Snigger! - by Richard... Monday, May 16, 2011

Snigger! - by Richard... Monday, May 16, 2011

A touch of the licky-lickies from a blog that was once thought to be premier political site. You might like to suggest your own three reasons on the forum (which is still open for registration). I'll give you a starter for ten ... Huhne?

And for another vomit-inducing panegyric, you need to take a butchers at Brogan:

Mr Huhne may not have endeared himself to many with his intellectual swaggering and political style, but he was undoubtedly one of the Cabinet's big beasts, and one of the best Lib Dem operators. While Mr Clegg may find it useful to see his rival reduced, he can ill afford to lose a political heavyweight of Mr Huhne's calibre.

If that poisonous, low-grade dwarf is a "big beast", then we are in more trouble than even I thought. That Brogan seem to think he is one tells you more than you need to know about Brogan - and the toilet paper he works for.

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Am I bovvered? - by Richard...

Not so, says the National Research Council. "Although the scientific process is always open to new ideas and results, the fundamental causes and consequences of climate change have been established by many years of scientific research, are supported by many different lines of evidence, and have stood firm in the face of careful examination, repeated testing, and the rigorous evaluation of alternative theories and explanation".

Climate-change deniers, in other words, are wilfully ignorant, lost in wishful thinking, cynical or some combination of the three. And their recalcitrance is dangerous, the report makes clear, because the longer the nation waits to respond to climate change, the more catastrophic the planetary damage is likely to be — and the more drastic the needed response.

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Rattle dem chains - by Richard...

Dominique Strauss-Kahn will appear before a New York court today, to plead on charges related to the sexual assault and attempted rape of a hotel chambermaid. He was reported to be "tired" after having agreed to undergo a forensic examination at the request of prosecutors. You can read a very interesting take on the background from Subrosa, and the latest update is here.

The somewhat underwhelmed New York Post notes that Strauss-Kahn had allegedly "sodomized" the Manhattan hotel maid, reporting him being in a "snit" over the lack of VIP treatment.* He had "proved the height of pompous arrogance yesterday", throwing a fit over a battle on his bail — which left him parked on a wooden bench in an East Harlem station house the whole day.

He had been initially led out of the NYPD's Special Victims Unit at around 11 pm in handcuffs, scowling and red-faced (pictured). Sporting a long navy-blue coat and an open collar, he refused to acknowledge reporters as he was placed in the back of a police car and whisked off to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn for forensic tests. The NYP sources said he was taken out of the police station after finally agreeing to a medical examination - and only after the police had moved to obtain a warrant to gather potential DNA evidence.

Meanwhile, the IMF and the French government both seem to be throwing "the seducer" off the sledge. He is said to have been in New York on "personal business" and has not claimed diplomatic immunity. His schedule meetings with Merkel on Sunday in Berlin was postponed and meeting of the finance ministers of the EU member states in Brussels today is going ahead without the great man, who was to have been there to represent the IMF.

* The meaning of the word "sodomized" in the US (according to Tim Worstall, who knows about these things and sent me a helpful e-mail) is different from its normally accepted meaning in the UK. As so often with two cultures divided by a single language, the labels on the tins may look the same, but the contents may vary - as does, occasionally, the direction of travel.

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An epidemic of panegyrics - by Richard...

Over the past year, I have been through thousands of back numbers of newspapers, stretching all the way to the 1930s. From that, I can aver with some confidence that there has never been a period in the history of British journalism where we have seen such a torrent of sycophantic drivelabout a man who calls himself prime minister.

We have in Cameron a man of whom even his best friends would have difficulty defining as a conservative, yet we have Leo McKinstry gushing about the "enduring strength of British conservatism" under his tutelage. To Max Hasting – no mean pompous ass – the Boy has "shown daring and hints of greatness", while Benedict Brogan writes of "something remarkable, even miraculous" about the coalition. 

Even Simon Jenkins heaps praise upon the visage of the Great Leader, declaring that he has emerged as "a leader of real ability with a talent for luck", and Philip Stevens of The Financial Times tells us that Cameron "exudes a confidence that says the thing that counts above all else is that he is prime minister". He was made for the role, we are thus informed.

I thought the Oborne effort was bad enough, but the gut-wrenching adulation we have been seeing is neither healthy nor safe. There has always been an element of irreverance and even iconoclasm in the British press, so this fawning sycophancy is completely out of character. Even if Cameron was as good as he is made out (he isn't), it is quite unlike the media (on a historical scale) to say so.  For all but a few, the collective minds of "Fleet Street" have succumbed to the fawning virus.

At least we are getting some corrective from Hitchens and thank goodness for Dellers (extract above). Dellers has picked up on this, which makes that Saturday demonstration even more fatuous. There were all the little wuzzies asking for more cuts, and we have this vomit-inducing politician setting out to bankrupt the nation with the climate change nonsense driven by the barnkrupt Huhne.

But for Hitchens and Dellers, it would be easy to believe one was going mad. The epidemic of panegyrics is quite unnerving. There is a psychic disease abroad and, not for the first time, one wonders where it is all going to end. It really cannot last or the patient may never recover - the fever must soon break.

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No end to it - by Richard... Sunday, May 15, 2011

There just seems no end to the amateurism of the British media. While it is true that, during the Battle of Britain in 1940, provision was made to fit the aircraft with bomb racks, by no stretch of the imagination  could the Tiger Moth be described as a "Second World War fighter". And what is a "spiral roll"?

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