I can’t help but wince when people claim that the result was fraudulent. We don’t know that. We suspect it, but we don’t know it.
The western press, as we know, polled the urban young. Many warned, prior to the election, that non-urban areas are far more conservative and that there Ahmedinijad is very well liked.
It’s apparent that some intimidation occurred, and the election result is questionable, but we should be careful about being so certain that any foreign election we don’t like is rigged.
And - this folks is the huge elephant in the room - it’s highly unlikely that the installation of Moussavi would lead to the rapid liberalisation of Iranian society.
That said… Sunny is dead-right. Conservatives demanding action are dead-wrong.
Know-nothing Republican senators and vacuous Tory blowhards should keep their traps shut. What would a “strong statement” actually achieve, apart from justifying the Iranian establishment’s claims of foreign chicanery?
If we can help the Iranian progressives logistically, we should. But help should come from western citizens, not moronic conservative politicians trying to score political points.
Iran is at a crossroads. We should allow the people of Iran to determine their own destiny.
And so finally, fascist flabby arse-wipe Nick Griffin has achieved national political legitimacy by winning a seat at the European Parliament.
And guess what?
We put him there. The progressives. Or so-called progressives, anyway.
The New Labour project, that brave centre-left experiment to bring Clintonian Third-Way politics to a post-Thatcherite Britain, is over.
Yeah, Slippery Dave promises us pragmatic politics without “isms”, but we know that’s a crock to triangulate the Tories for the maximum haul of MPs at the next general election. Cameron will use his majority to remind us what a bunch of twat-necks the Tories are, and always have been.
I’m not a socialist. I’m a centre-left liberal. I believe in robust markets and social liberalism. Labour’s failure is not its adoption of Ordoliberalism, but its failure to deliver it.
The State has spent millions on management consultants, yet it has been proven incompetent at improving systems and controlling costs — two pillars of good management.
Look at the colossal clusterfuck that is tax-credits. Hard working families have found themselves repaying thousands back, because the system is convoluted, over-complicated and utterly mismanaged. Brown’s gargantuan tax-system is an operational catastrophe that has ultimately failed the working poor.
Then there is Labour’s abject failure to communicate to the working classes. New Labour’s kowtowing to the Murdoch press and its rabid commitment to spinning a narrative to the bloated middle classes, have ensured it no longer speaks directly to the poor and disenfranchised. Whenever a section of society is ignored and marginalised, the predatory fascist right move in to fill the vacuum. I predicted this years ago, as did many writers and commentators.
The final nail was the expenses scandal, which was a plague on all their houses. But it was Labour, with its huge majorities, which could have reformed the system — had they not been abusing it like alcoholics at a free-bar.
Our politics is broken, but the Labour Party is shattered. It’s on life-support and few people actually want to see it pull-through. If we forget tribalism for a second, wouldn’t the progressive cause actually be helped by the quick suffocation of The Labour Party?
We need to reclaim the conversation from the far-right. We need to address, both rhetorically and practically, the concerns of the working poor.
Progressive politics must have a carnival of ideas. We need to experiment with proven policies that have been successful across Europe and the world, and we must remain focussed on efficiency and delivery. These are lean times, but it doesn’t mean we can’t work towards better times.
Labour will lose the next general election, but it lost a commitment to progressive politics a long time ago.
You’ve probably heard all about Sonia Sotomayor by now. She’s the Bronx-rasied hispanic judge who Obama has nominated as his first appointee to the Supreme Court.
If like me you first read about her in The New York Times, you may also know that — from the comments posted there by liberal readers — the left aren’t particularly taken with her. The grassroots left, whose activism had propelled the young Chicagoan outsider to the presidency, were hoping for a nominee who would be guaranteed to further their cause (not to mention piss off the GOP).
Sotomayor isn’t an activist judge. She’s a champion of judicial process. To the polarised partisan her judgements might appear ambiguous (and so could be “shaped” to fit any desired narrative), but this is because they’re nuanced. A judge shouldn’t seek to push an agenda.
This doesn’t mean Sotomayor won’t be a liberal judge. No one is completely objective (even if, invariably, prejudiced myopia is a conservative trait). But it may mean that she will be a floating vote on close judgements. And surely, this is what we should really expect from Obama. He’s never claimed to be an activist liberal, he has always championed merit, fairness and common-sense.
To me Sotomayor is the perfect Obama choice. She has risen from humble origins to the brink of the highest court in The United States. She is smart — she graduated second in her Princeton class, and was an editor of the school’s law review. And Sotomayor appears to put reason and pragmatism ahead of culture-war politics.
Of course just because Sotomayor isn’t a rabid baby-eating liberal, it doesn’t mean that the Republicans will accept her with fair-minded acquiescence. In reality, the GOP is probably livid that they don’t have an activist judge they can easily paint as a “jackbooted feminazi”.
The Republican Party is in complete disarray. Rovian conservatism is built on the politicisation of religion. The GOP needs a Supreme Court fight to energise and unite its base — not to mention invigorate its fund-raising efforts.
The right thing for the Republicans to do would be to take the high-ground and embrace the new political atmosphere. Obama could have nominated a much more threatening judge (or Democrat politician) to the SCOTUS. He didn’t. But to a desperate GOP a fight’s a fight, and boy do they want a fight.
I’m sorry, but… I’m not interested in politicians cleaning up their act.
I want them to be held accountable - as criminals, where necessary. If the general public dodge tax, or try to fiddle benefits, they get hammered (this government even screened ads demanding we turn each other in, if we suspect wrongdoing).
And please, don’t allow them to hide behind technicalities. These are our elected leaders. They, supposedly, serve at our pleasure.
Why should politicians be allowed to say sorry, promise to do better, and keep their ill-gotten loot? If they do, why shouldn’t future politicians not be allowed to wet their beak? No, no, NO! Every claim that can’t be justified as wholly legitimate should be paid back. I don’t give a runny shit whether it costs £10m to investigate and claim back £500,000 - I WANT IT BACK.
Why are they so special, and why are their proposals so clearly designed to allow much of this to continue?
It’s not just Labour. Our politics - all of it - is broken.
Tim’s latest video, ripping the absolute piss out of sock-puppeting hack Andrew Gilligan, is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Genuinely laugh out loud.
Unless Brown calls a snap election in the next month or so, we’ll have a General Election by June of next year whether we like it or not.
Personally, I couldn’t care less. Like the famous South Park episode, this election will offer the tempting choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich.
Now I know the usual Labour commenters will hurl a volley of abuse at me. About how the Tories are so much evil’r - and of course, they are. But seriously, having been a Labour-leaning voter and blogger for many years, I have become to view this relationship as an abusive one. Labour kicked the stuffing out of me, and I just put up with it.
Dan, over at Wikio, has again kindly forwarded me the latest rankings.
Interesting movers include Labourlist’s breakthrough into the top-five, and Labourhome also getting a top-ten spot. So regardless of Gordo’s toxicity, Labour is still alive and kicking*.
This is actually the main blog list, but the mix is pretty politics-centric anyway.
*Mind you, take away the thousands of Tories with nothing better to do than troll Labourlist, and the thing probably wouldn’t make the top 30, never mind top-5.
Iain Dale has posted a YouTube video explaining why lefties are so out of order for complaining about his post yesterday about the late Jack Jones. Dale used the post to point out his opinion of Jones’ shortcomings, and for this the Tory blogger has been accused of being insensitive.
Whatever, Trevor.
Criticising people in the days after their death is insensitive. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. Iain Dale can say what the hell he likes on his blog. And readers and political foes can call him on it, if they so wish. It’s really not a big deal.
And it will also not be a big deal when Lady Thatch’ finally parts this world for the fiery depths of hell. The left will enjoy toasting to her demise, and will revel in the thought of her reuniting with Reagan and Pinochet, as they in turn take it up the arse from the devil himself.
I for one salute Iain Dale for standing up for our inalienable right to pick at the still-warm carcass of our political enemies.
Sunny has a post over at LC commenting on the McBride/Draper affair. Sunny asserts that, surely, Derek Draper’s scandalous and counterproductive foray into the blogosphere is over. Done. Finished. Kaputt.
I hope so. Draper is not only “poisonous for the Labour party”, he has become a toxic presence that is soiling the entire medium. It’s almost as if Dolly’s a MSM agent, planted within the blogosphere to undermine the medium and bring it down from within.
He is a virus. A horrid bacterium that has spread, uncontrolled, through the online community. It’s time he slithered away.
But the thing is… there… just now… I fed the goat. That’s what Dolly wants. That’s what Guido wants. These wankers are HUGE ego-whores. They want you talking about them. Good or bad. They’re like the vacuous coked-up clothes horses that populate the celeb rags, they’re obsessed with publicity.
And you, I, we’re all just doing exactly what they fucking want. We’re talking about them. Aggghhhh!!!
I could write a hugely informed post about how Paul “Guido” Staines is a hypocrite for slating McBride/Draper, when he’s a pioneer of mud-slinging hate politics (chicken and egg?), but I’d be FEEDING THE FUCKING GOAT!
So please, I beg you, let’s stop waxing their egos and ignore these two self-seving wankers.
Thisreally is much ado about nothing — it’s no different to the expenses nonsense. They’re all at it. It’s what they do. They fiddle and they scheme, and one or two, might actually do some work once in a while.
Politicians like to claim that they’re morally superior to us, or that they’re in the know about things we’ll never comprehend, but in reality they’re like the rest of us: a mix of shirkers, workers, liars, pervs, twats and smart-arses (have I missed anyone?). MPs are no different to that bunch of goons and loons you work with. No better, and probably no worse. It’s the anthropology, stupid.
Guido’s desperate to make this a big deal because it feeds his gargantuan ego. Is it really news that politicos scheme against one-another? No, don’t be so daft you silly hypocritical gonad.
If the political blogosphere really is going to be the antidote to the MSM, rather than its desperate echo-chamber, we really have to be better than this.
Posted: March 23rd, 2009 | Author:Aaron | Filed under:politics, usa | Comments Off
Further to this piece by Tom Griffin, over at LC, on the connections between the “decent left” (*spits*) and the Islamophobia movement, I read a piece in this week’s Time Europe, about the survival of NATO in spite of the collapse of the USSR. How it’s actually got stronger, despite all other alliances collapsing soon after mutual goals had been achieved.
Alliances die when they win. Take away the enemy, and you take away the glue that holds a coalition together.
[...]
Yet instead of taking its final bow, NATO expanded. In 1994, the alliance sent out invitations to the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland; five years later, all three were in. Sixty years ago, NATO started out with 12 members; today it has 26. Not bad for an outfit that, according to theory, should have breathed its last once the Soviet Union had capitulated.
One wonders, when these characters are so committed to a continued American hegemony, if they haven’t got a vested interest in the continued threat of radical Islam?*
The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights has agreed to hear my evidence on torture on Tuesday 28 April at 1.45pm. Many thanks to everyone who helped lobby for this.
I am delighted, as I have been trying for over four years to lay the truth about British torture policy before Parliament. I will testify that as British Ambassador I was told there is a very definite policy to accept intelligence from torture abroad, and that the policy was instituted and approved by Jack Straw when Foreign Secretary. I will tell them that as Ambassador I protested formally three times in writing to Jack Straw, and that the Foreign Office told me in reply to my protests that this was perfectly legal.
Hat-tip Jennie (email), who wonders whether the MSM will run with this significant story? We’ll see. If the blogosphere makes a big deal, then I would imagine The Guardian will pick it up.
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