RED MEAT
>> SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2011
But the rest of the world has to recognise that whatever transpires, the US is unlikely to be pushing a radical green line any time soon. Then again, it has been this way since the hanging chads of Florida carried Mr Bush to the White House in 2001.
BBC Edits The President's Speech To Mislead The Public. Again.
>> SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2011
Switching back into a plea for unity, and invoking the memory of Abraham Lincoln: "A Republican president who mobilised government".
"We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party".
We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. But in the middle of a civil war he was also a leader who looked to the future - a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad; launch the National Academy of Sciences; and set up the first land grant colleges.
John Humphrys explains 9/11, Terrorism, and Where We Went Wrong
OPEN THREAD
>> FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 09, 2011
Sunday, 11 September 2011
Richard Black has now decided to move into overt political analysis, the logical extension, I suppose, of his eco-warrior brief. His worst nightmare is in prospect: that a red meat Republican climate denier might succeed the sainted Obama. Cleary "red meat" has special abusive value in this context, because he points out with pride it was devised by his chum, the cannabis smuggler, Jonny Dymond. En route, he sings loud praises to the Environmental Protection Agency, the body that single-handedly is doing more damage to the US economy than a phalanx of Bin Ladens. And, using a quote from one of favourite organisations, the so-called Friends of the Earth, he produces his trump card to show how plain stupid the red meaters are, because he EPA, he tells us with glee, was actually set up by one of their own, none other than that (boo, hiss) ultimate nasty Republican, Richard Milhous Nixon.
Mr Black saves the best until last. He writes in best Eeyore fashion:
Quelle horreur! It's all that lying, cheating, double-dealing Dubya's fault. What an outro! Can't you just hear the rest of the BBC newsroom cheering him on for being so smart...and getting so much anti-Republican venom in one story?
They simply can't help themselves. I couldn't stomach listening to the Stimulus Jr. speech to the bitter end, so bailed out and missed a major gaffe. What's that, you ask? The Smartest Man In the Room made a gaffe? Never. Well, He did, and it's a good one. This has been making the rounds of actual honest journalists who are not propagandists or die-hard Obamessiah fans, but I waited a full day because I knew the BBC wouldn't have corrected it by now.
At 19:36 on the BBC's liveblog of the speech, Beeboid Adam Blenford posted this at that point in the speech:
He's referring to this bit of the speech:
Bzzzt! Wrong. Blenford, of course, had no idea. Sure, Lincoln was the first Republican to be elected President, but the Party itself was founded in 1854 by a Alvan Bovary, at an abolitionist meeting at a church in Wisconsin. Yes, that's right: the Republican Party was basically founded to fight against slavery, in response to the looming Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would let new states decide if they were going to have slaves or not. Lincoln was a Whig at the time, and didn't join until 1856, when he co-founded the Illinois branch. Sure, he did a great deal to help establish the Party, but did not found it.
This is the President of the US, folks. Now, it's impossible to know if the Teleprompter of the United States had it wrong (which means the President is also ignorant and just read it out), or if the Community Organizer in Chief just winged it and told a lie so he could use Lincoln as a cudgel with which to beat intransigent Republicans in the House. But the President either got it wrong, or simply lied in front of Congress and the whole country, just to score a political point.
Blenford didn't catch it, and Mark Mardell didn't catch it, nor did Katty Kay. I don't expect them to actually know anything about US history, as Mardell and the rest of the Beeboids covering the US display their ignorance time and time again. But the BBC then censored this mistake/lie in the transcript:
Sadly, this isn't the first time the BBC has...um...touched up one of the President's speeches in order to give the audience the desired impression. In fact, they did it with His very first speech as President. They edited the footage to make Him appear to have said stronger words about environmental issues.
The problem here is twofold. First of all, there's the fact that the dozen or so BBC employees you're supposed to trust about how to understand US issues are woefully ignorant of their patch. Worse, their colleagues in the editing suite and in the BBC News Online offices are dishonest, and edit and censor news to fit the impression they want you to have. This time they're just censoring a transcript to protect the leader of a foreign country. How pathetic is that?
Even if the very young person being paid very low wages to put up the transcript can't be expected to know the place he copied and pasted it from had it wrong, this has been all over the web for more than 24 hours, and surely somebody with integrity at the BBC would have caught it by now. If there was anyone with integrity at the BBC when it comes to the President.
BBC, you are liars and propagandists. There really needs to be a complete purge of personnel before this can be fixed.
We don’t know whether the BBC has chosen its position on 9/11 and Islamic terrorism because the hierarchy sincerely believes in it or because it’s strategically pertinent, but John Humphrys set it out loud and clear in his 8:30 spot on the iconic Today programme. Tony Blair was also present.
In other words:
Islam is fundamentally peaceful.
Fundamentalist Islamism is a distortion of Islam.
9/11 and similar acts of ‘terrorism’ are crimes perpetrated by a minority, who have distorted (fundamentally peaceful) Islam.
These crimes have nothing to do with the peaceful religion known as Islam.
We mistakenly blamed the peaceful religion, Islam, for crimes which were unrelated to true Islam.
It was this mistake of ours, which radicalised fundamentally peaceful Moslems, turning them away from true, peaceful Islam, towards a distorted, ‘separate-from-Islam’ criminality, (which has nothing to do with Islam.)
‘Terrorists’ are straightforward criminals who have distorted the fundamentally peaceful religion of peace. We call them militants.
The BBC is impartial and non-judgmental. We don’t call them militantcriminals.
We refer to ‘Militants’, or ‘militant Islamists’, meaning
'militant ‘nothing-to-do-with-Islam-ists’.'
Earlier, someone said the glorious ‘Arab Spring’ is proof that we’ve won an ideological battle.
The news headlines state that ‘post-glorious Arab Spring’ Egyptians have attacked the Israeli Embassy in Cairo because of their anger at the killing of six Egyptian policemen by Israeli security forces. This apparently motivated their democratic decision to destroy the Israeli Embassy and its occupants.
It ignores the boiling hatred that has been driving the Arab World since the year dot, a hatred which was released and allowed to flourish and blossom as soon as dictator Hosni Mubarak was deposed. A hatred alluded to vaguely by the BBC itself in its own statement here:
”There have been protests outside the embassy for weeks amid a downturn in Egypt-Israel relations.” but in a statement further down in the same article, ‘for weeks’ has turned into ‘since 18th August’
“There have been protests outside the embassy since the deaths on 18 August of five Egyptian policemen.”
So, the anti Israel protests are merely because of Israel’s recent provocative, unexplained aggression? Or perhaps, since the glorious Arab Spring?
The glorious Arab Spring doesn’t prove any ideological sea change whatsoever. The Arab world does not love us. 9/11 was not an isolated criminal act by distorters of a fundamentally peaceful ideology. Nor was it supported by a mere minority. It was celebrated throughout the Arab world, on September 11th 2001, and as acts against the West still are, to this day, September 2011.
Tony Blair gets it, but nobody likes him, nobody listens to him, and the BBC marches on.
Meanwhile the Any Questions panel drones on predictably. “The whole world was behind America after 9/11!” “We saw Yassir Arafat giving blood on television!”(wasn’t he supposed to have had aids?) “It was our foreign policy that turned the Arab World against America.”
Heaven help us.
Well, finally I get around to providing you with a new Open Thread to bring us into the weekend. Enjoy.
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