Sweeney On-His-Todd

Liberals often deny chages that the media lies by omission. No, the fact that seemingly newsworthy stories that happen to be unhelpful to the Left sometimes disappear without a trace is simply because the selection of which stories to feature is - that phrase again - 'very complex' so stories that would be headline news one day, might not feature the next.

Uh OK. But I'm betting there are some stories that would be headline news anytime. How about the abduction and subsequent murder of a teenage girl ? And how about if one of the assailants was a former social worker, cleared to foster kids ? Still not enough ? OK, how about if they carved her body up and served it up to customers in their takeaway ?

STOP THE PRESSES!

This is the type of story you'd expect the MSM to go to Defcon One for, but no - talking dogs get more coverage. Why might that be ? Guess!

(tip of the hat to Laban)

No Censorship Here!

Latest news from the Telegraph: editor Sarah Sands, what placed the article that shall not be named, has been given the ol' heave ho.

Yes, indeed, Mr Liberal, her tenure was not one of unparalled achievement, but to repeat the point I made originally, if this happened in any other context and in any other industry, the media would be all over it. The firing of an editor (very) shortly after the publication of a controversial article about Islam certainly comes under the aegis of the media's favourite phrase 'the appearance of impropriety', all the more so when there appears to be a fatwa against mentioning these two incidents in the same article. To use another of these favourite phrases: just what is it they’ve got to hide ?

Maybe Kevin Costener Could Star In The Film ?

It’s the heart-warming tale of indigenous activists resisting the thuggery of evil multinationals.

BBC Zoology

As part of it's committment to public service broadcasting, the BBC offers us an answer to the age old riddle: what's the difference between 'campaigners' and 'lobbyists' ? Answer: the side of the issue they're on.

Both words are used in their coverage of the 10th anniversary of Dunblane (Boris Johnson, please call your office!), but you can't help noticing that activists on only one side of the debate are labelled 'campaigners', i.e. concerned citizens working for a better world, while folk on the other are referred to as a 'lobby', no doubt plotting and planning in smoke-filled rooms.

Just about the only people who talk about the 'gun lobby' are members of the hoplophobic loon lobby. Take, for example, this effusion from the Cindy Sheehan of Scotland:

[Mick North] said the pro-gun lobby claimed it was their right to carry on a sport responsibly, but the right to bring up his daughter had been taken away from him.

That's it, that's the closest we get to any comment from pro-freedom campaigners, a notorious hate speaker telling us what his opponents might say.

Well, I guess it cuts down on the phone bill if one interviewee can supply both sides of the argument. But seriously: What. The. Hell! The BBC often like to caricature bias spotters as political anoraks, sitting there with their stopwatches, making sure both sides get equal time. Well, there's no question of equal time here, they just don't cover one side at all.

This is the central point about BBC bias. No one - strawman-loving BBC apologists to the contrary - seriously believes that BBC staff all meet up of a morning and decide how they're going to spin today's news. Nope - it's worse than that. They just don't think there are any other perspectives in the first place. It wouldn't occur to them that there are alternative worldviews to the rantings of the hoplophobes, anymore than they'd think of the bigoted rantings of 'Cindy' North as anything other than common sense.

No doubt there's a willing audience for this kind of easy pandering to prejudice, but how exactly does it count as public service broadcasting ?

UPDATE:

Of course, no mention of North's crazed rantings about the 'gun lobby' should pass with taking note of this.... revealing exchange when his own Gun Control Network gave evidence before a Parlimentary select committe:

Mr Fabricant

Just before I get on to my main small area of questioning, Mr Singh asked you about your organisation and you said you were set up after Dunblane but I am still not clear in my mind—and I suspect Mr Singh and others feel the same—exactly who you are. We know who the RSPCA are, the NFU and we know who their members are. How many members do you have?
(Mrs Marshall-Andrews) We were set up after Dunblane in July 1996 as a voluntary organisation with an executive committee of seven. We had families of people from the Hungerford tragedy as well as academics and lawyers.

Mr Fabricant: How many members do you have now?

(Professor Taylor) I am interested in the reason for the question.

Mr Fabricant

283. I do not have to give a reason for a question, I want to know how many members you have. Do you know how many members you have?
(Mrs Marshall-Andrews) Can I just explain a bit of the background to the organisation? We set up with an executive committee of seven, we decided not to have a public membership of this organisation, and on the advice of some Canadian colleagues who had set up a similar organisation and found it infiltrated by shooters and had to stop and restart again with a very, very small group, we decided to remain as a very small group, and that is what we are still.

Mr Winnick

284. Financed by whom?
(Mrs Marshall-Andrews) We started off by being financed by a trust which came to us after Dunblane with an unsolicited donation, and that helped us over the course of our major campaigning until the legislation took place. Since then, we are just operating on a voluntary basis, occasionally we have small donations by trusts but we are a very small group.

Mr Fabricant

285. Can you tell us which trust?
(Mrs Marshall-Andrews) No. It was asked that the donation should remain anonymous. It is a charitable organisation.

So there you have it. Consider for a moment the thought process the BBC must have used to decide that a country GP who likes shooting clays is part of the 'gun lobby', but a group which couldn't fill a minibus and won't come clean about who's backing them are 'campaigners'.

Nasty Domestic

I guess there is no honour amongst thieves after all. Liberals profess to be shocked – shocked! – that Sir Ian Blair taped phone calls with a government minister. Personally, if I had to deal with a Nu Lab minister, I’d want the whole thing recorded, independent witnesses present and a marksman on a nearby rooftop. But that’s my own VRWC self – of all the people in Britain, Blair is the one least qualified to start claiming he fears persecution by the State whose powers he worked so hard to increase.

Of course, that goes both ways. Back in the 1990s, the MSM were obsessed with the hypocrisy of Tories who signed up to the whole ‘Back to Basics’ thing, even while cheating on their wives. Now, our CCTV-obsessed Liberal Establishment - favourite mantra: ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear’ - has decided that, actually, privacy is kind of important after all, and the MSM are eating it up with a shovel.

Typically, it’s the BBC that’s pushing hardest on the line that what Blair did was an outrage. Yes, the Beeb is vigorously opposed to this kind of underhand behaviour, as the results of a google.co.uk search on bbc+secret+recording+police+reporter reveals. Of course, the two cases aren’t exactly the same. After all, one involves a Liberal activist masquerading as a police officer, while the other involves a BBC reporter.

All the MSM’s fatwa on Blair proves is that you know who your friends are when you can longer serve the Liberal agenda. Sir Ian was the very definition of a useful idiot back when the L3 needed an insider to carry out their anti-police agenda, but that was before July 7. Until that day, the L3 could get away with sneering at anyone who suggested we were at war. Afterwards, denying the existence of the threat got a little tougher, right up until July 22 and the Martyrdom of St Jean.

Indeed, the Yin of the demonisation of Sir Ian is matched by the Yang of the Liberals near-deification of a fraudster. Say, didn’t the Left used to be against tax evasion ? Certainly, you’ll never see the MSM pick up on any of these questions. Speaking personally, I’m with this guy. Forget the legal arguments, morally St Jean was in exactly the same position as a conman who talks his way into a pensioner's house then breaks his leg slipping on the kitchen floor – if he hadn’t defrauded his way into this country, he’d still be alive.

It was the Liberals’ own Via Dolorossa, those two weeks spent pretending to support Britain, but at last they were free to claim that the real threat was from the people fighting to defend our civilisation. Never mind that the people running the operation were the very definition of the Nu Police, there were 52 bodies to buried, and so the bombers were rebranded as ‘misguided criminals’, while Liberals professed to be terrified that SO19 would suddenly jump out of the bushes and shoot them.

Never mind too that the L3 had not a single worthwhile comment to make on this operation. In so far as no one was arguing in favour of shooting the wrong people – no matter how vigorously the Liberal media may maintain otherwise – the sole matter for debate was the tactics the police should use when faced with a suicide bomber. As ever when faced with difficult questions, the Liberal response was to evade it with a serious of teenage girl whines about insensitivity and the like.

This isn’t a hard scenario to visualise: police believe an Islamic terrorist has entered a confined space carrying a bomb, how should they prevent him detonating it ?


….


Nope, the Left are busy chasing down allegations that Sir Ian fiddled the books for the CID coffee fund in 1982. Liberals are against bad stuff, that's all you need to know.

Outrage D'Jour

Somehow, I can't help thinking Nick Griffin hasn't been offered the same service.

What You Could Have Read, If You Lived In A Free Country

I guess the L3 were right, the Danish cartoons were simply a mindless act of provocation, with no wider point to make about the coverage of Islam. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to read articles like this.

Oops.


Mind you, the Telegraph admitting that the Filth have ordered them to take an article down practically counts as heroism compared to the normal standards of our fearless media. Certainly, the rest of the MSM are hardly rallying to their cause - something to be borne in mind next time you hear some editor banging on about how legal challenges to their right to report on gay goalkeepers or bonking batsmen is a terrifying threat to British democracy.

Need it be said that Liberty and the rest of the hand-wringers are AWOL (but don't call them Left-wing) ? So this is what it means to be on the far Right: believing that newspapers should be free to publish and be damned. I guess we'll have to win the Culture War to see what the Telegraph would have said, until then here's a completely random article for your reading pleasure.

UPDATE:

The plot thickens! Via Laban, who's been on this from the start, there comes a suggestion that the Telegraph bungled the name of one of the books cited in the article. Given that the sort of thing is happening a lot since the Telegraph took a chainsaw to their subediting personnel, that's just about believable but we're still faced with a lot of unanswered questions. Why was the whole article taken down ? Why does it remain down, rather than producing a corrected article with an addendum (surely the normal response to this kind of thing) ? Equally, the tone of the offended party's letter suggests that legal action is unlikely. More to the point, what's with the 1984 style vapourisation ? We still have no official word from the Telegraph on why the article has gone. Ditto, no other news outlet has referred to these events.

The bottom line is that for years jounalists have been preaching about the public's right to know. Phrases like transparency and accountability have been tossed around, together with not so subtle innuendos that any entity that fails to immediatly submit to the jounalistic equivalent of a prostate exam must have something to hide. Well, now, the MSM does have a record of censorship in the coverage of Islam, an article critical of Islam has disappeared down the memory hole, there is a news blackout over what's actually happened - do they have something to hide ?

Liberals, Taking Lessons From The Best

On the subject of Soviet era jokes, I recall the saying that both the US and the USSR had freedom of speech, but only America had freedom after the speech. I'm not sure how many modern Liberals would get it. Not too many to judge by the fact that they can come out with stuff like this with a straight face:

If a newspaper through its columnist is willing to express a controversial opinion, its editor should surely be willing and available to be held to account for it.

More 'Very Complex' Dealing

The Jowell farce continues - the latest iteration is Jowell explaining that her husband didn't own a particular set of shares, he merely owned the company that owned the shares. See ? That makes all the difference.

All of this reminds me of the old joke about Brezhnev becoming General Secretary of the USSR. He invites his mother up to Moscow and shows her his swanky appartment, big car, domestic staff and all other trappings of office, then she says to him 'Well, you've done very well for yourself, Leonid, but aren't you worried what will happen if the Communists take over ?'

Liberal Special Needs School Holds Graduation Ceremony

Apparently, they had some kind of village fete in LA last Sunday. TDL tell us what it all means.

Lord Snooty's Safari

Given the precious one’s penchant for exhuming the dead and setting up fatuous policy groups, this was sort of inevitable. Not that Heseltine’s unqualified though:

Lord Heseltine, who led the regeneration of Liverpool after the 1981 Toxteth riots...

It’s lucky we have the BBC to tell us these things. Without them, how would we know Liverpool has been regenerated ? Can you imagine what Wayne Rooney would be like if it hadn’t been ?

For what it’s worth, Heseltine’s chosen method of regenerating Liverpool was the International Garden Festival. Really. This settled once and for all the difficult question of whether millions of pounds of public money could succeed in transforming derelict land into Japanese pavilions and the like. Call me a cynic, but I’m thinking that whatever's happened or hasn’t happened on Merseyside since then, bonsai trees are unlikely to have played a significant role in it.

Mind you, paying people to grow really small trees in abandoned dockland seems sane compared to his latest pronouncements. Try this:

[Heseltine] said deprived areas needed to be made competitive.

The former environment secretary said: "Instead of areas which a large number of people try to get out of because the schools aren't good enough, because the housing isn't good enough, because the dereliction is off putting, you have to make them competitive with those leafy suburbs to which people go."

Now isn’t this a revealing insight into what Blue Labour really believe ? Sure, there’s the Thatcherite rhetoric about ‘competitiveness’, but what does it actually mean ? Let's, for the sake of argument, accept that the inner cities are awful because of a lack of high-quality horticulture. Either they have nice gardens or they don’t. In what sense are they competing with anyone ? The logic – and I use that term loosely – of Heseltine’s position is that you could presumably achieve the same effect by either building more gardens in the cities or by soaking the suburbs in Agent Orange. Or, to put it another way, forget all the pseudomarket jargon, this is just the same old obsession with supposed ‘equality’ that has hobbled social policy for years.

Still, it marks a new low even for these people to be adopting the childish Liberal habit of sneering at ‘leafy suburbs’. Really, what do they propose ? Maybe they could hire a few dumper trucks and set up a bussing programme to help counteract the ‘leaf gap’ ? Seriously, what’s objectionable is not only the fact the Tories have bought into the stupid rhectoric, but also the underlying ideas. Take schools - to listen to the L3 you could almost imagine literacy rates in schools in the inner cities were so bad because they pesky suburbanites were using up all the education so they had nothing left over to teach with.

But there’s something more profoundly wrong about Blue Labour’s approach. Consider the sheer weirdness of the whole thing, banner headlines about the fact that an English guy has gone from one part of England to another. There’s something deeply wrong when Cameron seems to think he’s David Livingstone just because he’s gone north of Watford. Does Cameron really expect to be taken seriously ‘oop North’ when he makes it so blindingly obvious that he consider Northerners as ‘the Other’.

Where are the Northern Conservatives ? Hell, I’ll even give Cameron a name: Esther McVey. Successful GMTV presenter, now a Conservative candidate in an eminently winnable seat on Merseyside. But no – Cameron travels up with his Metropolitan acolytes, talks to a bunch of Metropolitan journalists, then goes back to London.

Now, some may point out that the lovely Esther is not standing in an inner city hellhole. Well, yes, that would be the point. The North isn’t all gun battles and derelict buildings. Even Merseyside isn’t all that. In so far as Esther McVey is standing in a constituency that is abnormal in no way other than geographically, this attractive, articulate candidate would be exactly the type of person the Conservatives should be pushing. But no, Cameron’s posturing just confirms that to his breed of Conservatives, the North is merely a backdrop for some suitably grim photo ops, with Northerners as victims or savages or anything but fellow citizens.

The North needs neither grand projects nor Metropolitan yuppie scum tourists taking out onions for it. What the North needs to prosper is what everywhere needs: functional law-enforcement, real property rights, low taxes, capital punishment for lawyers…You know, it occurs to me that for all that the government has done for the North over these past thirty years, what they’ve done to the North is far worse. Human rights, ecolunacy, discrimination legislation, health & safety and all the other obsessions of the idle rich taxgulpers down in our nation’s capital have done more damage to the North than any number of white elephant projects can make up for. Maybe we shouldn’t object to Cameron treating the North like the Cursed Earth, just as long as he’ll follow through on the logic of his own position. Let’s cut a deal, Cameron: when your PM, you’ll be free to stay down there, if only you’ll keep your stupid legislation there too.

Hollywood For The Ugly

You may remember that last week the Great & Good were deeply concerned about political disengagement amongst the ordinaries. Baroness Helena Kennedy QC had chaired an inquiry into how why people were so cynical about the political classes. Staggeringly enough, the answer wasn’t that we’re governed by people who think that the best person to investigate the views of Joe Public is a media luvvey barrister and member of the House of Lords. Nope – apparently, what Britain needs is more Liberalism.

Call it a wild shot in the dark, but I’m thinking that recent events may shed more light on political disengagement than the dribblings of a bunch of Metropolitan Liberals you wouldn’t trust to make a cheese sandwich. Consider the reception given to Tessa Jowell in the House of Commons:

It was noticeable that there were more MPs actually sitting in the chamber for
this session than would normally be expected, particularly on a Monday when many
are still returning from their constituencies.
Were they there to gloat,
engage in a bit of car-crash-style rubber necking, or to support Ms Jowell?
There may have been a bit of the first two, but from a large number of those
on the Labour benches it was certainly a show of support for the beleaguered
minister.
Earlier in the day she had again been offered the prime minister's
support, and, as he answered the first question of the session, sports minister
Dick Caborn also offered praise for his boss' work. …
And Ms Jowell received
more vocal support from a number of her own backbenchers.

Hello ? Let’s just take the stuff Jowell’s admits: she approved a series of murky dealings, failed to declare interests and generally showed the alertness and intelligence of a table lamp. And for this she gets a hero’s welcome from the Left ?

At the risk of stating the obvious, Tessa Jowell isn’t in trouble because she bent the rules for a noble cause or took a stand on principle. The overwhelming characteristic of both her actions and her defence of them is sheer sleaziness. Maybe that isn’t a sacking offence, but it’s hardly something that should be celebrated. Her reception in the House was another classic Nu Labour Animal Farm moment.

Maybe I’m too idealistic, maybe this support for a sleazy incompetent is just party politics. OK, so what about the Yin to that Yang ? Where are the Tories ? Ah yes:

[Tory spokesman Hugo Swire] suggested that, in her difficult time, the
minister must ensure it did not get in the way of the proper running of her
department.

This might just signal a hardening of the line from the Tories who have
been careful not to weigh into this controversy just yet, preferring to watch as
the row unfolds through the media and elsewhere.

This is their new harder line ? A government minister has been accused of being involved in large-scale corruption and they’re hoping it doesn’t distract her from business ? And the Tories can’t even hold that line:

Tory MP Mark Lancaster also expressed his genuine pleasure that she was in her
place for question time.

Yes, opposition for opposition’s sake is stupid, but this insane. Plausible allegations of money laundering have been made and instead of holding the government to account, the Tories are going through the motions. Sure, they’d like to be in government one day: better offices, chauffer-driven cars, etc, but not to the extent of derailing the gravy train. C’mon! Have a sense of priorities here...

This is what’s really wrong with British politics. It’s not just Tessa Jowell that’s been exposed as sleazy, it’s the rest of them as well. Ask one of the Labour MPs who cheered Jowell, what they were actually cheering. Was it the lies ? The tactical separation ? The self-confessed incompetence ? Or was it simply an exercise in crude, boorish arrogance, a demonstration of utter contempt for any of the rules of normal behaviour ? Certainly, the Tories won’t object. No doubt, Her Majesty’s Opposition might stick their oar in future in if there is some overwhelming political advantage to be gained, but that’s kind of the point. Forget any other factors, Jowell's behaviour, in and of itself, is an outrage, irrespective of any wider political calculations.

The old joke has become true, Westminster really is Hollywood for the ugly. Just like Hollyweird, the place is a cesspit full of elitist morons completely divorced from real-life and unmoored from any sense of morality. That’s the answer right there. The public hasn’t become disengaged from politicians, politicians have become disengaged from the public. Why should any decent person give these sleazy low-lifes the time of day ?

Blood Guilt

As I understand it, Tessa Jowell never questioned her husband on his Byzantine financial affairs because she was blinded by lurrrve but, after a week of negative media scrutiny, she’s dropping him like a Frenchman’s rifle. Is it just me or do other people sense a certain mixed message here ?

Not every Liberal got the memo though. While the MSM was busily telling us that it’s perfectly credible for a government minister to have absolutely no idea what’s going on in her own house, up on Murkeyside Liberals are experimenting with a whole new concept of familial responsibility.

Not to be flippant, but at least they only killed Anthony Walker once. Romeo & Juliet appear to have changed mortgagees like David Beckham changes hairstyle. More to the point, there's no evidence that the Barton family knew - let alone approved of – anything, far less that they benefited from these crimes, so that’s two things they’ve got over the star-crossed ones.

It can’t be just the fact it’s a murder case. As JuliaM pointed out when she first mentioned this case, what about another well-known group of killers ? When the July 7 bombers were identified, Liberals didn’t want to put their families on the street, they wanted to give them pride of place at the memorial service.

Equally, while it’s true that the Libs aren’t actually blowing the house up, in so far as a family will be made homeless, this seems essentially the self-same thing Liberals decry as ‘collective punishment’ when carried out by you-know-who.

Of course, there is a case for eviction where the crimes committed directly affect the quality of life of other tenants, but I think we can safely say that there is no threat from Michael Barton for the moment. Nope, this action is entirely punitive, Liberals aren’t trying to make the community a better place, they’re motivated by a medieval concept of vengeance.

This is the point I keep making. Liberals do love their little sermons about the evils of an excessively punitive justice system, but us evil Righties only wanted to execute Ian Huntley, not his parents. Every time a Liberal talks about the need for compassion, understanding or some other hippy garbage in the justice system, you can bet that we’re talking about something that Liberals don’t think should be a crime anyway. Have you heard a Liberal talk about the need to understand the root causes of tax evasion ? Mind you, one more week of revelations and they might start. Still, remember the compassionate Liberal response when Jeffery Archer got sent down ? Apparently, prison works, but only for Conservatives.

These people are telling us who they are. NACRO, the Howard Trust, Amnesia Intentional, Libelty and all the rest of the Liberal freak show have given the game away. Just like 90% of Liberal pressure groups, their positions are entirely fungible, changing with whatever best suits the Liberal agenda at the time. Kill a guy because you don’t like blacks ? Liberals will try and get your second cousin fired from his job. Kill a whole bunch of people because you hate Infidels ? Liberals will be treading on the bodies of the fallen in their rush to comfort your family.

So Liberals are a bunch of conniving scumbags. I know that will be a shock to many of you, but there you have it. I have a modest suggestion though. Let’s stop arguing on ground of their choosing. We've allowed them to set the terms of the debate and use the genuinely oppressed as some kind of human shield. When we talk about their agenda, we aren’t talking about human rights, morality or anything of the sort. These people are campaigning to advance the Liberal agenda and Conservatives should have no qualms about calling these people what they are.

Possession Of A Cuddly Toy With Intent To Supply

Who says the police can’t deal with serious crimes ? Self-confessed ‘store owner’ Donald Reynolds thought he was safe to carry on his evil trade, right up until the moment officers from West Mercia Police’s elite Special Toy Squad raided his den, seizing toys with a street value of up to £60.

Note that this whole farce was supposedly started by ‘a' passer-by - this really is a perfect example of the Liberal conception of free speech. Liberals believe that the police should harass shopkeepers for no better reason than that one person has decided that they don’t like what they’ve got in their window, but a major political figure abusing a Jew with a series of Holocaust references is the epitome of free speech. Then again, the Filth aren’t always as quick to act. You do wonder what would have happened if the golliwogs had been holding placards calling for the murder of Infidels.

The bit I can’t work out is why they needed to take the toys to decide if an offence had been committed. What were they doing, interviewing them ? Did they have a lawyer present ? Or is it, to take a wild shot in the dark, that they realised even our courts would throw the case out in approximately 3 seconds flat, so they settled for some legal harassment instead (where’s Liberty when we need them ?).

Having given up on trying to find a judge daft enough to believe that a cuddly toy could be said to be ‘threatening, abusive or insulting’, the Filth will apparently be advising Mr Reynolds on the ‘sensitivities of displaying them’. Yes, indeed. No more displaying his wares in the window. How about putting them on the roof ? Or in the basement ? Or how about my idea – put a uniform on one and make it Chief Constable. The quality of service can only improve.

Exactly

Great comment to this post over at Biased BBC. Here's Susan on the BBC's whiny hand-wringing about anyone telling the truth about Islam.

"Is it responsible for them to make a statement like this in the current climate?"

Was it "responsible" for the barons to write the Magna Carta? Was it "responsible" for Luther to nail his theses to the cathedral door? Was it "responsible" for Parliament to put Charles I on trial? Was it "responsible" for the American colonists to sign the Declaration of Independence? Was it "responsible" for Martin Luther King to give his "I Have a Dream" speech?

This is what we Westerners DO, ya dumb*ss Beeboids. And if you'd bothered studying our history, our traditions and our culture in college instead of sniffing glue and whacking off over old copies of Das Kapital, you wouldn't be so horrified that we haven't **quite** forgotten who we are -- yea, even after decades of Gramscian brainwashing put out by the likes of you tried to make us forget all about it.

This is the revenge of the hated Dead White Males on your stupid malignant Gramscian *sses and the beauty of it is, many of those people paying tribute to the **horrible** values of the **horrible** West by signing that manifesto aren't white!

Does Ken Know ?

In order to pursue his campaign against unelected activists impeding the business of government, Ken Livingstone has gone to court to block his suspension. Don’t forget to vote in the election for Lord Chancellor!

Nevertheless, today’s exercise in humbuggery is but a mere molehill compared to the slag heaps of it which have emerged from the Left since Livingstone had his misfortune. As Mark rightly points out, it was people like Livingstone who lit the flame at the Victimhood Olympics in the first place. More to the point, the rules surrounding grievance mining were deliberately drawn up to maximise the likelihood of such complaints. That’s why, for example, it’s completely bogus for Liberals to claim Livingstone shouldn’t have been suspended because what he said wasn’t actually that offensive. The rules they drew up say that if anything – anything! – is considered racist by anybody, then it is indeed racist.

For those still convinced that Livingstone is the victim of some dark conspiracy, consider recent events in Manchester. No mere standards board here. I guess we’re finding out why Manchester has such a problem with high-velocity lead pollution – all the cops are busy investigating complaints from psychics who saw Ken Dodd, Paul McCartney and Cherie Blair make an obscene gesture at Frank Bruno. Hey – at least it was the guy himself who complained in the Livingstone case, not some blokes two hundred miles away. So where are all the Liberal opponents of this sort of thing ? I guess Steve Finnan needs to start having Islamofascists to lunch.

Tossa Jowell

Apparently, Tessa Jowell is starring in a new show on BBC2 – Pay Off Your Mortgage In Two Weeks. Of course, the actual details of Tessa’s Italian Job are ‘very complex’. When Liberals say something is ‘very complex’ but won’t provide the details, that usually means they’re up to no good.

Doubtless, the ins and outs of the wheeling and dealing are complex, but the key facts are hardly rocket science. Tessa’s significant other raised a mortgage on the house to release £350K, supposedly to fund an investment in an offshore hedge fund, then paid it off days later. As joint owner, Tessa Jowell would have had to sign the paperwork for the mortgage, would have had an interest in half the investment (which she failed to declare it), and would have had an interest in the money used to pay off her mortgage (ditto). Complex, n’est pas ?

Seriously, who doesn’t mortgage their house to invest in high-risk offshore investments ? Did she do anything illegal ? Wrong question – we’re not talking about whether she should be in jail, we’re talking about whether she should be in a highly-sensitive job, all the more so in an administration that was supposed to be whiter than white. Leave aside moral questions – if she’ll sign away her own house at the drop of a hat, what’s she like with other people’s money ?

But that’s all by the by, the best thing about all this has been seeing yet another femihag try to pass herself as Daphne from Scooby Doo. Ooooh money, I don’t handle money, I just let my husband sort it all out. Her Royal Cherieness claiming to be just an ordinary housewife and mother was funny enough, but now Little Miss Gender Segregation herself claims she signed away her house with no idea where the money was going just because her husband told her to ? How can the satire industry survive when faced with this kind of unfair competition ?

Leftist Banking Fantasies

The Leftards are yammering again. They’re whining about banks exploting poor people by pressuring them to buy complex financial products that they don’t need.

No, wait. That was last month. Now it’s the other way round: banks not offering enough financial services to the poor.

Even Leftists realise that criticising people for refusing to sell products to people who can’t afford them might be a tough sale, as it were. Hence, Plan B: yammer on about feelings of ‘abandonment’ and other Therapy Nation garbage.

What’s the answer ? What do these freaks suggest ? Ah, yes, nada. Of course. They’re Liberals, did you really expect them to advocate a coherent policy ? They can’t admit the truth – that they just hate the financial services industry. No matter how badly the insurance companies screw up, people aren’t yet ready for the idea that John Prescott could do a better job. Instead, Liberals try to prepare the ground for more government intervention by seizing on just about any trend to explain why the free market is bad. Banks selling too much to the poor ? Evil. Selling too little ? Still evil. The only consistent theme is this: the market’s full of big, scary monsters, so give all your money to nanny, and she’ll look after it for you. So now the inner cities will have banks that work as well as the local schools ? You think the queues are bad now, just wait to the brains behind the NHS get a grip on the industry. Mind you, I wouldn't mind one of them Tessa Jowell mortgages...

Kenny Everett Lives!

At least I’m assuming he does, ‘cause the latest emissions from the Pink Wedge bear his hallmark eye for the absurd. They’ve come out – as it were - against legislation they’ve spent years pushing. They’ve finally noticed that there’s no obvious way to draw up legislation imposing a right for 16 botty bandits to goose step into the Dog & Duck and claim it for the Republic of Rumpramming without similarly creating a right for persons of the straight type to enter the Blue Oyster Bar.

The technical term for the above observation is ‘blindingly obvious’, but it passed them by until about two minutes ago, at which point all the queeny hysterics previously dedicated to pushing this legislation was suddenly switched to opposing it. Not that they’re bigots, oh no, they’re just worried about gay bashers. Funnily enough, the landlord of the White Lion isn’t prejudiced either, he’s just worried about one of his regulars being sexually harassed by a passing Tory MP, but when he says that he gets called a Nazi.

Still, the Pink Wedge is left with trying to find a way to explain why schools should be forced to expose pupils to publicly-funded gay propaganda, but folks down the Swinging Stallion shouldn’t be exposed to the sight of badly-dressed blokes. This is where we are in the Culture Wars. These people have spent years banging on about their desire for equality, yet now they’re suddenly demanding special treatment. Who’d have thunk it ?

Well, yes, plenty of us actually. It has been quite obvious for years that the Pink Wedge’s attachment to equality has been purely tactical. Consider, for example, the legal harassment of pensioners who ask for equal prominence for gay and Christian literature in council offices. No complaints from the Pink Wedge there. That is important because Prince David has dedicated a lot of time to grovelling to the Pink Wedge – indeed, the whole gay rights thing seems to be Opus Dave’s very own litmus test, but this whole policy is based on two really stupid myths: that there is some kind of moral case for their argument, and that Cameron need only find a magic formula and the Pink Wedge will flock towards his banner.

Forget it - the Pink Wedge isn’t motivated by any particular vision of ‘equality’; it’s just another special interest group. There will be no point at which they decide ‘hey, things are going pretty well, let’s fold out tents and get a life’. Or to put it another way, Cameron can feed the crocodile all it wants, but that won’t stop it shedding tears about how badly it’s been oppressed.

Cartoon Jihad Exposes Cartoon Leader

I’m guessing the honeymoon is over for Prince David. The latest polls are in, and the Tories are melting….melting. Not coincidentally, voters list ‘defence/foreign affairs/terrorism’ as their most important issues.

But, of course. Islamic fundamentalism is the perfect rebuttal to everything Opus Dave believe about politics. Cameron, like Blair before him, is an essentially post-modern politician, obsessed with questions of image and perception, more than facts. But while Blairism retains the putrid remains of at least some basic idealism, Cameron takes it one step further. Listen to Opus Dave talk about committed Conservatives and you realise these people not only lack any beliefs of their own; they positively hate the whole concept of idealism itself. Actual beliefs are so twentieth century, ironic detachment is the thing these days. Everything is negotiable, all considerations are tactical and expediency is the only principle.

Now, consider this comment from a former leader of Hezbollah “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something, we are fighting to eliminate you.". Say what you like about the Islamopaths, but you can’t accuse them of burying the lede. A bus bombing demands a more serious response than spin and photo ops. But does anyone expect that from David Cameron, a guy who needs to check the polls before deciding whether or not to wear a tie today ? On the one hand, we have people who’ll kill themselves just to nail Infidels, on the other, people who live in fear of a critical story on Newsbite.

The War perfectly criticises the difference between politics and leadership. That Cameron is effective at the first may be all well and good, but would anyone feel safe with him in Number 10 ?