Monday, March 12, 2007

Chickenhawk Down!

Farewell sweet chickenhawk, we hardly knew ye.

Liberals have spent years insisting that unless you’ve personally beaten six Argies to death with your water bottle, you’re not qualified to support the war on terror, but now, following Patrick Mercer’s comments, it turns out that pretty much anyone can run an infantry battalion.

With the nation’s race-hustlers turning the hysteria meter up to 11, it’s quite an achievement to produce the sleaziest contribution to the debate, but Raffles the Gentleman Thug managed it. Cameron not only fired Mercer, but also labelled him a racist – a charge too far even for some of the race hustlers. Hey, if a Tory frontbencher with a fine record of military service gets slimed by Cameron, what chance do the rest of us have with him ? Indeed, you could almost say this is Cameron’s Rose Addis.

But there’s more to it than that. Mercer’s two points were that soldiers often use insensitive language and that some black troops exploit racial paranoia to skive off. As far as the latter goes, if that doesn’t happen, then someone should call the Biology Police, because the laws of human nature are being broken. If next week the MoD announced extra pay for Jedi Knights, the force would be with half the Army by Easter.

As for the insensitive language, well…… Twenty years of PC have resulted in an obsession with social mores that make the Victorians look like Hells Angels. Yet still the running-into-machine-gun-fire industry won’t get with the program. Just a hunch, but I’m guessing this might not be unconnected with the fact that when we refer to soldiers being ‘wounded’ it doesn’t mean someone’s made a hurtful comment about them.

Liberals have spent years claiming soldiers are semi-literate sociopaths, but now they’re just horrified at the thought of the little flowers being exposed to hurtful language. Hey, Libs, you know what else is hurtful ? IEDs, but the Left is happy for our troops to travel round in ‘snatch’ Land Rovers with the survivability of a cardboard box, just as long as no one uses naughty words.

All of which is by way of saying that this debate is emphatically not about anything Mercer said, just the fact he said anything at all. Under the Left’s conception of racial equality, whites are forbidden from saying anything substantial about racial issues. Self-flagellation is allowed, but God preserve the white guy who points out, say, the racist rhetoric employed in rap music. That was Mercer’s problem: he just didn’t know his place and play his cards right.

See, this is why the Tory base is wrong about Cameron. The excuse for Cameron is that he’s not quite as awful as the alternative. I’d dispute that, but anyway, let’s assume for the moment that it’s true. Look at the price to be paid. Just as it took the election of Tony Blair to truly secure the Lady Thatcher’s legacy, so victory for Cameron would set in stone this kind of PC lunacy. In fact, to judge by this case, Cameron would go even further (and, again, if he’ll do all this to Mercer, what hope is there for, say, the average police officer) ? That’s the bottom line: can anything – anything at all – that Cameron might do, make up for institutionalising this kind of PC lunacy ?

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