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/ 21 January 2005
United States President George Bush’s second inauguration on Thursday provided the signal for an intense debate in Washington over whether or when to extend the ”global war on terror” to Iran, according to officials and foreign policy analysts in Washington. That debate is being driven by ”neo-conservatives” at the Pentagon.
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/ 7 December 2004
You might think such a political annihilation would destroy the confidence of even the most thick-skinned politician. But Ralph Nader, one of the last true radicals in American public life, thrives on this kind of setback. In an interview at his Washington offices, he shows not a flicker of self-doubt or self-pity. He feels sorry instead for the American electorate and the liberals who deserted them.
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/ 18 November 2004
Condoleezza Rice’s 500m move from the White House to the State Department is a supreme act of vindication by a president who believes he has the popular will behind him. ”She’s fun to be with,” Bush said at the time. ”I like lighthearted people, not people who take themselves so seriously. Besides, she’s really smart!” The new state secretary has become the first black woman to fill a post that first belonged to Thomas Jefferson.
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/ 12 November 2004
President George W Bush has picked Alberto Gonzales, the White House lawyer who advised him he could disregard the ”obsolete” Geneva conventions, as the United States’s new attorney general. News of Gonzales’s nomination, replacing John Ashcroft, who resigned on Tuesday, was poorly received by US human rights groups, which said he had shown scant regard for the importance of international human rights law.
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/ 29 October 2004
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Four years on, the United States presidential election is again a dead heat between a radical conservative and a mainstream liberal. And once more, Ralph Nader’s oddball candidacy threatens to tip the delicate balance to the right. This time the consumer activist is a much-reduced force. The overwhelming majority of his closest aides and supporters have defected, including Michael Moore.
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/ 29 October 2004
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There is an elderly woman with a long-winded anecdote about the old days on the prairies; a farmer with a desperate appeal for drought assistance and lower petrol prices; and a set of African refugees who want a group photograph of themselves. Tom Daschle, the most powerful Democrat in Washington, has time for them all.
Hundreds of thousands of protesters calling for United States President George Bush to be removed descended on to the streets of Manhattan on Sunday, on the eve of the Republican party convention. But as the demonstrators marched, Republican delegates arrived in town hoping to open a significant lead over the Democratic challenger, John Kerry, for the first time this year.
There comes a time in many United States presidential elections when things begin to get really tough. And then there is only one thing for it — the candidates bring out their children. Democrats John Kerry and John Edwards can fill whole podiums with their offspring. Now, the White House has struck back with a double whammy — the Bush twins.
President George Bush was on Tuesday struggling to prevent the escalating violence in Iraq from engulfing his re-election campaign, after his worst political week this year triggered bipartisan calls for a rethink of United States strategy there.
US forces battle guerrillas in Iraq
If the Bush White House had heeded warnings in early 2001 about the threat from al-Qaeda, at least two of the September 11 hijackers would ”probably have been caught” and ”there was a chance” the attacks could have been prevented, the president’s former top counter-terrorism adviser told The Guardian newspaper last week.