I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s [sic] and thought, ‘Why doesn’t anyone see where this is leading?’ ”
Media psychologist Oliver James, The Guardian
Did a high turnout from the Religious Right win it for Bush? Was it really about Moral Values
? On reflection it seems not. The immediate reaction in the UK at least - that the Stupid Block won out over the clearly more sensible Kerry crowd - was premature and maybe we should give the pollsters and statisticians more time to argue over the presidential election. Calling 60 million Americans stupid certainly isn’t going to help the Democrats in 2008 and it won’t help Labour or the Tories over here plan strategies either.
the Rotterdam police were destroying a mural by Chris Ripke that he’d created to express his disgust at the murder of Theo van Gogh by Islamist crazies. Ripke’s painting showed an angel and the words “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. Unfortunately, his workshop is next to a mosque, and the imam complained that the mural was “racist”, so the cops arrived, destroyed it, arrested the television journalists filming it and wiped their tape. Maybe that would ring a bell with Oliver James’s mum.
Mark Steyn The Telegraph
I was in the US during the DNC and I saw Kerry’s big moment, after hours of toe-curling tributes to his sheer wonderfuness. He walked onto the stage, saluted in that Top-Gun, hand-snapping way and yelled that he was Reporting for Duty!
. It reminded me of Kinnock at the Sheffield rally. But if the man’s difficult to stomach, what about policy?
Kerry’s position on Iraq, as far is it could be glimpsed, was that he had voted for the committment of troops and supported the action against Saddam’s regime but thought he could manage things better.
Gay marriage? It’s an issue on which he’s changed his position. He seemed to support civil unions but objected to marriage. It’s obviously divisive and Kerry thought he had to fudge - or nuance
as he’d have said - the issue, rather than provide a clear and believable statement of principle. A quarter of gays voted for Bush but I suppose they must be the stupid ones.
Every single BBC reporter looks like they have just swallowed a wasp
The BBC was hoping for a Kerry win because of the difficult position in which it would leave Blair. It hasn’t really given up fighting over the Gilligan affair, which saw the resignation of the Beeb’s Chairman and its Director General.
All of this has been buried beneath an obsession with the institutional future of the BBC - not as a news outlet, but as a political opposition to the government
