Handy Dandy

Oh well. After my last post (immediately below, so no link), Nick is rather good and it's the CiF comments which are outrageous.

See Jack Straw, rightly, is refusing to let an unrepentent thief go. (Life imprisonment for theft; let's just cut off their hands as well, then!) If the young Ronnie Biggs hadn't decided to become a thief rather than work for a living then the elderly Ronnie Biggs wouldn't be in prison now. (Gosh, it's all so simple isn't it?)

Nick at least sees that the issue is Jack Straw's vindictiveness, rather than the morals of Ronnie Biggs. I don't think a great deal of Mr Biggs, for the record, but he's not an elected official and he doesn't lecture other people about principles.

It's taken some time, but Nick's found a new article to write. Friendly criticism does work.

Alan Johnson vs the CIF Comment Zoo

Actually, it's Alan 'The Minister' Johnson. Some days CIF comments are hardly better than Harry's Place, but then they go and do this. Wonderful. It's like a glorious summer day or a British player in the Wimbledon semis.

ID cards look to me like being a good bet for Aaro next Tuesday. I'm hoping that Aaro writes something on ID, because he has a word count to reach (800?) which is a few more than A'TM'J uses - so he may feel compelled to put in some actual arguments or evidence. (I'm not very hopeful of this.) You know, the tricky stuff, that may convince somebody, which the minister was obviously too busy with his red boxes to include. You may say, "at least it's not old A'NTM'J", but this dreck was just as bad.

Anyway, this is your Aaro prediction thread, because we haven't had one for a while. And I can't think what to say about Tuesday's effort. I almost wrote a post with the title 'More tractors, comrade' (suggested in DA's comments by one Tim in Kingston), but, well, that's about the sum of Dave's position. I'm mostly clueless about education, but I think I can tell when DA's being selective with his facts. But if any of you wish to defend him, fire away...

Those dinner parties again

Gary Brecher aka The War Nerd, reviews a decent neocon thriller. It seems that the Islington dinner parties of Nick's imagination have their Manhattan counterparts:

And just in case you were in any doubt that they really are the forces of evil, there’s a long scene at a snooty Manhattan dinner party where the reader meets Johnson’s lefty boss, Josephine Parker von Hildebrand. Josephine is just about the evilest witch-queen since Snow White: “Josephine had practically every desirable personal characteristic, except wisdom and mercy.” Gee, that sounds like she actually isn’t a nice person at all! Well, this isn’t one of those subtle type novels. If it had a soundtrack, it’d be heavy on the Count Dracula organ notes every time Josephine appears. The scene at her snooty dinner party is maybe the worst in the novel. Basically, all the cool lefties at the party turn into rabid Jew-hating Nazis after their second glass of wine.

There's much more, of course.

Whacking Jacko

Whew. Readers deserve to know that I nearly wrote a post last night concerning the current issue of Standpoint. Nick Cohen was not listed among the contributors. However, he seems to have become one of Standpoint's bloggers, so he hasn't fallen off that perch yet.

The thing about Nick, he doesn't seem to get out much, so complaining about Radio 4's Today programme has become a staple. Entirely predictably, he thinks that too much coverage was given to Michael Jackson. (BTW, what other news stories are there? What else is actually new?) Of course, he links to Oliver Kamm whose post consists of a link to and plug for Nick's new gig; a two sentence quote from same; and a complaint that the news blog of the Times has asked readers for their favourite Jackson song. Not really any 'more' there, Nick. He also links to the Drink-soaked Trots who seem to be complaining that there's more of that advertising about these days, and things were better when they were young.

Fun stuff: Oliver Kamm's colleague has managed to wring two posts out of Jackson's death: 1; 2. (The second is more substantive, and the sort of thing blogs do better than journalism.) There is an Amazon ad to the right of Nick's post: for 'Thriller' "the biggest selling album of all time." Nick still doesn't see why MJ's death was story at all. How has he survived in journalism this long?

Commenter Organic Cheeseboard has claimed that the Times blog has "hosted a chat between Finkelstein and Kamm about their favourite pop stars." I can't find this. Pity, because I can't imagine who Kamm's favourite pop stars could be.

Coming soon to a shopping centre near you!

Actually they're almost certainly all about Internet distribution these days, plus modern shopping centres are notoriously closed retail environments that for the most part no longer allow any sort of public activity like selling political newspapers. But nonetheless, AW is plugged in Socialist Worker today, thanks to comments section regular Mr Kitty's review of "Voodoo Histories", which is well worth a read.

What is this, the missing chapter of "Voodoo Histories"?

Longtime readers will recall how annoyed and appalled I was that Voodoo Histories (£17.99! in all good bookshops, somewhat cheaper on Amazon, Alan Beattie's "False Economy" is probably a better read for the money) didn't deal with the Iraq War, and specifically didn't deal with how it fits into Dave's worldview about government dodgy-dealing, general non-existence of. Here we get the Happy Shopper version.

Apparently opponents of the war are "implacable in their interior knowledge of the wrongness of the conflict". Oh Dave. Oh Dave, Dave. At this late date, are you really hoping to convince anyone that the Iraq War wasn't a bloody horrible mistake? The bed is shat, it cannot be unshat, and in five minutes the hotel manager will be here and there will be no reasoning with him that shitting the bed actually represented a better outcome than the alternative possibilities.

Fair do's for mentioning the very obvious point about the fact that there was a conspiracy (under any reasonable meaning of the term) to trick up the war into happening (credited to Jon Snow at the Hay Festival, although it was also the key point of Johann Hari's review). But having set the hare running, Aaro signally fails to catch it. He waffles about the Hutton and Butler inquiries, and then sets out as his main argument ... that everyone believed what the government said in 2002, so they couldn't have been lying? I really don't get it here and suspect that the copy has in some way got mangled.

What clearly went on in 2002 was either that there was intentional deception, or that the government believed that Saddam had WMDs, and therefore because it believed this, thought it was a gamble worth taking to portray the evidence as much more conclusive than it was. That's the sort of thing that people go to jail for if they do it in a set of accounts; if this isn't "lying", then there were no liars in the executive suite at Enron.

Aaro himself, notoriously, was persuaded by the government case to make a massive investment of credibility points into a decidedly subprime vehicle (the parallels between the September dossier, in which poor quality underlying material was layered, structured and given the imprimateur of a supposedly neutral agency to create the illusion of AAA status, and the CDO market, are perhaps fertile ground for someone more desperate for a column than myself). Unlike the investors in Bernard Madoff's funds, however, he seems determined to defend the very people who swindled him. Nice one.

And then we end up with the old chestnut, "errors of postwar planning". As if any inquiry into the Decent doctrine of "war first, plan later" is going to come out looking good for the reputations of those people and pundits who kept telling us that the Iraqis were crying out to be invaded?

Basically, my point here is that Thomas Friedman already wrote this column, three years ago.

Lucky 13

Thanks very much to BenSix in the comments, for the heads up on Dave's appearance at the Editorial Intelligence blogging debate thing, in which he gives us a shout-out! Big up yourself Dave man!

One of the other comments DA makes is that his main problem with the blogosphere is not so much the criticism it makes of the commentariat as the fact that, to quote "in one single comment thread at Guido Fawkes, I was called a c**t 25 times" (the asterisks are the typographic equivalent of the bleep inserted by EI's web editors). With this in mind, I thought I'd see how we score on that metric:

Pretty well! We called Nick Cohen a c##t once (by allusion), Rod Liddle a c##t once (directly) and Chris Woodhead an "unspeakable c##t" once. We've also upbraided Nick Cohen for "calling everyone who disagrees with you a crpyto-fascist and a c##t" (perhaps hypocritically in context) and suggested that he would only be happy with Newsnight if Jeremy Paxman were to call Ming Campbell a Saddam-loving c##t.

We suggested that Niccolo Machiavelli's advice could be summed up in part as "be a total c##t" (I think fair enough, although political philosophers might suggest there's more to it than that) and adapted a Peter Cook sketch in order to put the C-word in the mouth of a personalised "Euston". We also reported on Rod Liddle having, possibly (quoted in a Guido Fawkes post on the Spectator party) called Dave "that c##t Aaronovich[sic]". I think this might have been the comments thread he was talking about. I suggested that "the project of being a c##t about the war" was a part of Decency that Aaro didn't take part in, and we suggested that a picture of Norman Finkelstein could be found in the Dictionary of British Colloquialism under the heading "do you have to be quite such a c##t about it?".

Unnaccountably, we described AA Gill as "the noted drama critic and c##t" (untrue - he is a restaurant and TV critic; we apologise unreservedly) and suggested that Tom Conti "called Aaro, at length, a c##t", in what I maintain is a reasonable summary of the relevant Ham & High interview, but where our Readers' Editor found that Conti did not actually use that word and so censured us.

That's it. I'm surprised that I've haven't used the word in the context of the Prime Directive and suspect that this is because the site search only picks up front page posts rather than comments.

Update: Mindful of our younger readers (and also to avoid having to change the post title to "Lucky 25"), I have redacted the relevant words from this post. Readers wishing to enjoy the original unexpurgated version can copy it into word and do CTRL-H to replace "##" with "un". Apple users, you're on your own.

Like a Wolfowitz Upon the Fold

Really just an excuse to link to Dave Noon of Lawyers, Guns And Money:

As if to affirm its utter worthlessness, the Post follows up the canning of Dan Froomkin by publishing a stream of effluent from Paul Wolfowitz, who seems to believe that Obama's ability to shape events in Iran is roughly on par with the Reagan administration's ability to shape events in the Philippines 23 years ago. Never mind, of course, the fact that one's ability to usher someone like Ferdinand Marcos from power is correlated in a non-trivial way with the fact that Marcos presided over a client state that the US once literally owned, and over which it continued to assert significant military, political and economic power. Which is so totally like what's happening in Iran, I'm not sure why the comparison failed to strike me before now.

So far, I haven't seen Wolfowitz cited by any Decents. Who will get there first? Hitchens or Nick Cohen?

Bonus links: Who is IOZ? (one of the very few truly radical bloggers anywhere). John Cole on Wolfowitz vs Obama. (BTW, isn't Wolfowitz a registered Democrat, for what that's worth?) Cole again on a distinction I consider very important: blowhards on democracy in the abstract (yay!) against democracy in the real world (the people's choice is not actually liberal or nice or even particularly able, so, er, boo to him and his supporters).

Consider this an open thread on Iran and anything else. Also, if anyone finished DA's latest, you're welcome to give your opinion at length. I don't think I made half-way. "I don't think there is much wrong with the [Labour] party's view of say, climate change, the security-liberty balance, public investment or international engagement."
Can anyone tell me what these views (as voted on at conference) actually are? My current (possibly cynical) view is that the Labour party's view of all of these (as expressed by the relevant ministers) is ad hoc and opportunist. I'd be glad to be wrong.