Another £1,000 Note Left On The Ground

Like I keep saying, the weirdest myth in British politics is that Tory 'modernisers' are just staunch conservatives  forced by political reality to moderate their views.

Just no: any honest analysis of the squish wing of the Tory Party makes it obvious that not only are they not savvy political geniuses, but that they actually take leftist positions even where it means losing votes.

Consider Exhibit A.

Just to ram the point home: the police didn't 'fail to put the pieces together' or 'miss warning signs', they were fully aware that an active predator was grooming children and choose to act against the woman warning families to protect their kids. In effect, the police did all but keep lookout for a sexual predator.

Who the hell voted for this?  Answer: no one. Hence, why the snoot class had to pass the Human Rights Act and rely on the loose wording and their fellow snoots on the bench to do the rest.

Call it a hunch, but I'm thinking repealing the Pedophile Safety At Work Act might be a vote winner. Oh.... and also the right thing to do, if anyone cares about that anymore. So how come the Certified Super Geniuses at Tory HQ can't see this?

Actually, the real question is how come this is the one hill they will die on?

Ah well, this is indeed the Rosetta Stone of Tory moderniser rhetoric.  They're all about the electability, except for when that might conflict with their dinner party invitations.

That's their North Star around which all else revolves.

Our worthless elite, lacking any actual qualifications for elite status except for the arrogance and entitlement, define themselves entirely by opposition to the common morality.  Hence, they claim that the public's abhorrence for pedophiles is clearly proof of their crudity and lack of sophistication - and so they defend the kind of junk science that announces that 'Tom' is Certified Safe, even while he's stalking his next victims.

No, don't bother asking any of these staunch supporters of the rehab industry where they feel the balance lies between psychoanalytic strategies to rehabilitation and CBT-based approaches. They don't need to know anything about what they claim to support, they just know that the supporting phoney-baloney pseudo-science makes you a cut above the common rabble.

And that's how we ended up with an allegedly conservative party supporting the right of public servants to not only release a dangerous predator onto the streets, but to set him up in a free house next to a whole bunch of kids, stand by while he grooms his next victims and then use the law to stop anyone talking about it.

This kind of thing is why ordinary people now think this country doesn't work for them anymore. Hence, the rise of The Brexit Party. Meanwhile, the Tory modernisers are deep in the bunker, explaining how it's all down to dark money from the Russians.

As I Was Saying...

The Tories are still trying to terrify the public with the Corbogyman. Lest you be tempted to choose them as the lesser of two evils, here's Mark Steyn with a reminder that eight years of Conservative Prime Minsters has done nothing to deal with the most important issue of the day: the remorseless transformation of Britain into Not Britain.

 Hence, why I can't get too excited about Gerard Batten appointing Tommy Robinson as an adviser. Personally, I think it's bad politics, but on the other hand, who would be the respectable alternative to Tommy Robinson? As Mark Steyn himself has pointed out, if respectable politicians won't deal with the elephant in the room, then the public will turn to non-respectable ones.

We already have three parties hiding behind ludicrous euphemisms, like 'grooming gangs'. Meanwhile, in so far as Tommy Robinson was banged up for contempt of court, that means we've had more people jailed for reporting on jihadist rape gangs, than for actually assisting them. Police officers and social workers have destroyed evidence, buried crime reports and intimidated witnesses, without facing so much as the ghost of a charge. Turning a blind eye to outright corruption: that's what counts as 'Respectable Conservatism' these days.

Return Of The Greatest Living Englishwoman

I'm guessing you guys have been thinking the same thing as me recently, namely 'if only we had more chances to hear from Gina Miller'.

Good news, everyone! She's back and she's got a whole book full of Top Grade Super Genius available in all good book stores.... and all good pound shops, if you wait a week or two.

What's it about? What do you think it's about? It's what it's always about: the Everlasting Glory of Gina.

'For having an opinion and holding the government to account and ensuring they abide by the law, it seems I have upset people in an extraordinary way and it has unearthed a part of Britain I didn't know existed.

Yep, the bit outside the M25.

Maybe she doesn't realise this but, as a True British Heroine once said, 'it’s part of our culture to speak out.'

And particularly so when faced with such an unpleasant combination of victimhood and entitlement as Gina Miller.

Just occasionally the mask slips:

If you have money and work hard and dare to succeed you get put into a corner and must be quiet, which I find extraordinary.

 Will no one speak out for the filthy rich? 

This is further support for my theory that the New Left is just like the Old Right.

Seriously: you can just imagine the Caricature Tory Boy character coming out with something like this in some Godawful BBC drama.

Deeper point: this is what multiculturalism and the open borders lobby have done to this country. If someone had immigrated to the US and become filthy rich they'd call it living the American Dream. Here, we have someone who came here and got rich, but she's still a victim so screw you all. She'll take all the benefits of citizenship, but as long as there's one guy in Sunderland who fails to worship the ground she walks on, forget about her giving anything back to this country.

You'll never guess what she just remembered too:

As part of her new memoirs, Ms Miller also reveals how she was sexually assaulted by a gang as a student and how the ordeal turned her into a terrified recluse.

Say what you like about former UKIP leader and fantasist Paul Nuttall, but at least having a PhD and playing professional football are actual achievements, even if not ones he actually, technically,  achieved. Meanwhile every female politician in the country is suddenly recalling that time they got raped, 80% of them by Nigel Farage.

The Respectable Right Is Rubbish

Tim N rightly points out that the MSM's Licensed Conservatives sure seem comfortable with Putin-like behavior, providing it's aimed at enemies of *their* state.

In fact, it's worse than that. Say what you like about him, but Vlad never claimed to be one of those touchy-feely guys. Equally, whether he's Making Russia Great Again, or just stealing it piece by piece, at least he's thinking big.

Meanwhile, media conservatives make like they're Spartans at Thermopylae, fighting to their dying breath for muh justdis, muh umanrites, muh desensee... but ditch it all in a flash when there's a chance at a crappy newspaper column with some ludicrously self-aggrandising tagline like 'Jeff Tossari: The Man Who Calls It Like It Is'.

Of course, it's not just a British thing. From the sidebar at Ace's place:

Thought: Although conservatism argues for a lot of specific policy goals, there has always been a large part of what we call Republicanism that has never been anything more than a reflexive, steadfast defense of vested caste/class interests. We are entering the second year of discovering which "conservatives" have always been motivated primarily by what might be called Ruling Class Republicanism.

He expands on it here:

If there is going to be a law, then the law shall apply to all.

If the law does not apply to all, then there shall be no law at all.

This is not a novel, hard-to-understand, or revolutionary idea. We demand that we be treated equally. If a rule shall be inflicted on us, then we demand it be inflicted on the High Caste as well. If it is not to be inflicted on the High Caste, then we reject the rule as not a rule at all.

A rule which does not bind all men equally is not a rule. It is merely a partisan weapon.

It is, in fact, a marker of Caste privilege on the positive end and Caste disfavor on the negative end.

Why should anyone arbitrarily pushed into a Deplorable Caste willingly prop up the system of burdens and forbiddances which define the caste? Why wouldn't someone suddenly made into a member of a newly-invented Deplorable Caste by a newly-invented Media Aristocracy Caste reject the badges and markers of the Caste system wholesale?

I think what he means is kind of like where the courts decide some guy live streaming on Fakebook *near* to a courthouse is a terrible threat to justice, but a defendant being deprived of meaningful legal representation and instead being 'represented' by a government-appointed shill lawyer is just one of those things, you guys.

This is the bit our supposed betters just don't get. They really think we're too stupid to notice the contrast between their rote denunciations of the predators ('obviously, we all oppose gang rape...') and their frenzied ranting about the 'knuckle-draggers' who dare point out the utter failure of the legal system to deal with systemic sexual terrorism. Apparently, everyone - everyone - who finds this case a little fishy is a Nazi, but they're damned if they can find any underlying philosophy motivating the rape gangs....

These people genuinely think they just need another ten or so sneery articles about Tommy Robinson's past and the public will start to trust them again. They don't understand that the more they point out the skeletons in Robinson's closet, the more they're condemning themselves. No matter how bad this particular individual is, when it comes to the real issues, increasingly large numbers of the public still find *even him* more trustworthy than the Julians and Hugos in the MSM.

Who, Whom Shall Be The Whole Of The Law

There no better evidence that the two Irish rugby stars accused of rape really are innocent than that the left has chosen to go after them. Look who the left doesn't protest: apparently, it's eminently possible that a thirteen year old girl would consent to group sex with middle-aged sleaze bags but not that a twenty-something would consent to sex with a couple of international athletes.

Yes, indeed: even the age of consent is Islamophobic now.

There's the obvious point that yet again it turns out that this Grrrl Powah! only extends as far as targeting people who won't fire back, but consider the flip side. Consider how Victorian the feminazi position sounds. We're meant to take it as read that no woman would be interested in a couple of professional sportsmen teaming up for a ruck between her posts. Is this feminists talking or Peter Hitchens? Who's buying all those copies of 'Fifty Shades' anyway?

The feminist approach to due process is literally like the old witch trials, either the accused drowns or his failure to drown proves the Patricarchy is keeping him afloat. No one is ever innocent - except the bearded guy ranting about Infidel whores.

Guardians Of The Narrative

Good post by Ace here re: America's allegedly elite media and their passive aggressive attempts to push conspiracy theories. It's all good but this bit struck a chord:

Those who have expressed skepticism about this conspiracy theory have been pilloried -- pilloried by the NeverTrump Smart Set Circle Jerk for a long time.

Jonah Goldberg certainly saw the attacks on Mollie Hemingway.

Why did he never say, "Wait a minute, the Washington Consensus is not agreed that there is any 'there' there, so her opinion, while it could be wrong, is perfectly respectable at this point in time, with this current state of the evidence?"

Seems very strange that the Washington Consensus has known there was no "collusion" for a while now and yet so few members of the Washington Consensus stepped forward to say that skepticism about this was a perfectly reasonable attitude to take.

Hmmmm.... that sounds vaguely familiar.

The MSM is now claiming to be shocked - shocked - by events in Telford. Apparently, the notoriously naive newshounds from Fleet Street were bamboozled by the fast talking big city cops from Shropshire.

The thing is though, plenty of people were reporting on what was going on, Breitbart and Katie Hopkins for two. The MSM wasn't just skeptical about these reports, they were certain that it was outrageously outrageous even to suggest such things could be happening.

They weren't just unconvinced, they were prepared to state affirmatively that anyone who claimed there was systematic sexual abuse by Islamic gangs was a nasty Nazi nutter.

Well, now we know just why people thought there might just be the slightest possibility of Islamists targeting Infidel girls, how about these guys get asked to produce the evidence they used to decide it was all a hoax?

This goes to Ace's larger point. Just as the Washington elite never quite come out and say that they think the Golden Don finishes a tough day's presidenting with a game of chess while drinking vodka and listening to Tchaikovsky, Britain's MSM never get round to saying what they think is *really* going on in places like Shropshire.

Yes, the MSM doesn't believe that there's any connection between Islam and sexual exploitation of Infidels, so what *do* they think is going on? What other possible explanation can there be for how we keep finding gangs consisting entirely of one certain religious group targeting girls from any other religion except their own? And how about these guys answer that one before they get to point and shriek when anyone next mentions the I word?

What This Election Is Really About: UKIP Vs TVP

Hey, it's great to be back! I've been tied up these past few weeks working with Thames Valley Police's Hypothetical Crimes Division. All their cops were busy dealing with non-existent hit & runs, so I had to pitch in to help investigate the theoretical case of an 80 year old widow who would totally have been tortured to death by home invaders while the police were too busy shaking down motorists to respond. If this case had actually happened then the gang concerned could potentially have been very dangerous, but fortunately there's now a reciprocal arrangement in place whereby the police raise revenue and HMRC provide a SWAT team so you can rest assured your government is right on top of all forms of speculative homicide.

 ...

No, just kidding! There's nothing theoretical about Thames Valley Police prioritising shaking down drivers while letting serious criminals run free.

Apparently, Sgt498 was not available for comment.

When it all comes down to it, that's what this election is really about. We've had a nominal Conservative in No 10 for five years and we've still got Socialist Workers in uniform strutting round shouting 'Oh, I suppose you want to murder children do you, Adolf Businessman? Right? RIGHT'?

Meanwhile, mention the Molesters of No Appearance and these guys suddenly turn into Nuance Squad. They take out an onion for pretendey deaths on the road, but real kids being molested? That's a toughey. Who's to say? We'll get back to you on that.... sometime.

Just on it's own all this would be an indictment of the legacy parties, but there's a bigger issue here. No one voted to pay SJW tossers in uniform to campaign - in both senses of the word - against motorists, and we certainly didn't vote to redraw the law on rape. It was the left's Common Purpose cultists in uniform who did all that, just like their fellow travelers in the rest of the public services have pushed the left's agenda in their jobs, and they'll keep doing it until they're stopped. Right now only one party out there that is promising to do anything about rooting them out and restoring actual accountability to the public services. Free clue: it isn't the one that just spent the last five years insisting that it's the non-rapist protecting side of the political spectrum that's extremist.

Conspiracy Nuts FTW!

As I understand it, the latest iteration of Harriet Harperson's position is that she was working for the NCCL when they were coordinating with a paedophile group but she somehow missed the open references to legalising child abuse: in other words, she wasn't at the meeting, she was with the meeting.

To which all I can say is 'how about that paedo panic, huh'?

Yes, normal caveats apply. Spending £14 bazillion to put Basil Brush on trial for supposedly touching someone's bottom in 1974 is insane, but the people Harperson was working with were the real deal.

Ditto, while 'road to Damascus' conversions do happen, they do require you to admit that you were on the way there in the first place, rather than claim you were just taking the scenic route to Cairo.

As it is, for all Harperson might claim she didn't know nuffink guv, there is a common thread between what the NCCL believed back then, and what the same people believe right now. That's why this is such a key issue for conservatives, not just because the harassment and interdiction of paedophiles is the right thing to do (though it is) or because it's a winning issue politically (also true) but because it's a perfect insight into the left's MO.

Round around 1990 the left suddenly decided to start claiming that they totally hated paedos too, but they just wanted to fine tune things. They tried to claim they were Barnes Wallace to our Bomber Harris but the trouble was the more time went by without any actual dams being busted, the more obvious it was that these guys were all a bit Neville Chamberlain.

The rhetoric might have changed but the theme was still the same: rigid opposition to anything common sense would suggest as a way to make life harder for paedophiles. Consider this: for all the supposed excesses of the 'paedo panic' these guys can never name a case where they think the law was excessively savage to a bona fide, actual predator. It's always some guy who should never have been convicted anyway. Meanwhile, us knuckle-dragging rightists can name a barrel load of case where savages were let loose to strike again - like this:

Michael Clark, 40, was on the Sex Offenders Register and subject to official checks. But he was able to move into a city of his choosing where neighbours did not know his past.

The council considered him too dangerous to live there, but had to house him after being warned of legal action for breaching his human rights as a homeless person.

If the left could ever show as direct a connection between CO2 and climate change as the right can show between elitist liberals and murder, every conservative in the country would be biking to work. Meanwhile, the left regards a few dead bodies as the cost of doing business, but pouts and whines about 'smears' when anyone calls them out on it. 

I See What You Did There

Dan Hodges is the latest of several million liberals to try and concoct a defence for our completely impartial national broadcaster and he's come up with a line that, in terms of sheer brass neck, is worthy of his old boss Princess Tony himself.

Apparently, we need to let the boys in blue get on with the job. 

You know, just like Blair did with the Macpherson report.

The left's record of serial cop hating aside, you have to admire the sleight of hand. Sure, it's a matter for law enforcement to investigate whether or not anything the BBC did rises to the level of actual criminality, but when it comes to justifying soaking the public for three billion and change a year, 'not committing any actual felonies' doesn't really cut it.

Who knows whether anything George Entwhistle has done is actually illegal? Not me, but I do know he acts like a slippery weasel when perfectly reasonable questions are raised by the people who employ him. Given the choice, who on Earth would employ him if they had to pay his salry with their own money?

This is what liberals do. They claim the right to torment private businesses in the name of accountability, but when their own people are under fire, nothing less than conviction in a court of law counts. Hence the BBC's new slogan 'You can't prove nuffink, guv'.

"Two Brothers"

It's almost like there's some kind of pattern to all this.

Two brothers have been jailed for a raft of sexual offences including pimping out young girls to workers at a curry house for £150 sex sessions.

Ahdel Ali, 24, was sentenced to 18 years in prison, while his 29-year-old brother Mubarek was handed a 14-year-term by Judge Patrick Thomas QC at Worcester Crown Court.

During the brothers' trial the court heard that the two men systematically groomed young girls for after hour sex sessions at the restaurant.

Note the location too. Apparently, it isn't just some kind of weird 'Northern' thing, after all. Maybe it's an allergic reaction to the spices in the curry?

MSM Self-Awareness Fail

A Telelgraph blogger asks why the 'Rochdale grooming' was allowed to happen. Probably the same reason why the MSM uses slippery euphamisms like 'Rochdale grooming' and turns off comments on posts, eh, Ruthie?

Feminism: A Wholly-Owned Subsidiary of the Left

Dorothy, please!

Is anyone really surprised that the people who claim endlessly that everything in the world is 'just like rape' have suddenly decided sex without consent is nothing like rape?

Forget the ranting about how all men are rapists, it's always been noticeable that they don't seem to mind the men who really are rapists. Consider Exhibit A.

Yep, six years, or as we say oop North, 'three years'. That'll teach him.

If feminists were really that bothered about rape, they'd stop with the insane conspiracy theories about 'rape culture' and start protesting Turn 'Em Loose Bruce and the rest of his pals on the bench.

Ah yes.

That is the problem. That would bring them into conflict with the rest of the left, mired as it is in relativistic, 'who are we to say', moral squalor. And then there's Julian Rubbish PhD and the thousands - even tens of thousands- of leftists making a life and a living pushing pseudo-scientific drivel in the rehab industry. It turns out that rape is, like, kind of bad, but it's not worth the risk of liberals having to get real jobs.

Stephen Lawrence Redux

Someone remind me: wasn't one of the main charges against the police at the Macpherson witch hunt that they intially failed to treat the murder as racially-motivated?

I only mention it because... well, you know.

On the plus side, at least the police didn't take half a decade to decide he was really dead.

Instinct tells me that the Macpherson principle, that crimes are racially-motivated if the victim or any third party thinks they are, will now be quietly dropped.

A vote of thanks too for the femiloons. They've now managed to top years of pushing absurd false rape claims by a blind refusal to acknowledge actual rapes.

Apparently, the victims should have lain back and thought of Marx.

All of which is by way of saying Ed West is wrong. It's not about victimhood, it's about promoting savagery. Liberals instinctively defend whichever side is most opposed to civilisation. That's why Saddam Hussain, Gary Glitter and Mozzam Begg have all received the liberal sob sister treatment.

It's the left's own version of the Confessional: simply recite ten 'Death to Americas' and be reborn as a Certified Liberal Icon. For proof of that, look no further than the Guardian's glowing tribute to this 'warm, funny and blunt' charmer.

Victim of No Appearance

Further proof for my theory that, just like the Ultimate Question & Answer in the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you can either know the felon's background or the victim's, but never the two at once.

Yep, two Afghanis - probably Mormons - stalk the streets and rape a 'woman'.

Really? Any particular type of woman? Anything in particular driving this choice of victim? Considering she was pulled off the street, there can only be a limited number of things that could have driven them to target this particular victim. It's not like they were driven by an irrational hatred of left-handed dental technicians.

Hey, in so far as this was a premeditated rape of an Infidel woman by Islamosavages, exactly as demanded by the Koran, this is a textbook case of a hate crime. This is what 'hate crime' means: the use of violence to intimidate members of the target demographic.

Needless to say, m'learned friends huffed and they puffed, but then they carefully steered round the elephant in the room on their way to Jokesentanceville:

Jailat Khan, of Beeston, Leeds, was ordered to be detained for five years and Shahzada Khan, of Leeds, was ordered to be detained for four years after both admitted kidnap and rape.

Sentencing the pair on Tuesday, Judge Christopher Batty said they had targeted a vulnerable woman alone in the city centre and the effect on her was 'immeasurable'.

Phew! Just think if it hadn't affected her so badly, he might have let them off with a light sentence. As it is, it now appears you can take part in a brutal rape and get exactly the same sentence Jeffrey Archer got for perjury.

Meanwhile, the femiloons have all gone quiet. Well, duh! They can sneer all they want at the Fifties, but compared to their craven toeing of the leftist line, the Stepford Wives look like Madonna.

Prince Andrew Calls For Left To Quit Over Links With Paedophiles

As I understand the left's current position on paedophiles, it's that they should be allowed to move next door to a playground or a primary school, but not hang out with Prince Andrew.

Hey, I'm sure his bodyguards will protect him.

I'm thinking the left may want to think carefully about emphasising that Prince Andy is 'unelected' and 'unaccountable' at the same time as the Supreme Court is busy gutting the Sex Offenders Register.

Consider the full implications of the left's position: the Sex Offenders Register has long been the left's favourite example of how sex offenders are tightly-monitored (and pay no attention to the scouser behind the curtain). Yet now, in so far as the Supreme Court has decided that the Sex Offenders Register isn't allowed to register someone just because he's a sex offender, the left's strategy has been crippled. Now they're prevented from carrying out the monitoring they claim can stop perverts striking again, all down to a handful of leftist philosopher kings on the bench.

Meanwhile, all Andy did was go to a few parties!

Jack Straw Shoots Congresswoman

See, this is exactly why you need to keep your scorecard up to date: jovial Jack Straw suggests there may be a problem with the 'Pakistani community' and their attitudes to girls who are not-so-Pakistani but even that exercise in euphemism can't stop the left howling and whining (which at least provides us with a nice contrast to their deafening silence every time one of these cases gets uncovered).

Meanwhile, a Democrat Congresswoman gets shot and it's all Sarah Palin's fault.

So there you have it: Sarah Palin's harsh rhetoric (meaning: she wants to win elections) drives people to murder, but the Koran's constant references to the degenerate nature of the Infidel? Just a little over-exuberance by Allah.

Of course, there is the fact that while Sarah's never shot anyone, while Mohammed.....

The Rehab Industry: Like Astrology, But Without The Science

Now that the Pope has headed home and hipsters don't have to pretend to care about sex offences any more, normal service has been resumed.

Post In Which I Brilliantly Draw Together Two Disparate Elements To Make A Serious Point

Never ones to miss a chance for absurd liberal preening, BBC4 on Tuesday aired a program celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of 'To Kill A Mocking Bird'.

Yes, indeed: liberals are standing up and bravely denouncing lynch mobs and racism, come what may!

But there's more to it than the left's habit of courageously speaking out against dragons, just as soon as St George starts typing up his after-action report. Consider what the central plot device is in TKAMB: a false rape accusation.

Lynch mobs and Jim Crow laws strike liberals as red-hot issues, but a black guy facing a false rape charge? Ancient history, dude!

The liberal obsession with supposedly detecting super-secret racism everywhere merely rams home the point how absurd is the idea of lynch mobs of Klansmen running round Britain's streets. They may as well denounce bear baiting or witch craft. Meanwhile, under the legal arrangements favoured by Harriet Harperson and friends, Tom Robinson would surely have been found guilty, racism or no racism.

All of which brings me back to the BBC and their plans for a 'Man's Hour'. What are the odds of 'Britain's Campest Man' and pals taking time out from probing each other's depths to cover false rape accusations? Better or worse than the chances of them airing about a thousand cutesy interviews with faux lad, performing seal manginas like Nick Hornby et al? Hey, it's not like they can say they're short of material.

And, No, Civil Liberties Nuts Don't Support Actual Civil Liberties Either

Good news: we've now found a new source of renewable power. Stick magnets on Cast Iron Dave and his constant U-turns could power a small city.

Of course, the real question is this: which is the greater force of nature? Cameron's gutlessness, or Harperson's stupidity?

Say, what you like about Mad Hattie, but at least her room temperature IQ means she keeps letting the truth slip out. Here she is on the case against anonymity:

[Harperson] said: 'We know that it is often only after many rapes that a defendant is finally brought to court and it is only at that point, often, when previous victims find the courage to come forward.

'By making rape defendants anonymous you are going to make it harder to bring rapists to justice.'

Errr...OK.

Hey, apart from anything else, can you imagine what Harpic's like playing Cluedo:

It was Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory with the Dagger.... or in the Kitchen with the Revolver.... Dining Room with the Spanner. How about the Garden with the Chainsaw? Listen dammit, as a member of the Rape-Industrial complex, he's clearly guilty anyway. Stop whining about the specifics!

Needless to say, the requirement that citizens be charged with committing a specific crime, at a specific time and place, is designed precisely to stop the State cobbling together Frankenstein's Case. Stripped of its Grrrrl Power! blather, Harmful's position is nothing more than the legal codification of the belief that there's no smoke without fire.

This is an actual civil liberty issue, not one of the approximately eleventy million totally, vital liberties that lurked undetected until 1997. So where are the Gitmo Groupies when we need them?

Most. Bogus. Scandal. Evah!

On the plus side, the second election debate suggests that even some open borders nuts have now internalised the concept that not everyone should be let into the country. Then again, it was the Pope they wanted to keep out.

As far as I can make out, the main charge against His Holiness is that he didn't take paedophilia seriously enough, unlike liberals who...

[Dawkins] wrote then that 'we live in a time of hysteria about paedophilia, a mob psychology that calls to mind the Salem witchhunts of 1692'.

Yes, indeed: until about 10 minutes ago there was no better way to mark yourself out as an urban sophisticate than to sneer at those pesky witch hunters out there chasing mythical 'paedophiles'. Apparently, all those times groovers referred to 'paedo panic' what they actually meant was that they strongly supported enhanced screening for suspected paedophiles.

Or maybe it's the other thing: the Church wasn't harsh enough on priests who really were paedophiles. The Vatican scheduled them for counselling by senior clergy, rather than the punishment favoured by the intellectual classes, which is counselling by a psychologist. Or, to put it another way, the difference between hipster sophistication and Papal depravity is the difference between counselling based on a bunch of superstitious, unscientific garbage, and counselling based on Christianity.

I would point out the absurdity of people who wail about mythical vigilante mobs criticising an organisation for not indulging in extra-judicial punishments, but it's eclipsed by the even greater humbuggery of the same folks complaining that the Church didn't do enough to keep paedo priests away from children, even as they denounce the dirty masses for not being thrilled at the idea of unrepentant predators being housed on estates full of children. Hey, if you're down with Gary Glitter being free to do all but mail snaps of his naked backside to the families of Ian Huntley's victims, you're not best placed to criticise the Church for not opening its own version of Gitmo (and I still say a higher proportion of the suspects at Gitmo are terrorists than priests are predators).

Still, we can take one lesson from all this: let's compare the Catholic priesthood with the liberal equivalents. All of which means....

No, wait, I hear a squeaking from the corner: Mr Liberal would like to point out that Catholicism looks down on sexual excess generally so priests who abuse kids are, like, totally huge hypocrites.

See, that's the problem with child rape - everything would be OK if the assailants had previously spoken out in favour of child rape but they didn't so clearly this invalidates everything Catholics have ever said about anything.

Now we're getting to the truth of the matter. Our right on pals wave the bloody shirt of priestly child abuse (and only priestly abuse) because they hate the whole idea of morality. They can't say anything positive about the lifestyles they promote, so instead they try and drag everyone else down. If only the Church would join them in the sewer, these priests could sign up for the Roman Polanski Misunderstood Artists Program and Tom Hanks would win a Oscar for playing one.

On the other hand, I'm guessing everyone expects liberals to be degenerate filth anyway, so that must be why teachers and social workers sodomising their charges is yawnerooney, but why do they get so mad when I point that out?