orders for that model and counting. The all-too-brief piece also reveals certain additional characteristics about them: made of brown leather, with a thick sole (ah, but does not one need a thick sole to reside in Baghdad these days?), priced at $42/€30 a pair. From the picture at the top (looks like a crowd of Indonesian protestors), we also see that the shoes are loafers (i.e. no laces), which makes sense from a weapons standpoint: better for deploying to one’s throwing-hand quickly, especially in that most-critical interval when you have already thrown one and hope to get the second one despatched as well before any bystanders or security personnel can react.

Sorry, no actual link or any other information other than “Ramazan Baydan” about where to go to get your own pair – time to head for Google! But it seems that very many Americans have already solved that puzzle and placed an order – thus the GVA article’s title.

UPDATE: Here you go! H/t to Bloomberg’s Mark Bentley, it turns out that the place to go for your “Bye-Bye-Bush” shoes is the Baydan Group. Fair warning: Even on their “English” site (to which the preceding link connects you, of course), they still use Turkish extensively.

You’ve heard by now of the remarkable welcome President Bush received at a press conference during his surprise visit to Baghdad yesterday, yes? Arab journalists may still be in the early stages of adjusting to the freer media environment in Iraq, but at least they don’t settle for flip-flops. No, what George W. Bush instead twice found coming in on a bee-line to his head were the formal dress-shoes of a certain Muntadar al-Zeidi, correspondent for the Cairo-based TV network “Al-Baghdadiya.”

Which of the many available European lenses to take up for review of this incident? Obviously it should be from a culture with a certain shoe-expertise; the Italian press thereby suggests itself, but long-time readers (Hi Mom!) will realize that Italian coverage is here on €S an exception rather than a rule, due mainly to considerations of linguistic familiarity. The French should be a perfectly-suitable substitute. (more…)

They’re getting impatient out there in the outside world for Obama – real impatient. Last week’s attacks in Mumbai only made this situation worse, to the point that India’s crisis has somehow become Barack Obama’s crisis. This we read even in the normally-sober Financial Times Deutschland, in an article by Washington correspondent Sabine Muscat: “Evil prophecy for Obama.” The lede: “He is not yet president. And still the attacks in India are the first test of the foreign-policy man Barack Obama.”

In truth, this “Barack Obama’s first foreign policy test” has been a red-hot label looking for something to which to affix itself ever since he won the election, if not even before. For one thing, remember the remarks on the campaign-trail by Joe Biden – comments apparently not particularly welcomed by the Obama campaign – about how there surely would occur some international crisis early in the new administration, one deliberately engineered to test the new president’s resolve. As Muscat points out, this “evil prophecy” was also a line White House press spokesperson Dana Perino was pushing – for obvious partisan purpose – just before the election, and it was certainly part of John McCain’s own pitch, implicitly if not explicitly. In these early-transition days, then, it would not have taken much of an unpleasant nature, happening anywhere in the world, to turn into “Obama’s first foreign challenge,” with all eyes swiveling to Chicago to see what he intended to do about it. (more…)

One of the occupational hazards of having just won the presidency, I suppose, is the tidal wave of advice, from parties near and far, that immediately crashes over you. Here’s a counselor who might make Barack Obama sit up and take notice, if he could ever hear word of what he has to say: yes, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran. We learn about Mahmoud’s suggestions to Barack courtesy of the French press agency AFP, as published in an article in the French conservative newspaper Le Figaro: Iran: Obama should opt for pacifism.

These words of wisdom, obviously issued in reaction to Obama’s election, were actually conveyed through Ahmadinejad’s press spokesman, Ali-Akbar Javanfekr, speaking on al-Alam, an Iranian TV station. (Which is why Obama will never hear of them. By the way, in the article AFP incorrectly calls the TV station “Arabic”; if you’re curious, you can peruse its English-language website.) (more…)

It’s Obama! Let’s take a broad range of European editorial responses to his historic presidential victory and look at each briefly in turn – using what we could even call the Andrew Sullivan format, but with translation. (more…)

It looks like I was a bit premature when I wrote in this space a few days ago about al-Qaeda’s “endorsement” of John McCain. (But the quotation-marks around “endorsement” were back in the original post, too.) From his weblog on the site of the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, Bas Benneker informs us that, actually, Al Qaida has also not yet decided. (more…)

Once the upcoming election has been conducted and the results made known, and as we get closer to inauguration on 20 January 2009, you can expect the usual flood of articles in all the world’s media evaluating the eight-year presidency of the departing George W. Bush. It’s been an eventful eight years, no? For some reason or another, though – apparently because he recently caught sight of Bush on TV looking “tired” and “grey” during his latest address to the nation about the financial crisis – the Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung’s Washington correspondent Matthias Rüb has decided to get a jump on the competition with a new piece: What remains of George W. Bush? A man of great expectations.

But don’t worry: the FAZ will surely find itself having to try again later. For what Rüb has come up with is an article that may offer a few interesting perspectives, but which first and foremost suffers from a worrying short-sightedness about what this man has done to the country for which he served as president. (Could it be a coincidence that the pronunciation of this journalist’s last name is basically “rube”? And as to that illustration at the top of his article: it’s obviously supposed to be George W., but in fact looks nothing like him.) (more…)

The leading Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad had an interesting item over the press conference given by Minister of Finance (and Cabinet chairmen in the absence of Dutch premier Jan Peter Balkenende, who is visiting China) Wouter Bos, which we can see in the article’s headline: Bos alludes to extension of French EU chairmanship.

From the very beginning of the European Union (i.e. from 1958; it was then known as the European Economic Community) the member-states have taken turns, at six-month intervals, at assuming the “EU presidency,” although the role is more-accurately described as the presidency/chairmanship of the Council of the European Union, which is the legislative forum for the member-states and usually the most-powerful of the EU’s component institutions. Naturally, the queue of countries waiting to serve their turn as president includes all EU member-states, and it was in the first half of this year that the first country from the great 10-country EU enlargement of May, 2004, had its turn as president, namely Slovenia.

The thing is, the second half of 2008 has proved to be far-from-normal times. First there was the diplomatic crisis over the conflict between Russia and Georgia, and now we have the international system of finance seriously in need of some restructuring. France is now EU President, and French president Nicolas Sarkozy has by all accounts done a credible job in responding to the worldwide financial panic. (His intervention in the Russian-Georgian conflict to secure the cease-fire was subject to rather more mixed reviews.) The comfort the EU has had with Sarkozy as point-man on that crisis may have much to do with the French president’s own personal qualities, but it also stems from France’s status as one of the EU’s major powers and its deep and capable governmental machinery. What if one or more of these grave problems had arisen during the Slovenian presidency: could President Danilo Turk and the Slovenian government have effectively handled the task of leading the EU response? (more…)

The US presidential election is coming up soon, less than two weeks away. That means, among other things, that it’s endorsement season now, and lately those have taken somewhat of an international flavor. You might have already heard about al-Qaeda’s “endorsement” of McCain – perhaps I’ll have the opportunity to write more about that soon. As such, that nod of terroristic approval goes counter to pretty much the whole rest of the world, which prefers Obama as next US president by about a four-to-one margin. (But you’d sort of expect that Osama bin Laden and his henchmen would be inclined to go against the grain, now, wouldn’t you?) More conventional is Russia’s choice, or at least Russia’s seeming choice, as reported by Per Dalgård in the Danish opinion weekly Information (McCain asks Russia for help). (more…)

In Denmark, as really most elsewhere in the world, the media are keeping close tabs on the US presidential election – passing on the polling numbers to their audiences, looking for that special insight that might provide a clue about what is likely to happen on Election Day. Of a piece with this is the latest US election coverage from Viggo Lepoutre Ravn of Denmark’s Jyllandsposten (A former Bush-advisor: We have lost). That former advisor is David Frum, actually a former presidential speech-writer, whose comments from an appearance on CNN are quoted to the effect (because this is a translation from the Danish back into English) of “We have to look it in the eye, that we [presumably meaning the Republicans] cannot win the presidential election. We have to concentrate on saving as many of our Senators as possible.” Accompanying this account in Ravn’s article is the news that Obama has now gone ten percentage points clear of McCain in the latest Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll, plus some electoral strategy analysis. (McCain’s only hope is somehow to win one large-population state that it now seems he will lose, etc., etc. – but we don’t need to occupy ourselves with that stuff, since either Ravn assuredly doesn’t know what he’s talking about or you and I have already read such an analysis, in English, somewhere else.)

No, it’s Jyllandsposten’s Niels Lillelund who gets into a more in-depth discussion of American electoral matters in an accompanying article entitled Farwell to Bush – whom will the intellectuals hate now?. (more…)

As Juan Cole of “Informed Comment” notes, an impeachment process has started against Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, he has decided he is going to fight it, and “[t]hus the stage is set for a major political crisis in the second most populous Muslim country in the world, the sixth largest country in the world, and the only Muslim nuclear power.” But one crucial aspect of this situation is the dog that isn’t barking: where at this stage is the American support for Musharraf, whom in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was suddenly embraced by the Bush administration and started having billions of dollars in military aid shoveled his way? Could it be that George W. Bush is simply too busy these days at the Olympics, blasting his Chinese hosts for their culinary abuses? (That last bit is but a joke, but I give you the link in the hope you’ll check it out – you’ll be amused!)

Philippe Grangereau, Washington correspondent for the French newspaper Libération, sheds some valuable light on this question in his article The White House Is No Longer Kissy-Kissy with Musharraf, although he relies primarily on analysis coming from Arif Jamal, “an expert on Pakistan at NYU,” who has written a book about Pakistani jihadists. (more…)

It’s all a bit bizarre: Here at EuroSavant we consider the Economist’s on-site blog Certain Ideas of Europe to be something of a watered-down competitor, in that its (anonymous) writers evidently command a few European languages themselves and take advantage of that often to remark upon noteworthy articles in the European press (really only the French and the German). Yet in its own day-after Obama-Berlin coverage, what else does Certain Ideas of Europe choose to highlight out of reaction to Obama’s Berlin speech from the German Fourth Estate than a breathless piece from the Bild Zeitung (Britons: think The Sun; Americans: maybe The New York Post but – as we’ll see – with a bit greater tolerance for female nudity.) The blog entry is entitled Obama and the ‘BILD girl’. Wow – 27-year-old Bild reporter Judith Bonesky (stifle the puns!) finds herself together in the gym of the Ritz Carlton hotel with HIM! Oh, he’s much taller than she had expected! They exchange some “How are you?”s! Then he goes and starts hefting some impressively-big weights, in such a manly fashion, without breaking a sweat! Naturally, when it’s time for him to go (he’s got a speech to deliver), she grabs her chance for a smugshot with the candidate. (more…)

The alert is out: the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel snagged a scoop in the form of an interview with Iraqi Premier Nuri al-Maliki, in which (according to a Reuters report) he explicitly endorsed the idea of a 16-month timetable for American troop withdrawal, a plan which has been the centerpiece of presidential candidate Barack Obama’s intentions towards US engagement there. Blogosphere reactions are already here and here (among many others, no doubt, including forthcoming).

Fortunately, your friendly neighborhood EuroSavant was carrying his pager, and was able to receive the emergency message and leap into the nearest – no, not phone booth, you don’t see too many of those anymore – Internet café to get on-line. Let’s take a look at the original German-language article itself, which is on the Spiegel’s website. (more…)

Denmark’s highly-regarded national newspaper (one of them, actually), Berlingske Tidende, has apparently been running for some time a weblog that I only recently became aware of. Called Amerikanske Tilstande (= “American Conditions”), it is written by one Paul Høi, Berlingske’s USA correspondent currently resident in Santa Fe (NM, I presume), formerly of New York and Washington. (DC, I presume; oh, and there’s no reason to be intimidated by the pronunciation of that last name, especially if you happen to be a full-blooded, beer-drinking male type: “Høi Høi Høi!” is exactly what you surely have found yourself yelling out many times in the past, at a boisterous C&W bar near closing time, say, or while attending some football game.)

It’s an interesting blog to peruse, if you’ve got the Danish chops to do so, and I will surely assign it its own tag and discuss more entries coming from out of Amerikanske Tilstande in the future. The boilerplate text found to the right side of the entries themselves – below Høi’s picture – gives an economical picture of where he is coming from: he has, it says, “a fundamental love for America and Americans – even for their dodgy automobiles. He drives a Chevrolet Tahoe and burns up gasoline like a native” – i.e. massively, especially compared to usual Danish standards. (more…)

“Whomever US citizens may choose: Europeans will wake up next year on a cold January morning – and find before them a government whose foreign policy decisions, although presented in new clothes, will appear almost like those customary to Bush.” That is the conclusion German-language readers of Spiegel Online get to digest today, in an article entitled Bush Leaves – His Foreign Policy Stays.

Crucially, though, take a look at who is the author: it is a certain Peter Ross Range, whose credentials are given in a short sidebar on the article’s first page: long-time Time magazine foreign correspondent, then editor-in-chief of Blueprint, the magazine of the Democratic Leadership Council – in short, in all probability an American. That means this article is intended to be a warning from the west side of the Atlantic to the east, not to expect much to change in US policy with the next administration. (more…)

It turned out I was just as unprepared as most everyone else for the Swedish Academy’s selection of Doris Lessing to receive the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. But the award has, as always, turned the just-turned-88 British/Rhodesian authoress into a hot property: her books are now in greater demand, and so are her opinions. And the Spanish newspaper El País has turned up as the big winner in the latter sphere, scoring the exclusive, (somewhat) extensive interview “War and Memory Never Stop” that the world’s other papers can only quote snippets from. (Yes, I don’t usually track the content on El País; I was alerted to the article by Le Nouvel Observateur’s treatment of such interview snippets.) Why El País? It’s nowhere totally clear, although it seems that Lessing has been thinking back quite a lot these days to the Spanish Civil War, something that is of course discussed in the interview. (more…)

Time for a quick “day-after” survey of French press coverage of the Iraqi elections.

As usual, “day-after” is sometimes too early when it comes to significant, multi-dimensioned world events, as journalists and editors get all caught up with the reporting and don’t yet have time to sit back and think about what it all really meant. If you want an example of what I’m talking about here, and can read French yourself, I refer you to Le Monde’s editorial this morning, The Iraqi Wager. Spotlight on young French-Iraqi student; for her and her mother, being able to vote for the first time is truly a moving experience. (And this in what Le Monde explicitly labels its “editorial,” written collectively by the editors.) Yes yes, and you know, Iraq has truly never had elections. These first were admittedly imperfect: Sunni underrepresentation, the threat of violence. Still, they were at least a relative success, and hopefully Iraqis can look forward to much less imperfect elections next December. Right, moving on . . .

Libération is a bit better in analyzing what author Jean-Pierre Perrin terms in his piece’s title The Lessons of a Confessionalized Election. (more…)

Le Monde Diplomatique is the leading French opinion-journal on international affairs, but it is a monthly. The November issue was already on the newsstands at the time of the US election. So it’s only now, with the appearance of the December, 2004, issue on the streets and on-line, that we get to hear their reaction to the result.

Is there any doubt what that is? This is France we’re talking about here, after all, not to mention one of that country’s leading intellectual flagships. Anyway, no less than Editor-in-Chief Ignacio Ramonet takes up his keyboard to record the paper’s displeasure at the prospect of Bush II. (more…)

It’s day two of the great George W. Bush re-election wake (since his victory only became definitive on Wednesday the 3rd – day Zero); time to search for some sort of intelligent word about what it all might mean from the German press, perhaps from the highly-respected Die Zeit. There we find, as lead article, what is basically a Teutonic riff on the “two nations” theme out of the election results, in Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff’s article The United Half-Nations. Maybe you’ve already drunk up all the English-language commentary on the 2004 presidential election that you have been able to find, and so are sick of hearing about this thesis and watching it quickly approach the status of a cliché. But if you can still stand it, the German perspective on it here is somewhat intriguing. (more…)

The result is finally in – Bush wins – and most of the rest of the world is rather less than pleased. You would rather expect that, but can get filled in on the details here in the Washington Post. In that article there is a brief reference to a commentary from Le Monde; reason enough to go take a look at the full piece itself, in the original French (Electoral Archaism). It turns out that that Le Monde commentary is perhaps not the most definitive word to turn to from France’s newspaper of record, since at the time it was put on-line the presidential election’s final result was not yet known – it begins “Despite an advantage held by George W. Bush, the result of the American elections remains uncertain.” (more…)

There is really a culture gap opening up along the fault-line of the Atlantic, but this is nothing you haven’t probably heard of already. Naturally I speak here with particular regard to the big climax, the big watershed which is coming up in ten days, the 2004 presidential election. Again, it’s exceedingly likely that you’ve heard in one form or another that John Kerry is a massively more-popular choice than George W. Bush to be US President from 2005 to 2009. (You’ll need to subscribe to or otherwise comply with the wishes of Salon.com if you want to click that link to read renowned foreign correspondent Mark Hertsgaard’s on-line exposition on that topic.)

People over here really find it mystifying why anyone would even consider voting for Bush. So the US correspondent for the Dutch NRC Handelsblad, Marc Chavannes, gamely sets out to perform a little public service for the folks back home and investigate this phenomenon. His research takes him to a recent personal presidential campaign appearance in Chocolate Town, formally known as Hershey, Pennsylvania. (Bush Stands For What I Believe – free registration to the on-line NRC Handelsblad required. By the way, for any of those who might be interested, Chavannes also maintains an NRC-sponsored Dutch-language weblog on the presidential campaign.) (more…)

The fourth and last of the debates of the 2004 presidential campaign has now come and gone. For the most part European newspapers have successfully dealt with the fact that, just like the other three, this debate actually took place from 2:00 AM to 3:30 AM their time, so that newspaper reports are popping up together with even the occasional analytical treatment already.

The Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung is among those already featuring some of that analysis, or Kommentar, and I think it is worthwhile to turn to that. (more…)