Tuesday 10 October 2017

I'll leave it to the Bonzo Dog Band to explain why I'm not posting much about politics these days...

I'm not bored with anything else - just...

...politics. I normally look forward to the Telegraph headlines, the latest tweets, and robustly right-wing articles on websites like American Thinker and Taki's Magazine, but right now I just feel slightly sickened by it all. I suspect it's because the choice currently on offer is so unappetising: on the one hand, it's a mixture of Old School "Marxism for Dummies" economic idiocy encased in a peculiarly repulsive New Left "free stuff" identity politics wrapper; on the other, it's Blairite cultural Marxism masquerading as "caring" conservatism mixed in with dollops of Cameron/Osborne-style crony capitalism, but with an ever greater emphasis on hobbling the free market (workers on boards, caps on energy prices, positive discrimination - all that old pish). As for Theresa May, I can't decide if she's Ted Heath without the charm and the people-skills, or John Major without his clarity of vision, air of command or his gift of oratory. I mean - blecchhh! 

As for America - oh, forget it.

Nevertheless, despite my political dyspepsia, I do - out of habit - dip my toes into the stream of current events... and invariably wish I hadn't, because this is the sort of malodorous stuff I find floating in it:
PRESS GAZETTE: Hertfordshire Police have failed in a bid to force Private Eye to reveal its subscriber list after a Muslim police employee was sent a cut-out of a joke about terrorists from the weekly magazine.
Evening all! Mind how you go. Mind what you say. Mind what you think. Cos we know where you live, sunshine - and don't you forget it! 
THERESA MAY TWEET: Today, I launch a world-leading project on the impact of ethnicity on people's lives. Time to tackle injustice.
Oh, please - just go away, you silly woman. This ghastly, divisive, guilt-trip nonsense won't gain you a single additional vote, but it will alienate yet more natural Tory voters - well, the handful you and your predecessor hand't already managed to drive out of the party. Just be the nasty party and get on with helping create a world-leading economy with a world-leading military and a world-leading police force. If Britain is the prejudiced hell-hole you evidently imagine it to be, why do black and brown people keep flocking here in droves?
CONSERVATIVE PARTY TWEET: We are acting to stop plastic entering our oceans, by banning microbeads and exploring a deposit return scheme for plastic bottles.
Here, Maureen - have you seen this Tory tweet? There was I accusing the government of not concentrating on what really matters to voters - but this announcement has shown me how wrong I was. That's it, I'm switching my vote from the Greens to the Conservatives next time round, and you can hold me to that!
DAILY EXPRESS HEADLINE: UK is a 'USELESS country!' Europhile sparks OUTRAGE in furious BBC News row on Brexit
A Belgian journalist - Marc Roche from La Point - calls the UK "useless"? From Belgium - a country, which, according to General de Gaulle, was invented by the British simply to annoy the French? My irony-meter just broke. In case you imagine this is merely typical Express pro-Brexit sensationalising, you can watch the clip here.  For those of you who are lucky enough never to have seen it, the BBC News Channel's Dateline London provides a weekly opportunity for foreign left-liberal journalists to get together to worship the EU, mock the Conservative Party, and sneer at Donald Trump. There's usually a conservative on the panel, so the three left-wing journalists and the left-wing presenter (sorry - neutral presenter, of course) have someone to sneer at in the flesh. An odd thing to spend licence-payer's money on, I should have thought - but that's probably because I'm too old, stupid, racist, useless and low-information to get it.

Remember how the liberal media recoiled in horror when the then-Mayor of London Boris Johnson had the effrontery to suggest that the then-US President, the "part-Kenyan" Barack Hussein Obama, may have harboured an "ancestral dislike" of Britain? Silly old Boris!
RT HEADLINE: Obama ‘mocked Britain in secret, thought special relationship was a joke’
Mind you, that's only according to one of Saint Barry's former aides, Jeremy Shapiro, who told the Cheltenham Literary Festival: “From my perspective it was very important for us to mention the special relationship in every press conference that we had when the UK were here. But really we laughed about it behind the scenes. Typically, I would try and slip in a reference to the Malvinas or something to spoil it.”

I caught 10 seconds of Have I Got News For You last night, entirely by accident, only to hear a female panelist tell us that she really hated Boris Johnson. Everyone tittered. These people are loathsome.

This next story in the Telegraph improved my mood no end:
An Oxford College has banned the Christian Union from its freshers’ fair on the grounds that it would be “alienating” for students of other religions, and constitute a “micro-aggression”.
The organiser of Balliol’s fair argued Christianity’s historic use as “an excuse for homophobia and certain forms of neo-colonialism” meant that students might feel “unwelcome” in their new college if the Christian Union had a stall.
Freddy Potts, vice-president of Balliol’s Junior Common Room (JCR) committee, said that if a representative from the Christian Union (CU) attended the fair, it could cause "potential harm" to freshers. 
Doomed, I tell you.

My acidie wasn't alleviated by learning that Ireland have introduced a stamp featuring the psychopathic mass-murdering sadist Che Guevara. As for the Wiltshire Police and their attempts to justify destroying the reputation (such as it is) of a former Conservative Prime Minister, despite an absolute lack of anything remotely resembling actual evidence, I truly despair. God knows I despised Ted Heath - but this is sheer lunacy.

I'll end with that evidently lovely chap, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. The response to allegations (as I'd better call them) of this thug's sexually predatory behaviour by Hollywood liberals - who shrieked in outrage when it was revealed that Donald Trump had once bragged about grabbing women's private parts - demonstrates hypocrisy on a cosmic scale. Of course, some of them have started emerging from the woodwork since Weinstein was fired to condemn his alleged behaviour, but most of the virtue-signalling moral pygmies are keeping shtum.

Perhaps some older film-industry types have reminded younger Hollywooders that when, in 1977, the actor Cliff Robertson blew the whistle on the head of Columbia Pictures, David Begelman, over a forged $10,000 cheque, Begelman - who was revealed to have embezzled an additional $65,000 from the company - was suspended, although still being paid, only to be reinstated for a brief period. (In 1980 this convicted criminal was appointed  CEO and president of MGM for four years.) The CEO of Columbia, who refused to reinstate Begelman after his paid vacation on the grounds that he was a crook, was himself fired. The actor Cliff Robertson was effectively blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1980s. No wonder the moral relativists of the US entertainment industry backed Hillary Clinton to the hilt.

I'll end with this scene from the 2008 film Tropic Thunder. Obviously, I have no idea whether Tom Cruise's Les Grossman character is modelled on a specific Hollywood mogul - but, whoever he's meant to be, he doesn't seem particularly nice:

11 comments:

  1. Oh the wonderful Bonzos, to whom Monty Python owes a massive debt. For some one who is bored with politics, you do go on a bit in trying to deny at length why you are still fascinated by it.

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    1. Appalled, rather than fascinated - and genuinely saddened that, despite the only interesting political ideas these days coming from the right, almost everything I hear from Mrs. May and her ministers these days are timid little echoes of malignant Corbynite lunacies, interspersed with pallid and unconvincing support for capitalism and ridiculous claims to be supplying "calm" leadership - which I suppose she is, if a rabbit frozen in fear in the headlights of an oncoming car can be described as calm. Where are all the ideas, where's the intellectual verve, where's the oomph, where's the determination to make things better? I don't tend to give way to despair - but it's all rather disheartening.

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  2. Agreed ex-KCS. It's a bit like the nicotine addict who swears to quit only the next day to run a sharp and slightly shakey thumb nail down the cellophane of a pack of twenty.
    Clearly Mr.G has thankfully not ditched his addiction to politics.

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    1. Well, yes, I'm still addicted to nicotine, Brainiac: it's just that I satisfy my craving with relatively risk-free eliquid these days rather than health-destroying tobacco. As for politics, I think I've reached the equivalent phase in a smoker's life when cigarettes have stopped being a pleasure and, instead, have become an unpleasant, shame-inducing necessity - though I'm finding daily politics a damn sight easier to give up than fags!

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  3. That choleric conservative, Sir Henry Rawlinson , would doubtless welcome timorous Teresa May with his customary bellow of ," Release the Hounds".

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    1. Release the hounds?

      Theresa May's political demise is not without precedent. The son and heir sent me a fascinating Wikipedia link to Records of members of parliament of the United Kingdom which reveals that Sir Ralph Carminowe was High Sheriff of Cornwall in 1378 and was elected MP for Cornwall in 1383, 1384 and 1386 but died before taking his seat that time when he was pulled over a cliff by his hounds while out hunting.

      Cometh the hour, cometh the man works on all occasions except the occasions when the man or woman cometh not. There aren't many great statesmen. That's the whole point. They're rare. Lose Theresa May, and who on earth is there to take her place? John Redwood would be my bet, and my brother's, but even we aren't convinced and we're probably in a minority of two.

      Brexit will work. It's just that it will work without a hero. Or at least, without a political hero – there's always the British public and, remember, we're supposed to be in charge, the politicians exercise our power on trust. This isn't Hollywood. We're grown up, aren't we? We know that there isn't always a hero.

      There was a documentary about the Queen on telly in April 2016. The programme covered the abdication of the disgraceful wrong 'un Edward VIII and the accession of George VI. There is evidence that, on the King's untimely death, Lord Mountbatten sought to bring back the wrong 'un and have him re-enthroned. At which point in the programme one transcendently magnificent lady, a cousin of the Queen's, delivered herself of the following: "it was always said of Lord Louis that if he swallowed a nail he would shit a corkscrew".


      Let's call that property mountBatten(). It's a relation between any number of nails of any sort and any number of corkscrews of any sort. It's obviously not a very pleasant property. But in politics it can be occasionally necessary, all hewn of crooked timber as we most unfortunately are, it has its place.

      Not least, we expect our cabinet secretaries to possess it. They must have thousands of other properties as well but it must be the case that cabinectSecretary.mountBatten(). Otherwise they can't do the job and they're no use to us.

      Sir Jeremy Heywood?

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  4. The Wimbledon Bookfest finished on Sunday evening with an appearance by Alan Johnson.

    26 December one year, he was telling us, he found himself with Tony Blair in the flat at No.11 – tee-shirt, jeans, sandals – surrounded by children's toys and the young Leo much in evidence. It was a pleasant, relaxed occasion and Johnson was reminiscing about how he had had three children by the age of 20. "Oh", said Tony, "you really are lower class".

    Mr Johnson had one firm prediction to share with us. David Davis will be Prime Minister by January.

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    1. David Davis? I suspect Labour might quite like that - as would the BBC, which has been in full "Destroy Boris" mode since the day Cameron resigned. Anything which suits the BBC and Labour should worry the Conservatives. If only Michael Gove hadn't gone totally tonto during the Conservative leadership election, this might have been his chance - he's certainly the cleverest, the hardest-working and most viscerally right wing of any of the likely candidates. Plus, he's the only one who seems to have any genuinely interesting ideas - and anyone loathed by teachers must have something going for them. Alas...

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    2. Gove & Vine. In her article [1962] on "Macbeth" Mary McCarthy had this to say:.... his [M's] tragedy resides in his literal-mindedness, that he is no more than a familiar “modern” and
      “bourgeois type,” superstitious and credulous, the “eternal executive”
      whose “main concern throughout the play is . . . to get a good night’s
      sleep,” and whose savvy wife—who sees him for what he is, a shallow
      mix of “fear and ambition”—can barely mask her impatience and contempt for him."

      She later describes the Thane as a second rate Scottish bank manager with a very pushy wife.

      Gove is a disgraceful Quisling. The sight of him with his stupid eye-brows, vast posterior and sycophantic manner upsets me. His wife is unspeakably ghastly.

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  5. Hyper Masculine Heteronormative Bigot29 October 2017 at 06:58

    Mary McCarthy's novel, The Group, was indicative of her Leftist political sympathies and, as such, was the steaming heap of malodorous guff that would normally be expected to emanate from that quarter.

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