The Aged P

Mark Mardell is so excited about Obama giving his support for gay marriage. A “courageous act” on this “hot button issue” chirps the Beeb’s man in Washington as he religiously obeys the BBC handbook on brown-nosing Barack Obama at very possible opportunity.

But many Democrats would rather their man led, than followed.
Just because the timing of this announcement was unplanned and unwanted doesn’t mean it was undebated within the White House.
They may have seen little alternative, but also recognise that President Obama gets some kudos for being the first president to support gay marriage.

You see the strategy – yet another OBL type “tough call” for the President with a spine of titanium channelled via Mardell who is clearly consolidating the BBC as the unofficial UK arm of the White House re-election campaign.

Mardell is obviously flagging this up as a gift to Obama’s base. What he conveniently forgets to mention is that the reason why it came out at all was because his “base” appears to be withering away leaving him vulnerable on his left flank. Moreover Mardell’s identification of this as a “hot button issue” is open to question. He quotes poll data but can it be really true that across America this is the number one question in factory, office or store rather than gas prices, Obamacare costs or entitlements?

Perhaps the waspish John Nolte from Breitbart.com hit the nail on the head when he tweeted

John Nolte ‏@NolteNC
Did Obama’s cynical same-sex marriage move energize his base more than our’s? Doubt it. And by “his base” I of course mean the media.

The slavish adulation of the American media elite and their refusal to ask any questions about his background, experience or questionable Chicago acquaintances was a major factor in allowing this man to rise without trace to the highest office in the land. They remain a major bastion of his support – and, to these people in New York, Washington and Hollywood, gay issues are at the top of the agenda.

But to the rest of America, maybe not so much….with the exception, naturally, of Mark Mardell and the folk at the BBC….

cross posted at Biased BBC

I am wandering around encircled by a mist of uncertainty and aimlessness. I need therapy. I need The Lovely Mrs P to cuddle me and kiss me better….

My Blackberry has been misbehaving – or, more specifically the scroll button has gone awol and refused to function. It has now been despatched for repair. The helpful young man at O2 says it will go to a UK based “repair facility” but I know that in reality a guy in a loincloth is running across Europe and Asia, through urban hellholes, across scorching deserts and over cloud piercing mountain ranges to deliver it to an inscrutable phonesmith in a secluded village in a far corner of China. Breaking from his study of Confucius and his imparting of the secrets of kung fu to silent acolytes he will conquer the recalcitrant scroll button with sharp blows from the edge of his hand and the perfume from an infusion of lotus blossom.

Meanwhile I must go cold turkey until the loin clothed messenger returns to Crawley Town Centre.

Well, not exactly cold turkey. The chap at O2 revived my ancient steam driven Motorola mobile and, after a frantic search around the house I recovered the appropriate charger so I will have some sort of connection on the move…but, how humiliating, just calls and text…no e mails, no tweets, no BB messenger, no street cred…

Just to think, this time last year I didn’t have a Blackberry. Indeed we used to make rather caustic comments to the younger members of our family about “being on that Blackberry all the time…”

How times and circumstances change…

But, do you know the worst thing about this whole scenario? The Lovely Mrs P’s BB is still working fine and this evening I will have to try to look elsewhere as she checks her e mail, sends her texts and – the unkindest cut of all – SCROLLS around with effortless ease….

BTW – I don’t feel so bad now I realise that a certain member of the royal family shares my pain….

Nigel Farage mocked the Eurocrats with his usual panache by this tongue in cheek encomium to Europe Day (May 9th). Good knockabout fun, as usual, but, towards the end he makes reference to a spectre of civil war and revolution in the wake of the EU’s self serving attempt to defy gravity by forcing savage austerity policies on counties like Ireland, Italy and Greece in order to shore up the Euruzone and, more importantly, protect German banks from the consequences of their drunken sailor lending policies over the last two decades.

The established Greek political elite unwillingly submitted to the austerity package demanded by EU. But a few days ago the people of Greece were able to voice their opinion via parliamentary elections.

The result? A total collapse of support for the mainstream parties and a large swing to the extremes of left and right – exactly the same thing as happened in the German election of 1932…and we all know what came out of that….

From Stephan Shakespeare an excellent postscript to Boris Johnson’s re-election as Mayor of London in a city that is natural Labour territory at a time when everywhere else the Tories were getting a drubbing.

You don’t win London by luck. And you don’t win London, at the very moment when 50% of its electorate are saying they would vote Labour at the next general election, just because you are likeable and funny. Look at the polling: the majority credit him not just with charisma, but with doing a good job – even a significant fraction of Labour voters approved of how he handled his first term as Mayor.

That is the key fact about Boris. Beneath the golly gosh public schoolboy upper class twit image is an incredibly shrewd political brain. What is more his four years as mayor has now shown that he is also a savvy and efficient administrator. Interestingly enough many working class Londoners recognised this aspect of Boris and broke with their tribal loyalty to Labour in sufficient numbers to vote for his return to City Hall. It seems that they have latched onto something that has bypassed most of the commentariat.

Boris is competent. He is charismatic, likeable and competent. He is quite separate from the Conservative Party machine and competent. He is low tax, anti EU tough on crime and competent.

Boris is one of the few politicians of any party who combines brains with charm and humour. They are three very useful skills to have when running for anything. I am not sure whether Boris will be a future Prime Minister, but one thing will be sure, if he does decide to go for it, nobody will say to him he hasn’t had any experience of running anything… unlike Messrs Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, Milliband Mi and Balls.

If I were David Cameron I would be feeling rather nervous about Boris – and if I were George Osborne I would be giving up any hope of becoming leader because the one word you cannot now associate with those two is COMPETENCE.

For the moment, at least, Boris is the only Tory game in town…..

OMG – this is the sound that, for me as a South London schoolboy in the mid 1950s, burst virtually out of nowhere and became my music. Raw, roughly hewn and totally ignored by the BBC, we could only hear it via the wobbling wavelengths of Radio Luxembourg or AFN Europe. There were no pretentious pseudo political lyrics, no “messages”, no pompous arty farty “rock journalists”……just a songs about girls, parties and having fun all played with a solid driving beat.

I thought it was all in the past – until, sixty years later, I came across J D McPherson…..unfortunately, because it’s 2012, you have to read about his band via a pompous arty farty “rock journalist”….

Great stuff…(the music, not the article)…

Over at Legal Insurrection they picked up on the Obama campaign slogan for 2012…FORWARD. Some critics mocked the echoes of early 20th century socialism to be found in the word.

But to me it brought to mind Macaulay’s splendid poem about the Roman hero Horatius and his two comrades blocking the path of an Etruscan army as it attempted to capture the narrow bridge across the River Tiber that gave access to Rome.

The heroic trio fought so savagely that the Etruscan soldiers in the front line hesitated before their onslaught. However those in the ranks behind who were safe from the Roman swords tried to persuade them back into the fray.

Was none who would be foremost to lead such dire attack:
But those behind cried ‘Forward!’, and those before cried ‘Back!’
And backward now and forward wavers the deep array;
And on the tossing sea of steel, to and fro the standards reel;
And the victorious trumpet-peal dies fitfully away.

Might not that ring true today when Obama and his team, safely ensconced in Washington and living off the public purse, demand greater sacrifices from those on the front line outside Washington in order to fill the government’s coffers and keep them in the style to which they have become accustomed.

But where oh where is there an American Horatius to keep those ravenous beasts at bay….

In a withering polemic against the political class Brendan O’Neill points out that 68% of voters did not exercise their franchise on a day when seats across the country were up for grabs in this year’s elections for local councils. As he points out 68% could easily be described as a “vast majority” if applied to a particular candidate – ergo one could say that the vast majority of UK electors decided to go NOTA and vote for None Of The Above.

What the political class (politicians, journalists and academics) might describe as “apathy” O’Neill perceives as a quite justifiable indifference

There’s nothing peculiar about the majority’s refusal to vote. It’s perfectly logical. At a time when the political class is fantastically disconnected from everyday people, when mainstream political debate has been almost wholly colonised by suits and PR people and media darlings, it makes sense for people to deduce: “This has nothing to do with me.”

But it is not only at the ballot box that ordinary folk are manifesting a distaste and disregard for political activity. The political parties, for many years the main engines of popular political engagement, have become professionalized and reconfigured beyond all recognition. Once thriving hubs of local grassroots activity swamping the streets during elections and raising cash between them, and always jealously guarding their own manor against the central party they have withered away into glorified branch offices of the London machine. The big money comes no longer from subscriptions, coffee mornings and jumble sales but from corporate or union donors meeting with party professionals in swish London offices.

The established parties have now become corporations whoring themselves out to special interests and dominated almost entirely by a tiny Oxbridge educated metropolitan elite who segue effortlessly from university to media/academia/political consultancy with little if any experience of real work in office, factory, shop or in any area where they actually have to make business decisions.

The result?

Britain is morphing into an oligarchy, with a gaping chasm emerging between the spin-doctored politicians and Twitterati who “do politics” and the man and woman in the street who do not.

But this disconnect cannot survive the dark hours that will certainly overwhelm us when we realise that the vapid word games and pretentious promises with which the political class seek to appease us will stand for nothing as the frightening truth about their financial ineptitude is finally confronted. As usual Mark Steyn points the way.

There’s a famous exchange in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Someone asks Mike Campbell, “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways,” he replies. “Gradually, then suddenly.” We’ve been going through the gradual phase so long, we’re kinda used to it. But it’s coming to an end, and what happens next will be the second way: sudden, and very bad

Hey – we don’t need no small town redneck hicks embarrassing our convention with their backwoods old fashioned attitudes. We need to go rainbow….

Several insiders interviewed for this story said former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will present a unique challenge to Romney’s team: Will they give her a prime spot to satisfy her fans, or reduce her role because of her polarizing nature?
“You want people to generate interest and passion,” said one Republican who has organized conventions before and who, like others, didn’t want to be named. “Sarah Palin goes to a very small segment, relatively speaking, of the Republican Party. And you’re trying to put together a rainbow coalition.”

Ah those Republican insiders – the ones that did so well in 2008…..they really know how to generate interest and passion….

It’s official – the BBC obviously decided to start openly pimping for Obama from the beginning of May and, unsurprisingly, the oleaginous Mark Mardell was selected to kick off the campaign with a shameless piece of brown-nosing about the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Since the BBC is financed by a compulsory surcharge levied on practically every household in the Britain you can now add the UK taxpayers to Obama’s list of campaign donors.

His team won’t allow anyone to run away with the idea that the Navy Seals raid was the inevitable result of obvious decisions taken by shadowy figures within the administration.
Instead, they hammer home the view that the president made a courageous and difficult call, going against the advice of many of those around him.
This is pushed explicitly in a new campaign video narrated by Bill Clinton.
There have been several detailed insider accounts which support the idea of a tough and risky decision-maker at the top.

Fortunately at the moment the media influence of the left leaning BBC is counter balanced by a lively and disrespectful right wing press so readers of the UK Daily Mail were able to get a different perspective from Toby Harnden.

Senior military figures have said that Admiral William McRaven, a former SEAL who was then head of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) made the decision to take bin Laden out. Tactical decisions were delegated even further down the chain of command.
Mr Kyle added: ‘He’s trying to say that Romney wouldn’t have made the same call? Anyone who is patriotic to this country would have made that exact call, Democrat or Republican. Obama is taking more credit than he is due but it’s going to get him some pretty good mileage.’
A former intelligence official who was serving in the US government when bin Laden was killed said that the Obama administration knew about the al-Qaeda leader’s whereabouts in October 2010 but delayed taking action and risked letting him escape.

Once the BBC had a reputation for fairness and balance that was unrivalled in any other part of the world. Sadly that gold standard of reporting and commentary has been replaced by a left wing bias more reminiscent of a Polish TV station in the early 1970s.

You know what is even more worrying? They no longer feel the need to even pretend to be neutral….

Thirty years the Argentinian warship “Belgrano” was attacked and sunk with the loss of 323 lives

The Belgrano – a cruiser – was torpedoed by the British nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror on 2 May 1982.

President Cristina Fernandez used the occasion to reiterate Argentina’s claim to the Falklands. A retired Admiral played the moment by tuning up the emotion meter

“On days like these, we remember that there is a mission that is not over. There are 323 voices calling to us that there is an open wound. Every day they they remind us that the Malvinas are, were and will be Argentine.”

Great stuff – it almost gives the impression that the islands were thronged with hardy Argentinian farmers until 1982 when they were driven out by those land hungry British imperialists under the orders of the Thatcher junta back in London.

Pure nonsense, of course.

The Belgrano and it’s sister vessels were part and parcel of an act of naked aggression undertaken by the Argentinian government of the time. It’s military forces had attacked and occupied the Falklands in the expectation that the British government would make a lot of noise, summon ambassadors, write letters and eventually get involved in “negotiations” that would end up as a kind of shared sovereignty…and that’s how it would have developed under any Prime Minister of the last fifty years – with one exception.

Unfortunately for Argentina the one exception was the woman who happened to be in 10 Downing Street at the time. Margaret Thatcher retaliated to an act of military force with an even greater force – with much tut tutting from the BBC and The Guardian but with the overwhelming support of the British people.

Naturally the BBC uses weasel words to give President Fernandez moral support – after all she is a left wing politician pursuing a socialist agenda so, by definition, she must be right

The General Belgrano was sunk on the orders of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who said it had posed a danger to British ships. However, the warship was outside the 200-mile maritime exclusion zone Britain had declared around the Falklands and was said to be sailing away from the islands when she was hit. Critics said the action was excessive and scuppered any chance of a diplomatic solution to the conflict.

“Was said to be sailing away” is a classic ploy often used by the BBC and the media in general to give a measure of spurious authority to a purely speculative statement. So listen to the words of Vice Admiral Sir Tim McClement who was second in command of HMS Conqueror at the time.

No, Argentina, the deaths of those 323 sailors rests fairly and squarely on the Argentinian government of the time and those officers who were so keen to encourage the junta to invade the Falklands as a distraction from domestic problems……which, of course, is why President Fernandez is making such a fuss about the Falklands now….