Jonathan Miller

Here's the pitch: English intellectual speaks nearly non-stop for half an hour - 15 minutes on Shakespeare, 15 minutes on stammering, also waves his arms. Lap it up:

I threw in the last clip as an afterthought. In it Miller, a famous atheist, draws from Dudley Moore a model of deep Intelligent Design.

Worse than a crime, a blunder

Obama's Press Secretary tweaks the tail of a big bad wolf he thinks has the measure of:

“You're not going to find very many of these newspapers and truth within 25 words of each other,” Gibbs continued.

The British Press is more adept at telling truth to power than the lapdogs whom he's addressing. The particular story denied by Gibbs has a named source with impressive credentials. Moreover it's carefully written. It may not be true, I hope it isn't, but the reporting looks responsible compared to plenty in the NYT or the W.Post or the LA Times, regular sources of plagiarism, unsourced half-truths and outright lies. The British Press is more streetwise, more diverse, more hungry, more competitive AND it has a sense of humour. When stories are made up, the rest of the pack will tear into the fabrication and editors get fired - Piers Morgan memorably so.

Gibbs didn't need to set this up. The UK Press now has a vested interest in contrasting the truth of their stories with the truth of his. He will lose.

UPDATE - from The Daily Telegraph's response:

Can you imagine Gibbs making these remarks about The New York Times or The Washington Post, or NBC, ABC or CBS? This would never happen. The British press, especially the Telegraph, has been singled out because they frequently publish articles critical of the Obama administration and are not afraid to take on the status quo in Washington. Increasingly, millions of Americans are turning to online UK news websites for cutting edge reports on American politics and U.S. foreign policy that the mainstream media refuses to cover in the States, especially if it is unflattering to the Obama White House.

Robert Gibbs' completely unwarranted rant against the British press is an absolute disgrace, and the President should disown his views. An unreserved apology by Gibbs is also in order.

For all its talk of "raising America's standing" in the world after the Bush years, the Obama administration is doing a spectacularly bad job of reaching out to its allies. Unfortunately this is the new face of America's public diplomacy, which will only serve to alienate public opinion across the Atlantic. Congratulations Gibbs - you've just made an enemy out of the entire British media, quite an achievement for the man in charge of selling the President's message.

"The entire British media" is hyperbole only if you think of the BBC as British.

The Aid Virus

DanHan:

Socialists....emphasise motive over outcome.... the key thing, for Lefties, is to show that you're a caring person.

I've just been talking to a very clever man. He's called Thompson Ayodele, he's from Nigeria and he thinks that overseas aid is making African countries poorer.

Foreign aid, he suggests, isn't useless; it's actively harmful. It discourages enterprise, fosters dependency and bolsters corrupt regimes.

As Thompson puts it: "The British Treasury is empty. So you are going to be borrowing money in order to give it away. And the countries that get it will be poorer as a result". Yup: but at least we'll have shown everyone how nice we are.

I'd quibble with this last; the government isn't "borrowing other people's money", it's stealing it from other people's children and their own at the point of a gun, the gun to be paid for by those children. And The Aid Virus doesn't just corrupt Africa, it corrupts the mass of Obama voters in America: government workers, aid recipients, professional victims and elites.

The Decline of the West

Michael Savage is a lucky man. Not only does he have the publicity of being banned from the UK for being a right-wing talk-show host, but the politician who banned him is such an easy target. He should Google "Jacqui Smith expenses porno" to see how my tax pounds are spent.

Oppositional headbanging

These are dark days in American politics. Disgusting people run the country with disgusting deeds and disgusting words. Nothing I can do about it and I don't have much that's fresh to say, so concentrate on other things. But permit a small cry of pain on the subject of 'torture'. I wholly approve what the Bush administration did in relation to Al Quaeda detainees, except that they may not have done enough of it. This thought suffices: imagine you're Pinch Sulzberger, who runs the New York Times. The government believes a detainee may have actionable intelligence of a suicide attack against your skyscraper in Manhattan. But the detainee won't talk. He sniggers. So each day you watch your employees come to work and you know and they don't know that each day may be their last. You see their family photos on their desks, you talk about the future. So Obama rings you up and the call goes like this:

Obama: Hey thanks for all the help. I know you endorsed Hillary, but I understand the ethnic scene in NYT. Hey, Pinch, my people can lean on the terrorist COO a little. Maybe we can tickle him bad enough to to make him squawk. No bruises, we'll call it "processing". But we might save hundreds of lives, your people.

Pinch : It's torture, sir. It's unAmerican. Banning the use of torture would not jeopardize American lives; experts in these matters generally agree that torture produces false confessions.

Obama: The CIA tells me that we averted a specific attack on an LA building by waterboarding a terrorist COO. My DNI says we obtained valuable intelligence by scaring the bejesus out of a couple of these guys. What should I do?

Pinch: Sir, it's better that my staff die than that we 'torture' people who want to destroy America. We are men of principle, aren't we?

Obama: Fine. Let's see how that plays. I'll leave open the possibility of prosecuting the lawyers who justified the waterboarding. So long and tell your staff how much this administration values them.

Me: Among all the disgusting, luxurious, infantile attitudes adopted by liberals these days, this attitudinizing about coercion is the most depraved. It's good that the real effects of voting liberal are being so starkly played out. It's clarifying. Now back to escapism.

Update: I add Liz Cheney's fine refutation of the liberal mythology:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Escapism

I'm collating a book of images from around Shad Thames in London. In a converted warehouse nearby called Hay's Galleria there's a statue called The Navigators by artist David Kemp. I was composing a shot of this work when a tourist came into the frame and wouldn't budge. Eventually I took the snap with him in it. When I saw the image on screen I realised that the interloper resembled the sculpture, so I conversed a little with David Kemp about it. During the banter we discovered a certain shared affinity for cormorants and he drew my attention to this ditty by Christopher Isherwood, also attributed to Edward Lear:

The Common Cormorant
The common cormorant (or shag)
Lays eggs inside a paper bag,
You follow the idea, no doubt?
It's to keep the lightning out.

But what these unobservant birds
Have never thought of, is that herds
Of wandering bears might come with buns
And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.

If you want war, prepare for peace

The new basic data on Israel-Iran are these:

1."The peace process is based on three false basic assumptions; that Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the main cause of instability in the Middle East, that the conflict is territorial and not ideological, and that the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders will end the conflict." Avigdor Lieberman, 2006.

2. "Past prime ministers were prepared to make wide-ranging concessions and the result of the Olmert-Livni government was the second Lebanon war, the operation in Gaza, severance of relations with Qatar and Mauritania, Gilad Schalit still in captivity and the peace process at a dead end.." Avigdor Lieberman, Israeli Foreign Minister, 2009.

3. Iran now has the techniques to make and deliver a nuclear warhead within 2 years.

4. Obama is at least conciliatory to formerly outlaw states like Cuba, Venezuela and Iran.

5. Obama has a special relationship with Islam unlike any US President.

6. Influential Obama supporters include noted anti-semites and noted Hamas fellow-travellers.

7. Joe Biden says Israel will be "ill-advised" to attack Iran.

8. The US told Netanyahu that Obama will be "out of town" when the Israeli PM visits Washington in May.

9. Ahmadinejad is strong favourite to be re-elected in June.

10. The countries of the Arabian peninsula fear a nuclear Iran.

11. I doubt anyone exists who thinks Obama will undertake a pre-emptive strike against Iran. It's possible, but nobody thinks it.

12. Israel may need to cross Iraq to get to Iran.

13. The chance of a successful attack is much greater if the USA helps Israel.

14. Israel probably has far better intelligence than the USA.

If I were Israeli, especially an Israeli with Netanyahu and Barak's military background, I would not tolerate a nuclear Iran if it were in my power to prevent it. The Times' foreign editor:

What is significant is not their political affiliations but their military background. Mr Barak, the most decorated soldier in the Israeli army, once headed Sayeret Matkal, Israel's equivalent of the SAS before becoming the army chief. One soldier serving under him was Mr Netanyahu. Another veteran of this elite unit was Moshe Yaalon, also in the Cabinet. These men have taken part in assassination operations against Palestinian leaders and commanded daring raids deep inside enemy territory. In short, they have the experience and the confidence to plan and execute an attack on Iran.

Indeed, Mr Barak was Defence Minister in the previous Government when Israel carried out its latest secret raid in January - on a weapons convoy in Sudan. According to details released this week, Israeli F16 bombers, protected by F15 fighters, attacked targets in Sudan. Pilotless drones then filmed the wreckage, relaying back images which revealed that some vehicles were undamaged. The jets then flew a second sortie. The aircraft, which were refuelled in mid-air, flew 1,750 miles from Israel to Sudan and back. The distance from Israel to Natanz, the uranium enrichment centre in Iran, is 900 miles one way.

A factor in any Israeli calculation will be Iran's air defences, which are far more daunting than Sudan's. Here too there is good reason to believe that Israel may act sooner rather than later. Russia has sold Iran the sophisticated S300 surface-to-air system. Israel would want to launch an attack before these missiles are in place.

These military imperatives might make sense to soldiers, but surely the political cost of a pre-emptive raid - not to mention the risk of plunging the Middle East into another big war - would rule out an attack.

This argument might make sense from Europe but in the Middle East quite another logic is at work. Many Arab states, particularly in the Gulf, are more afraid of a nuclear-armed Iran than Israel is. A military strike that delayed that threat would be welcomed in some Arab capitals. The Israelis know that they would face a huge international outcry. But that happened after the raid on Iraq and many countries later thanked them privately. More recently they were widely attacked after the offensive against Gaza in January, but over time that criticism has died down.

Today the only serious obstacle to this battle is Barack Obama.

I'd deal with the opposition of this US administration rather than stake my children's lives on Iran's mercy or rationality, so I do think that Israel will attack with or without the USA because it makes sense, but unlike the surprise attack on the Osirak reactor in 1981, this time the USA has the chance pre-emptively to threaten Israel. Would the USA shoot down Israeli aircraft? Would the USA threaten to interdict Israeli aircraft? Obama will leave that possibility as an unspoken deterrent against Israel. Taste those words.."as a deterrent against Israel." How did we get here? You, Jewish-American liberals, how did we get here? We got here because your religion is liberalism.

Would Congress stand for an American President obstructing Israel to protect Islamo-fascists? Would Americans? That is the question for America. For Israel it's to be or not to be, that is the question.

Manhattan discovers Utah

The New York Times has a piece on southern Utah, specifically the Escalante area. The writer takes a few risks to bring back an account of the fearsome Peek-a-Boo slot canyon:

I had lost sight of the first stone cairns almost immediately, as I stumbled down to the dry river wash at the bottom of the ravine. (“Water is scarce,” the printout helpfully noted.) After a few false leads, I made it to Peek-a-Boo Canyon, whose hard-to-spot entrance was surrounded by what looked like a shallow pool: I took a step in and sank straight up to my thighs in thick mud. As the sun continued to climb in the sky, I wished for my own Ute guide — or at least a GPS tracking system.

Hugging the canyon wall for shade, I pressed on heroically and found Spooky Canyon, named for its otherworldly atmosphere. It was only an 18-inch-wide crack in the rock, but to me it yawned like the gateway to Shangri-La.

As I squeezed inside, the air was immediately cool and fragrant. The sky appeared to be an electric blue sliver far above, and the reflected light made the golden sandstone seem to glow from within. I remained utterly still, in a lizardlike state, knowing that I couldn’t hide in there forever.

Finally, I drank the last of my water and staggered across the rock like a sun-struck character out of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” I was parched, scratched, encrusted with mud — but triumphant.

Well, the esteemed proprietor of Anatreptic.com, Mick Stockinger, and I and my brother-in-law strolled down to Peek-a-Boo Canyon and Spooky Gulch a while ago. It's great but we missed the dramatics. It really is tempting to scoff at the Manhattan pantywaist, but the truth is that the difference between a stroll in the park and a scary adventure is very little. A wrong turn, a twisted ankle, disorientation, demoralisation, dark - and that's just Central Park let alone the wildest part of the contiguous USA.

Another difference tho is experience. There's a discreet gap between hiking and mountaineering apart from technique. Mountaineering is much tougher physically and calls for judgement under stress as well as a likelihood of spending nights in a bivouac. So on a trek, however tough, a mountaineer tends to be confident that he has something in hand. That can lead to comic mistakes of course. "Hey I thought you brought the compass."

There's an obvious political moral here, but I'll let that lie.

Scoops and scalps: the MSM gets shivved

Janet Daley, Brown apologist and Daily Telegraph columnist with a grudge, attempts to belittle Guido Fawkes:

In the US, the power of the political blog was transformed when Matt Drudge made Monica Lewinsky the most famous intern in White House history, and nearly brought about the impeachment of a president, by publishing his sensational story on the Drudge Report. Why did Mr Staines not follow his example? Perhaps he would like to tell us.

He replies in the third comment:

Perhaps I will eventually. Not to the Telegraph though. Your paper has behaved reprehensibly. To breach a confidence, reveal a source, tip off Downing Street and break a signed non-disclosure agreement is hardly honourable. The bitterness you and Pierce demonstrate is manifest to all your readers.

Claiming today that the Telegraph discovered that Draper lunched at Chequers days after setting up the Red Rag site without attributing that "scoop" to me two days earlier is revealing.

You have one of the weakest political teams around. The paper has lost its way and is reduced to taking scraps from my blog for its front page, day after day.

I trust this is all a big deal in Utah. It seems positively Jacobean to me. Delicious.

A milestone

Further to 'Scoops and scalps' below, Daniel Hannan well expresses how the smeargate scandal here in the UK has crystallized the plight of the elite media:

A blog has just done something that I thought no one could do: elicited an apology (or as close as we'll ever get to an apology) from Gordon Brown. Indeed, according to The Guardian, the McBride-Draper scandal might cost Labour the next election. If so, Guido Fawkes would have succeeded where his baleful namesake failed 404 years ago: he would have brought down a government. Even if you think the Guardian story is a bit de trop, the idea that one man with a laptop could do so much damage would, until very recently, have seemed risible.

Yet, even now, a number of print and broadcast journalists dismiss, disdain and depreciate internet-based news. Read the Guardian's own Michael White responding to the way my attack on Gordon Brown spread online. Read Peter Wilby's reedy complaint that the internet "lacks quality control". It is difficult not to sympathise with journalists of their generation. They can see local newspapers dropping all around them, and know that some nationals will soon follow. Every newsdesk is shedding staff, and journalists' are having to work longer hours for lower salaries. The Whites and Wilbies perceive, even if they do not properly understand, that amateurs are driving out professionals. It makes them frightened and bilious.

What irks them most of all is that bloggers refuse to apply Leftist filters. Until very recently, few people could watch a politician's speech or read his statement in full. They relied, instead, on the Whites and Wilbies to select, précis and interpret stories for them. Now, the masses can make up their own minds without bien-pensant intellectuals telling them what to think.

Scoops and scalps: a postcard from London

The lead story here has been the resignation of a key aide to Gordon Brown. The aide has been outed concocting a sex and drugs and mental health smear campaign against the Conservative leadership and their wives. So far, so sordid, but the big point is that this is a terrific scoop and scalp for blogger, Guido Fawkes, who obtained the smoking gun emails and skilfully played the quiet Easter news cycle to maximum effect. (Guy Fawkes, by the way, tried to blow up the House of Lords and King James I in 1605 as part of a Roman Catholic plot. His effigy is burnt every November the 5th on Bonfire Night).

The story is rife with British comic detail and vendettas all around, not least the envy and treachery of Guido Fawkes' MSM competitors, up to and including a pre-emptive betrayal of Guido's scoop by the supposedly conservative Daily Telegraph. An irony is that anyone can open a blog on the Telegraph site and Guido Fawkes himself has done just that - to embarrassing effect, writing:

Telegraph Has Behaved Terribly Over Smeargate

Sunday, April 12, 2009, 01:38 PM GMT [General]

There are a lot of bitter, jealous journalists at the Telegraph and you have behaved shamefully over the McBride story. You even tipped off Downing Street in advance as to exactly what I was up to. It reflects on you a lot more than it does on me.
You revealed sources, broke a confidence, breached a signed non-disclosure agreement and behaved like patsys for McBride.

You still failed to spoil the story. Your political team is about as weak as it gets, that is why you sucked up to Downing Street.
The Telegraph was once run by gentlemen for gentlemen. This would never have happened under Deedes or Charles Moore.
Do your worst.

This is manna from heaven for the Tories. No one thinks Gordon Brown was involved,*** but he certainly turns a blind eye (he actually does have a blind eye) to the poisonous shenanigans of his entourage as long as there's political advantage. For many years the Brownian poison has been directed at rivals on his own side. This is a different game with different rules. Gordon Brown has never been elected by any non-politician outside his constituency of Fife in Scotland, since he famously bottled out of calling a General Election soon after he took over from Tony Blair. He lacks legitimacy, moreover he's accident prone. He flourished alongside Blair, whom he was constantly plotting to unseat, but since moving to centre stage has had a run of ferocious bad luck which he attracts like a mountain massif attracts its own weather.

So politics in both London and Washington would be tragic were it not so funny. Look on the bright side. Things change.


***Update: uh-oh.

Update 2: Today is Guy Fawkes' birthday, 13th April 1570. This all brings back happy memories when my brothers and I would take a stuffed guy in a wheelbarrow from house to house calling 'penny for the guy'. The pennies were spent on fireworks.