As of May 2011, I have taken a staff job with The Hill, the political newspaper in Washington, D.C.

I am very happy about the job, which will involve a healthy combination of writing and editing, but it also means that the rationale for updating this website will be greatly diminished.

The website was initially launched as a way to provide information on Redemption Song. Latterly, I have used it to link to some of my freelance work, especially for U.S. outlets.

I will not be taking the site down anytime soon — and I have changed the Bio & Contact page to reflect these changes — but updates are likely to become scarce-to-non-existent. That being so, this is a good time to thank all of you who have visited, and especially those who have taken the time to get in contact about Redemption Song. It is very much appreciated.

Now, of course, you should feel free to follow me (and all my excellent new colleagues) over at www.thehill.com.

Thanks,

Niall Stanage

For Salon, I spoke to Ron Paul about his thoughts on making a 2012 presidential election bid. If Paul does not run, Gary Johnson may well emerge as the libertarian standard-bearer. The piece also includes Johnson’s comments.

Also for Salon, Steny Hoyer told me about his predictions for the next Congress just before November’s midterm elections. Of course, at the time I assumed (like many people) that Hoyer would become the Democratic Party’s leader in the House soon afterward. Oops.

Staying with the midterm elections, I argued that “tea is the Republican Party’s cocaine” in The Guardian. After the results came in, I also wrote about how indifferently Sarah Palin’s preferred candidates had performed.

Later, I wrote for Capital New York about why third parties and independent political movements have generally thrived in other western democracies but foundered in the U.S.

I rarely link here to my articles for The Sunday Business Post, but I’ll make an exception for a long piece I wrote in November, which asked: Is America in Decline?

Finally, a couple of TV appearances have been added to the “TV & Radio” page. I appeared on “Crosstalk”, a discussion program on RT, Russia’s equivalent of CNN, and on UTV Live Tonight back home in Ireland. The subject on both occasions was the midterm elections.

Thanks for reading and all the very best for 2011.

Judging from the reaction it received on Salon’s website, I suspect this profile of former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson may be the most-read article I’ve written in quite a while. Although the profile appeared back in May, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf gave his own take on Johnson, keying off the Salon article, last week.

Also for Salon, I looked at how Louisiana Senator David Vitter has remained in a strong position, despite being tainted by scandal. Soon afterwards, I added another, shorter piece, suggesting that the excitement being expressed by Vitter’s foes about the last-minute entrance of Chet Traylor into the Republican primary was overdone.

Keeping the focus on the Republican Party, another piece for Salon asked the question: what does South Carolina senator Jim DeMint want — for himself and for his party?

I published my first piece in The New Republic last month. In it, I argued that Barack Obama’s tendency to downplay race is ill-suited to discussions about the HIV/AIDS issue.

Finally, just this past weekend, I wrote about the so-called Ground Zero Mosque controversy for The Irish Times.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

For Salon, I wrote about Charlie Crist’s floundering Senate campaign back in early March and, later, about the search for a GOP presidential candidate — maybe John Thune or Mitch Daniels — who might appeal to the party’s intellectuals. (There is another Republican-themed Salon piece in the works, and it should appear within the next week or so.)

For the Daily Beast, I took a contrarian stance on British prime minister Gordon Brown’s allegedly bullying behavior and also gave my thoughts on the end of an era in Northern Ireland. Both articles appeared in February.

Finally, I defended the education policies of Barack Obama and Arne Duncan from the criticisms of the teachers’ unions in a March piece for the Guardian’s Comment is Free site.

In the unlikely event that anyone cares why I am supplying links rather than reprinting the articles in their entirety, as I have done in the past, a simple explanation: Most of the articles I have previously reprinted originally appeared in newspapers or magazines. I’ve decided — not withstanding the fact that I reprinted a previous Daily Beast column on Hillary Clinton on this site — that it is probably fairer to web-only outlets like Salon or the Daily Beast to simply provide the links.

Thanks for reading…

Some liberals worried that such a surprising accolade could ultimately weigh negatively upon a president still grappling with a host of domestic concerns. Over half a million new jobless claims were filed in the US in the last week in September, and it is hard to imagine many of the claimants popping champagne corks upon hearing the news. Others on the left could not resist satirising Obama’s apparently limitless “rock star” appeal. Liberal commentator Michael Kinsley suggested Obama must now be considered a shoo-in for an Oscar.

Despite these unusual voices among the chorus of concern, and despite the sheer vitriol of the reaction from the American right – radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh insisted Obama’s overseas popularity stemmed from “trashing his own country” – perhaps the most perplexing criticism came from one of Ireland’s Nobel peace laureates.

Mairéad Corrigan-Maguire, who won in 1976 along with Betty Williams for her involvement in the North’s Peace People organisation, was “very sad” to hear of Obama’s victory. “The Nobel committee is not meeting the conditions of Alfred Nobel’s will because he stipulated that the award is to be given to people who end militarism and war and are for disarmament,” she said.

As Maguire should know, the committee has a tradition of selecting winners as much as an act of encouragement towards their goal as a celebration of the miles already travelled. Even some of the most revered peace laureates of the modern era were anointed at a time when their aspirations were unfulfilled, including South African bishop Desmond Tutu, Iranian women’s rights activist Shirin Ebadi and Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. As for Nobel’s will, while the Swedish scientist did encourage giving awards to people involved in “the abolition or reduction of standing armies”, the first qualification he laid down for those who would be awarded a prize was that they should “have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations”.

Those words prove that selecting Obama to be not a defensible decision but the right one. Think of Obama’s achievements to date: setting in motion a US withdrawal from Iraq; renewing his nation’s focus on matters that demand international co-operation, including climate change and nuclear non-proliferation, and the tentative but encouraging advances that have come due to his emphasis on negotiation rather than sabre-rattling with adversaries like Iran.

Add to this the concerted push to reinvigorate the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians and the respectful but candid speeches delivered to audiences in the Middle East and Africa and it becomes hard to argue with the Nobel committee’s assertion that “Obama has, as president, created a new climate in international politics”.

These factors may have clinched the prize for Obama, but he evidently vaulted into contention much earlier. His detractors have pointed out that nominations for the award closed on February 1st, by which time the new president had been in office less than two weeks.

Again, they miss the point. By that stage, Obama had outlawed the use of torture by US forces, banned the use of secret prisons overseas and announced his plan to close Guantánamo Bay.

Lest we forget, he had achieved something of enormous significance even before making those moves: He got elected. The victory of a young, smart, internationalist Democrat – who thereby became his nation’s first African-American president – in and of itself nudged the political world into a different era.

Symbolic and substantive change are more intimately intertwined than Obama’s critics have acknowledged. His election and early months in power represent the kind of nascent emergence from darkness that the committee has celebrated in other nations. They were right to honour it in America’s case too.

First published in The Irish Times, October 12, 2009

Nick Hornby’s novel “Juliet, Naked” is set in a fictional and downcast English seaside town called Gooleness, where we meet a fractious and downcast couple, Annie and Duncan. They live together, unmarried and joyless. Mr. Hornby nimbly evokes Annie’s frustration, both emotional and sexual: “Sometimes Annie felt less like a girlfriend than a school chum who’d come to visit in the holidays and stayed for the next twenty years.”

A third person is spectrally (and later literally) involved in the couple’s relationship. Tucker Crowe is an American musician who, though once a critics’ darling, appears to have lived in seclusion since abruptly retreating from the spotlight in 1986. Duncan is utterly fixated on Crowe, becoming one of the leading lights—a “Crowologist” and “scholar” in his own words— on a Web site dedicated to minute analysis of the singer-songwriter’s life and work.

We are, in other words, deep in Hornby country. As a memoirist and novelist, Mr. Hornby has pursued a few recurring themes, including the challenge of finding a masculinity that is sensitive without being wimpy, and the attraction of obsessive fandom, especially regarding sports or music. His style—whether in “Fever Pitch,” the soccer- supporter’s memoir that made his name in 1992, or the music-saturated novel “High Fidelity” (1995)—blends dry humor, a dash of sentimentality and immense readability. He has sold more than five million books to date, even as some critics have complained that his pop-culture enthusiasms and guys-and-their-problems focus make his work the male equivalent of chick-lit.

“Juliet, Naked” will neither win over his detractors nor disappoint his admirers. The title refers to an unreleased album by Crowe, an acoustic, barebones version of his most famous work, “Juliet.” A copy of the hitherto-unknown album falls into Duncan’s hands, and he soon writes a rhapsodic online review. Annie, who respects Crowe’s music but has none of her partner’s fanaticism, is so irked by Duncan’s hyperbole that she posts her own lukewarm appraisal.

To Annie’s astonishment, she receives an admiring email reply from Crowe himself. It turns out that he is not the semi-crazed recluse that his dwindling band of diehard fans imagine. He is a middle-age man living a relatively normal, if domestically messy and financially straitened, life in Pennsylvania. The correspondence between Crowe and Annie, and their eventual meeting, provides much of the novel’s narrative.

Mr. Hornby’s humorous touch is very much intact. Annie’s visits to her inept and priggish therapist, Malcolm, are comic gems. She becomes convinced that the goal of analysis is to torture patients with silence until they “eventually shout out ‘I slept with my father!’ and everyone could go home.”

Elsewhere, Crowe ponders the role that his professional inactivity has played in the collapse of several relationships: “All of these women had known that he hadn’t done anything since 1986; that, it seemed to him, was his unique selling point, and it was a never-ending source of fascination. But when he’d continued to do nothing, there was outrage. Where was the justice in that?”

Even peripheral characters, like a bluff local councilman and a couple of aging lotharios named Gav and Barnesy, are well-drawn and sometimes poignant. Mr. Hornby’s casual turns of phrase can be especially telling, as when Crowe realizes that he has wasted two decades waiting for the muse to return. The wait, he reflects, has “felt like one long flick through a magazine.”

“Juliet, Naked” is solid but lacks the punch of the superb “High Fidelity.” Minor but irritating flaws crop up, particularly the tendency of all three main characters to dwell at odd moments on matters of syntax and grammar. In a scene when Duncan confesses to cheating on Annie, for instance, she asks: “Who are you sleeping with?” He replies: “It’s not . . . I wouldn’t use the present continuous.” At other points, Annie pronounces herself surprised by “the combination of Gooleness and an active verb,” and Crowe, when Annie asks him if he might be interested in her, answers: “The conditional is unnecessary.” This sounds less like characters speaking than an author letting the curtain slip. More seriously, the book’s final chapters have an underdeveloped feel as the narrative begins to dawdle before a rather contrived intervention from a minor character hastens its conclusion.

Still, “Juliet, Naked” is a rich and perceptive novel, with a keen sense of the lives led by the trio at its core. Duncan gradually realizes that his ardent consumption of every morsel of Crowe-related information is a way of compensating for his stunted emotional life. Crowe struggles, usually unsuccessfully, with the question of how to marry his freewheeling artistic spirit to the demands of adult life. And Annie is a case study in how caution can lead, just as surely as recklessness, to a lifetime’s worth of regrets.

First published in The Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2009

Part of the issue is Palin herself. She has a good claim to the title of America’s most divisive politician. After all, this is a woman whom a large swathe of conservatives adore, but whom an even larger chunk of the US population considers to be manifestly unqualified for high office.

In Going Rogue, touching portraits of family life are again and again revealed as mere diagrams to illustrate the correctness of Palin’s political beliefs.

As a child, she gets stopped while out for a holiday ride on a snow machine with her brother, is irked with the policeman who hinders their fun and solemnly informs the reader that “maybe that was my first brush with the skewed priorities of government”. A conversation a generation later with her own daughter, Bristol, about the younger Palin’s goal of opening a coffee shop, includes the advice: “Don’t do this until this [Obama] administration understands government’s role in private business. Or wait until they’re out of office.”

The prose style of Going Rogue — which is, for the most part, fluent though uninspired — tells us little or nothing about the former Alaska governor, since it is the work of a ghost writer. But what Palin has chosen to emphasise reveals plenty.

Perhaps most jarring to European readers will be the frequent references to God. On this side of the Atlantic, even believers sometimes feel queasy about public protestations of faith from politicians — hence the famous remark by Tony Blair’s erstwhile spin doctor Alastair Campbell that “We don’t do God.”

Palin most definitely does God. Indeed, he keeps a close and nurturing eye on her political ambitions. He is apparently in favour of her 2002 run for lieutenant-governor of Alaska (“I knew that God was working on something significant in our small-town life”); her later bid for governor (“I thought of a passage from the book of Jeremiah 29:11-13: ‘“For know that I have plans for you,” declares the Lord’”); and for the vice-presidency itself (“When God presents those doors, we think, ‘Yes. This is right. This fits’”).

When not contemplating celestial matters, Palin propagates her most cherished image of herself: the ordinary mom-politician, bravely doing the people’s business yet assailed by influential enemies on all sides. The media, political opponents, purportedly inept aides — all get it in the neck, and always in a way that presents Palin as the embattled heroine.

The problem here is two-fold.

Firstly, a petty, churlish air permeates much of the book. No stranger to innuendo, Palin refers to two public figures in her home town base of Wasilla “who it was rumoured were good friends”; a later political opponent is an “effete young chap.” Elsewhere, pointless jibes are made at her supposed opponents in the despised mainstream media. “Well, I like his mom,” she remarks drily about one CNN anchor.

Secondly, many of the targets of Palin’s ire have come out since the book’s publication to say that certain details are simply untrue.

Steve Schmidt, the manager of last year’s McCain-Palin campaign, is portrayed as her foul-mouthed nemesis. But he has called many of her allegations “total fiction”. Sources within the campaign have said that an episode described at length in the book, in which Schmidt apparently erupted in rage on a phone call with Palin, simply never happened.

Another campaign advisor, Nicolle Wallace, has alleged the book is “based on fabrications” and that Palin’s depiction of a conversation in which Wallace sought to persuade her to do a TV interview, which proved to be a disaster, “is fiction”.

This is serious for its own sake, but it also erodes the only reason any nominally neutral person would have for reading Going Rogue.

Political junkies might be lured by Palin’s apparently willingness to dish the dirt on what went on behind the scenes of the presidential campaign.

If a cloud hangs over those descriptions, however, there is little left.

Palin-lovers will lap Going Rogue up. For the rest of us, this is a hollow, occasionally nasty and oddly dispiriting book.

First published in The Sunday Business Post, December 6, 2009.

What is it about Hillary Clinton and conflict zones?

The secretary of State committed a major gaffe last year by giving a largely fictional account of a dangerous landing under gunfire on a Bosnian airstrip. Now, doubts have arisen over comments she made this week relating to Northern Ireland.

Although the new episode is unquestionably both less clear-cut and less significant than the Bosnia fiasco, it nonetheless has the potential to resurrect questions about whether Clinton has a tendency to overdramatize her foreign endeavors.

Her description seemed to illustrate just how far Northern Ireland had come from the first, fragile days of its peace process. The only problem is that it isn’t quite true.

In a speech to members of the Northern Ireland Assembly on Monday, Clinton talked about her first visit to Belfast, which she made with her husband in November 1995. “We stayed at the Europa Hotel, as I have again this time, even though then there were sections boarded up because of damage from bombs,” she said.

The description seemed to illustrate just how far Northern Ireland had come from the first, fragile days of its peace process, and how long Mrs. Clinton had been a witness to its travails. The only problem is that it isn’t quite true, according to both the hotel’s manager at the time and the managing director of its parent company, who spoke independently of each other to The Daily Beast.

Howard Hastings, the managing director of Hastings Hotels, which owns the Europa, said that the secretary of State’s description was “not strictly accurate.” John Toner, the hotel’s general manager at the time of the Clinton visit, was more blunt, “I don’t know where she’s getting that from,” he said.

Hastings and Toner both noted that the last explosion to damage the hotel—which was once, infamously, the most bombed in Europe—occurred in May 1993, some two-and-a-half years before the Clinton visit. Hastings Hotels, a Northern Ireland group founded by Howard Hastings’ father, Sir William, bought it shortly afterward. A multimillion-dollar refurbishment followed and the hotel reopened in February 1994.

Toner and Hastings say that the then-first lady may have been confused by the fact that there was some work going on around the time of her visit, 21 months after the re-opening. But both men insisted that this work was, in Hastings’ words, the kind of “repair and refurbishment” commonplace at any hotel undergoing an overhaul, and was “not because of a recent bombing.”

Contemporaneous press accounts seem to give further credence to the idea that the hotel was in better shape than the secretary of State’s war-scarred description this week suggested. A Los Angeles Times report published on November 28, 1995, on the cusp of the presidential visit, referred to “a new beauty parlor in the oft-bombed but now refurbished Europa Hotel.” A story by the legendary, and now-deceased, New York Times reporter R.W. ‘Johnny’ Apple, published on December 1, 1995, mentioned that “the often-bombed Europa Hotel, where Mr. Clinton stayed tonight, has been refurbished.”

Neither of the men connected with the hotel has any ax to grind with the Clintons. The room in which the then-president and first lady stayed during their visit still bears the name “The Clinton Suite.” Toner said he was “impressed with [Hillary Clinton’s] genuine concern and interest in Northern Ireland” in a brief, private conversation with her at the time.

P.J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman, insisted that there was nothing inaccurate in Clinton’s statement this week. “There was a renovation in progress that stemmed from the bombing and a change in ownership of the hotel. The secretary of State was not suggesting she was dodging bombs when she arrived at the hotel,” he said, recalling the May 1993 bombing. “We’ve talked to two people who were with the Clintons in 1995, and they say they were shown an area that was still restricted, where the bombing had been.”

Hastings said the only restrictions on access to parts of the hotel during the time of the Clinton visit would have been imposed by the presidential security team. But he said it had nothing to do with any bomb damage, and added that there were no “rooms with holes in the walls or no glass in the windows or anything like that.”

Clinton’s past accounts of her involvement in Northern Ireland have been the subject of heated debate. During her bid for the presidency last year, she told NPR that she had been “instrumental” in the peace process. She also claimed during a CNN interview that “I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland.”

Critics accused her of exaggerating her role, insisting that her involvement had been largely symbolic. The heavy lifting, they claimed, was done by her husband and by George Mitchell, the former Senate Majority Leader who, as U.S. Special Envoy, chaired the multiparty talks that eventually led to the 1998 peace accord known as the Good Friday Agreement.

David Trimble, who signed up to the agreement as leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, told London’s Daily Telegraph last year that Hillary Clinton was a “wee bit silly” for inflating her involvement. “I don’t want to rain on the thing for her, but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player,” he added.

That flap was superseded by the Bosnian story. In March 2008, then-candidate Clinton told a dramatic tale of arriving in Tuzla 12 years earlier. She landed “under sniper fire,” she said, and her party “just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

News footage from the day was duly unearthed, showing no evidence of sniper fire and no apparent hurry to get Clinton or her daughter, Chelsea, who was accompanying her, to a less-exposed location.

“I made a mistake. That happens,” Clinton said during the resultant furor. “It proves I’m human—which, you know, for some people is a revelation.”

First published at The Daily Beast, October 14 2009