As you may have noticed, all is somewhat moribund around here lately. Yet some still make their way to the blog and the above is a sample of the searches which brought them. I hope all found what they were looking for.
Back soon with something more substantial. I hope.
After a very long sequence of crimes against political literacy, even Christopher Hitchens has been brought back to his senses by the Obama/Biden vs McCain/Palin campaign. Here’s the article. And here’s the money quote:
This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured.
There’s a fourth candidate in the US election whom no-one seems to talk about anymore but who has been grafting away very effectively. If I’m being really honest, I think I actually warm to him more than Obama. It’s his VP nominee, Joe Biden. Ezra Klein puts it well:
When I argued for Biden’s worth as a VP pick, the center of the case was his ability to be a contemptuous, arrogant jerk when talking about the Republican foreign policy record.
When the details of this encounter fade, as they soon will, I think the debate as a whole will be seen as of a piece with Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, Reagan-Carter in 1980, and Clinton-Bush in 1992.
And therefore, as in each of those years, the electorate could well break decisively for the new man. (See 538, of course). McCain’s affected smirking at Obama’s supposed naivete was obnoxious, and will have been seen as so. (See here.)
On November 5th, Sarah Palin could well be Vice-President of the United States. VP, that is, to a 72-year-old man with a history of cancer (and the start of dementia, if you ask me…) Watch these excerpts from one of the very few interviews she has given, and weep:
On the bailout:
Her policy positions make her Cheney in lipstick; talking, she makes George W. suddenly sound like Alistair Cooke.
I don’t get it. I just caught up with this interview with Andrew Lloyd-Webber where he makes a declaration which I’ve heard mumbled elsewhere but at least he says it clearly:
I look back at when I was younger and ask myself would I have written an opera with Tim Rice? So many people nowadays are obsessed with things offending people. Today people say you can’t do this because it will offend that community, and then you can’t say this because the Muslims will be offended by it and we’ll end up being talked out of it. Talked out of ideas. Whereas when I was 20 I didn’t think about those things – you could just do it.
All I want to know is what on earth is this idea you’ve had which can’t be written? Just tell someone in private and they can pass it on to me secretly if its so inflammatory, my Lord.
The mind boggles. Don’t Cry for Me, Ahmadinejad?
Fortunately in an expansive piece in the Sunday Times Nick Hytner swats this away:
There are occasional rumblings about the theatrical stranglehold of the politically correct left. In the face of an explosion of creativity from writers, musicians and artists of every conceivable background and persuasion, it is eccentrically claimed that there are some topics too hot to handle. Quite apart from the fact that there are several shows on their way to the National that vigorously explore what we are told is the biggest taboo of all (the danger of radical Islamism, about which you may not have noticed there’s supposed to be a conspiracy of silence), there is a basic misunderstanding here of the way the theatre works.
For those of you who might be thinking that I seem to have lost any interest in British political life, preferring to concentrate on an election where I don’t have a vote, it’s not wholly true. I caught Gordon Brown’s interview this morning with Andrew Marr (after surprising myself with an 8.30am run in Battersea Park) and was struck by his quoting Conrad, saying that ‘facing it’ was always the right way to approach a crisis such as our present financial one.
Of course, there is a perhaps unfortunate precedent of a Labour politician making this allusion at a time which has plenty of echoes now:
Speaking as a minister to the Labour party conference in 1976, in the midst of an economic crisis, Michael Foot, … insisted that: “We face an economic typhoon of unparalleled ferocity, the worst the world has seen since the 1930s. Conrad wrote a book called Typhoon and at the end he told people how to do it. He said: ‘always facing it, Captain MacWhirr, that’s the way to get through’.” He then called for “socialist imagination” and “the red flame of socialist courage”. Surprisingly for a bibliophile, he missed the point of the tale, which is that, in facing the storm rather than taking steps to evade it, MacWhirr, far from showing imagination and courage, is being obtuse to the point of bigotry.
So that would be at a Labour conference shortly after a rather tired-looking new leader had taken over from someone younger and wilier than him, oil prices had shot the country’s economic plan to pieces, and the party’s best hope seemed to rest in a dazzlingly young Foreign Secretary called David. Mmmm, what happened next, I can’t remember…
UPDATE: Fame, at last. I posted this as a comment on The Guardian’s politics pages and its senior political correspondent, Andrew Sparrow, has picked up on it and quotes me here: Gordon Brown Takes Inspiration from Michael Foot.
I can pop over Albert Bridge and use Battersea Park as my back garden. It looked glorious in the evening sun on my second visit of the day. Here’s a sample, plus you can see a fuller slideshow of bad photography by clicking this.
Thankfully he’s surmounted the McCain/Palin bounce in the polls (as always, see 538 for the right stuff) and yet there are still all sorts of worries as to why he’s not doing better. I suppose as a blogger I shouldn’t say this but despite the liveliness of much of the blogosphere’s comment (especially Andrew Sullivan’s continuing rage against Ms Palin) the two sparkiest pieces today are from the MSM (mainstream media), and in this case just one source, the old grey lady New York Times.
Maureen Dowd (with help from Aaron Sorkin) imagines the conversation between Obama and ex-President Bartlet (of The West Wing), while Frank Rich nails the Bush/Cheney/McCain/Palin axis with Truthiness Stages a Comeback. After detailing McCain’s deep complicity in the financial imbroglios of the past week, he concludes with this:
The twin-pronged strategy of truculence and propaganda that sold Bush and his war could yet work for McCain. Even now his campaign has kept the “filter” from learning the very basics about his fitness to serve as president — his finances and his health. The McCain multihousehold’s multimillion-dollar mother lode is buried in Cindy McCain’s still-unreleased complete tax returns. John McCain’s full medical records, our sole index to the odds of an imminent Palin presidency, also remain locked away. The McCain campaign instead invited 20 chosen reporters to speed-read through 1,173 pages of medical history for a mere three hours on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. No photocopying was permitted.
This is the same tactic of selective document release that the Bush White House used to bamboozle Congress and the press about Saddam’s nonexistent W.M.D. As truthiness repeats itself, so may history, and not as farce.
Rich, of course, is the paper’s ex-theatre critic, scourge of David Hare etc. Can’t quite see the equivalent happening here.
