Rupert has a plan:

I think I have a pair of slightly mouldering size 12s which should just fit the parcel. Gordon may expect a package shortly, once the post sorts itself out…

I rarely find myself outright trembling with rage and fear. This, though, managed it:

Could they have found a more unreconstructed example of steaming, greasy excrement? The idiocy on display is commonplace Republicanism; peace through violence, defence through bombing cities full of children to dust, the usual. But the boldness of the hypocrisy took my breath away. Just listen to the smug shitmouth:

Interviewer: Are you worried about the escalating costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I mean, how would we pay for it?

Delegate: We should plant a flag, take the oil, take the money, we deserve reimbursement.

Reimbursement? Reimbursement for what, precisely? You invade a country citing your own country’s defence from weapons you claim an undemocratic dictator foisted on that people; you also claim you’ll shunt off that dictator. You mercilessly bungle that war, to the tune of some 85,000 civilian deaths and leave it with streets dominated by theocratic militias. In short, you do the job for yourself and you do it badly. You have no right to reimbursement.

And the flow of filth goes on unabated. Schwartz feels that it makes perfect sense to actively bomb Iran - that is, take a step past threatening to bomb - on the grounds that Iran might threaten Israel. Note that he doesn’t even try to frame his viciousness as a defence of the bombed, this time; there’s no mention of brutal theocracy as there is by anti-war projects such as HOPOI. He simply sees people he’s never met and likely doesn’t understand, who happen to have been born on the wrong side of the border, and decees they must be flattened. It’s naked, undisguised jingoism.

Politicians are often more restrained by their partisan supporters than by the electorate themselves. Those supporters put the politicians where they were. In McCain’s case, they nominated him. If not for their support, they wouldn’t even be before the electorate. They have to listen to them, day after day, month after month - a practise they only have to repeat for the voters every four years. So, when McCain’s supporters demand the outright obliteration of the Middle East, we know how little restraint he might face should he win the election; none. Isn’t that terrifying?

(Hat-tip: Mr. Eugenides.)

It hardly needs to be mentioned that the British pro-war coalition (a mixture of the most loathsome and internecine members of the left, along with a few gullible sops such as Johann Hari and, of course, the usual jingoist rightists) has shrunk and collapsed. Support for the war has tanked heavily over the past few years and reduced into a pale shadow of the former polarity that left the country so heavily divided that Radio 1 denied Hot Hot Heat’s best song the coverage it deserved due to its title and chorus being a reference to “Bandages”.

Anti-war sentiment, meanwhile, has swollen. The increasing crescendo of dissent was easily the largest single factor in driving Blair from office and without this ultimate, unforgivable betrayal there is little doubt that Labour would be in a far superior position to the predicament that they find themselves in. Had Michael Howard opposed the War there would be a sliver of a chance that he would be Prime Minister today, but its unquestionable that Labour would have taken an even greater pounding. As it is the Conservative’s inability to attack Blair properly upon the war (being able to attack the fashion in which it was conducted but not its existence) hindered them heavily and their failure to provide the opposition expected of them ensured that it took another few years and a total re-branding for them to grasp the public consciousness.

Whereas previously a deep commitment to opposition had filled many with conviction to end it (the largest protest in British history serves as an obvious indication of as much) the abatement of this apoplexy has been accompanied with the broadening of anti-war views. It is now only die-hards such as the ones SES censors all mention of that keep the line firm. Most of the Guardianistas, all of Hari and the rest have abandoned their former backing and grown contrite. Matthew Parris described this process as the sinking of the good ship Neo-con almost two years ago. By now the process is through. A scattered handful remain, fit only for being subjected to ridicule by radical socialists and squabbling over which Presidential candidate to back: all out behind the war and back the reactionary or throw your chips for Obama and his progressive vigour on all matters, bound to crush your love-child underfoot.

But this division is of greater significance than the group it tears apart: for in America one party’s de facto leader is a man who reckons that the war is “One that should never have been authorised and should never have been waged.” Now there is a position which there is no mistaking the conviction of. Although he has since mixed this stance with a displeasing nationalist smudge of the suggestion that Americans should “Stop rebuilding their country and start rebuilding our own” his core position seems sound.

As heartening as this is, should we not pause for a moment to reflect upon how strange it is that no such voice exists within Britain? Or rather, no such firm tones and intentions are anywhere matched by the actual possibility of the speaker coming to power. The Labour Party are of course crippled over this issue by their own conduct, with Brown incapable of speaking out over the issue as the inevitable retort “Where were you with these words when it mattered?” would snap him. The Conservatives are led, once again, by a war backer and he shows no signs of revoking his former position. So far as can be determined the line is jingoism as usual, despite the vast requirements that this makes upon the state which the Tories supposedly want to reduce the role and size of (funny how rightists always overlook military spending, even for totally superfluous and massively expensive measures such as Trident. Or, for that matter, the equally useless and even more pricey Iraq War.). The Liberal Democrats used to be a bastion of war opposition, as well as a sponge for disaffected Labour voters in 2005. But at present they are led by Nick Clegg, who seems to follow Menzies Campbell (who had a considerable amount of foreign policy experience) in issuing a muffled silence over the matter. He may well be firmly opposed to the invasion and subsequent occupation, it would not surprise me at all, but as of yet I have heard not a word of it from him.

The Greens and BNP, along perhaps with UKIP (I hopefully can be forgiven for not being bothered enough to check out their view, nor that of Veritas) are or were against the war. The Scottish exceptoin is a substantial one but strictly local (or if the SNP get their way, strictly foreign). George Galloway got a seat out of it (before the “Coalition” he rode collapsed multiple times). But this is scant consolation. In 2004 the Green Party of America was against the war and secured beneath a single percentage point in the presidential election and no national seats anywhere. Now the head of the Democratic Party, which claimed both houses in 2006 largely on the back of weariness of the war, and the most likely candidate to win opposes it strongly. That is the sort of four year progress I would anticipate of Britain. That would match the groundswell towards war opposition which has occurred in that time.

But, as I ask whenever someone suggests an “Anyone but Miliband” candidate claiming Labour victory, where is the name? Nobody in British politics shares a vigorous opposition to the War and the possibility of ending up anywhere important. Even the aforementioned most-likely-next-Labour-leader has done a grand total of nothing to end the war in his position of Foreign Secretary. Nobody inside the government or out seems up to the task and after the massive swing towards opposition this is not so much puzzling and disappointing as baffling and intolerable. Must the war serve only as a hindrance for those who backed it and never as an opportunity for those that did not? Is there no one willing to seize the chance to end it immediately and ride with this willingness to power?

If not we shall have to settle into the awkward position of being substantially to the right of America. At best we shall be dragged out along with them. So perhaps we should take heart in noting that either way the jingoist nationalists will be mildly humiliated. Which is, once again, scant consolation.

I can’t decide who I want to lose.

May they die in each others arms. Soon.

Witness the triumph of western value importation.

Andrew Sullivan has the transcript for Obama’s speech. If there was any doubt that the man is merry leagues ahead of any other politician active in the Anglosphere a read of that ought to dispell it.

A relief.

I had feared that his firm line was softening (which would have not only been a true pity but also politically opened him up to the same “Flip-flop” claim that hounded John Kerry. As it is he is actually attacking The Surge outright, an unexpected angle given the quantity of good press that this strategic measure has been given. His criticisms are sound though: Afghanistan does seem to have suffered from neglect (having been mostly forgotten, it seems at times) and the massive scale investment and resulting permanant killing of resentment which The Surge was supposed to have achieved by now simply happened.

John McCain appears to be deeming it a success purely because less American troops are now dying. This disregards the civilian death count and the fact that The Surge had goals which it has failed to achieve. Simply to prevent further hæmorrhaging does not make the conditions ripe for continued presence in the fashion which McCain suggests. Unless, of course, Iraq is to be treated like an imperial conquest.

Less pleasing is Obama’s continued commitment to troop deployment in Afghanistan. Although things are far more clear here in terms of the American’s foes (the Taliban wish to cease control of the country and implement once again the truly grim conditions that they previously enjoyed) the extent to which such a force can be defeated by the present tactics used is unclear. Should the present approach of the former regime of engaging in pitched battles continue it is likely that the Americans shall continue to win but fighting such an extensive force when it takes up insurgency tactics will be difficult.

More than military might is required to win Afghanistan and safeguard it from re-conquest by theocracy. What must be won over is the people. Through allowing the seminal education of girls there is a start towards this underway but there must be other ways in which the repuganancy of the Taliban’s return can be demonstrated. A viable alternative would be pleasing but the extent to which any American president can forge such a movement is strictly limited. We must hope for an Afghan alternative to theocrats or American puppet rule to emerge. For the time being more troops being present to stop, for instance, the murder of teachers educating both genders for the first time in Afghanistan’s history does not seem displeasing.

Certainly more good can be done there than in Iraq.

I do my best to avoid posting links to Trotskyites and the like. Not because it only encourages them {given that they’ve put up with everyone else ignoring them I doubt they’ll mind me doing the same} but because political extremists are so easy to ignore.

When they pick up on stuff that other’s won’t, though, it has to be done.

That the amount of birth defects have increased hardly surprises me. I recall going to see a play and meeting a chap who had been briefly exposed to “Spent” uranium during his service in the British Army in the first Gulf War. He later discovered, many years later, that the quantity of radiation in his blood was a few hundred times over that which would be safe. That his health was crippled as a consequence is perhaps surprising only in that he managed to stay alive. Now imagine the consequences for those residing in civilian areas struck by these substances. Imagine people who are not briefly in contact but return to their homes in areas hit by this stuff.

There has been copious evidence collected demonstrating the deleterious of these substances, but both the US and UK exempted themselves from any negative effects when writing up the laws concerning such matters.

Or perhaps it was the white phosperous.

Either way, we can but hope that the unhappy city of Fallujah is freed soon from the ill health and oppression that presently blight it and that the tyrants who struck it are tried as the war criminals that they are unquestionably are. Any apologist for this atrocity is either ignorant or an intellectual coward and callous whelp of the highest order.

Gerard Baker really is a lousy American correspondent.

Why? Because he understands half of America fine. Really well, in fact. There are better but he does an immensely decent job at reporting the right side, he has quite a feel for them and although he occasionally gets carried away {see: ham-fisted jingoism when it mattered} he actually seems to know nothing at all about the other side of America, about the left.

This article today simply confirmed it.

It dubbed Obama a “Dangerous Leftwinger” in a fashion that was positively McCarthian in the headline and then got worse from there:

He began with a jab at Obama’s wife, attempting to stage a critique-via-proxy to mask his real offensive on her husband, stating:

In what might be the most revealing statement made by any political figure so far in this campaign season…

in reference towards her views on America and pride. Apparently John McCain’s infamous “Iraq for 10,000 years” is effectively negligible. He then acted as the Thought Police and stated that she had a “remarkably narrow view”. I suspect that it was simply her breadth allowing her to note all of the atrocities that he acted as an apologist for.

He then proceeded to tout the moronic “Messianic” line, when Obama’s speeches have always told the American People that it would be a collective effort {perhaps something that Baker has trouble understanding} and been far from technocratic.

But then the idiocy gets further:

Secondly, and more importantly, I suspect it reveals much about what the Obama family really thinks about the kind of nation that America is.

It seems that Baker, although encouraging us to listen to Obama’s speeches has really never done so himself. Obama’s passion for America is blatant and only somebody lacking both internal ears and eyeballs could fail to observe it. Her view is her view, she will not be president. Barack’s is obvious.

He attempts to get around this by saying that he is on the “Wing” of the party that hates America {since obviously trying to get a country’s children educated and attended to by doctors is the signature for somebody who loathes it} but it here that Baker is worst of all.

I have observed a phenomenon amongst American correspondents that I dub the “Defensive Snarl”, usually accompanied by its applied aural form the “Hypocrite’s slur”. America is the target of a good deal of leftist bile and those who are in America tend to enjoy at least some element of their existence. Accordingly their tendency is to smear all of these critics as ferociously I can, in the most disingeious approach imaginable.

Calling all Americans “A bunch of bigots” is immensely ironic. Calling all critics of America those that call all Americans “A bunch of bigots” greater still.

Observe:

There is a caste of left-wing Americans who wish essentially and in all honesty that their country was much more like France.

I am almost in tears by this stage.

They wish it had much higher levels of taxation and government intervention, that it had much higher levels of welfare, that it did not have such a “militaristic” approach to foreign policy.

Yes, they do. Note the way that the use of ” ” to enclose the word militaristic. Why are they there? Presumably Gerard considers the USA’s foreign policy to be other than militaristic, and wants to let us know that he does not endorse such crazy traitor-talk as alleged that a President waddling around in an airforce jump-suit and beginning and then sustaining wars that cause a deranged amount of damage to entirely innocent people is something other than militaristic.

If that is his view then he should damn well say so and write a proper article explaining this idiocy.

But this has never been Baker’s style.  He prefers to keep himself in a rush, thinking that so long as he keeps on churning out the nonsense he can excuse not backing a word of it up.

Above all, that its national goals were dictated, not by the dreadful halfwits who inhabit godforsaken places like Kansas and Mississippi, but by the counsels of the United Nations.

This is the part where I began to imagine that Baker’s understanding of leftism and its priorities consisted of reading a few Those T-shirts and setting finger to key while still chuckling. I’ve read a good deal of leftist material over the past few years, much of it originating from America, and the one argument that I have not seen is the case for the UN taking over US foreign policy.

I am shocked that I have seen no blog, article or website promoting this cause if it really is as prominent a thing that we lefties covet. Strangely the impression that I got was that what the American Left really wanted was an end to torture, an end to the absurdity of an industrialised nation in the 21st century having citizens dying for want of healthcare or, oh, an end to the War?

This supports my long-held view that Baker really has no idea who the left are and what they believe in and as such his articles on them are bound to be that of a blind-man staggering about and bumping into things. Obviously he never reads any of their output since he has failed to note that the left really barely ever talks about the UN any more, perhaps because it now seems like the majority of Americans are coming around to its stance on the War. The American people, just like the majority of the American left always has, wants the troops out and wants it now. That’s what is spoken about, not the UN. Why would that be advocated when it looks like a President who agrees with them stands a strong {perhaps the strongest} of getting elected?

Ah, but what a fool I was to imagine that Baker would leave that uncovered:

He continues to insist, despite the growing evidence that this left-wing nostrum would be lunacy, that the US must pull its troops out of Iraq with the utmost dispatch.

Yes, nevermind the growth of actual Americans of the view that we need to leave, the lack of consensus towards remaining embedded in a country where we are causing damage to all democrats by associating western values with the presence of a unwanted military force is no concern for dear Gerard, for he can simply generate one from his mind’s never-ending fantastical capacity.

It is “Lunacy” to depart from a country that does not want us, where we are confined to a fortress city-within-a-city euphemistically termed “The Green Zone” to contrast it to the colour the streets turn whenever American soldiers try and travel anywhere else. Utterly absurd, of course. What could Barack be thinking? It is so beyond the pale, so in opposition to the almighty empirical data that I allude to but never cite, that we must not address his actual argument. Far better to dismiss him off hand, far better to use this as fodder for further idiocy.

Let the Fisking continue:

There was no shortage of proposals. He plans large increases in government spending on health and education.

As did Bush and as Bush did. If Baker is arguing that this is somehow still an approach advocated solely by the far left he has clearly not even heard of Huckabee, let alone noted that there is a candidate suggesting we shrink the state, Ron Paul, and that he has rarely received the support of more than 10% of Republican voters, often much less.

And we would have to overlook the trillions of dollars spent by Bush {indeed, the billions he has taken from China in order to stage Baker’s beloved war} as well. Of course.

He wants to tax the rich more to pay for it. He is against companies using the opportunities of free markets to restructure their operations in the US. He is vehemently protectionist.

These are policies of the left. However Baker is wrong in that he botches his follow through:

 when you cut through the verbiage there is nothing to suggest he believes anything that is seriously at odds with the far Left of his party.

Where he is utterly wrong.

Firstly he seems to have conflated verbiage with eloquence, when they are two clearly distinct concepts. When eloquent you say something with the same clarity but superior aesthetics to the most basic form that meaning could be gleaned from, while with verbiage the meaning is obscured by unnecessary clutter.

Baker is also wrong in that the left is actually considerably wary of Obama. He is barely distinct from Hillary but where he is it is to the right. The choice of the left would have been Edwards, by a merry mile, but in his stead they balked from Clinton owing largely to her blatant lack of integrity and ruthless opportunism. Obama is clearly a winner and the left are rather keen on enjoying a spot of that, since it really has been quite a while.

In a sentence less cloying than nauseating, he continues:

If you think about it for a second, it’s not really an accident that he has been endorsed by the likes of Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson.

Which makes it a mystery how he had such an easy time carrying all of the Red States, does it not? A total enigma, given that he is really a being of the hard-left.

Hang on though, I haven’t thought for a second…

Alright.

A second’s thought leads me to conclude that Obama is a centrist.

Though he talks with great eloquence about the future, he sounds for all the world like one of the long line of Democrats from George McGovern to Walter Mondale to Michael Dukakis, who became history by espousing policies and striking a rhetorical pose that was well out of the mainstream of American politics.

The absurdity of Obama being at all like McGovern, Mondale or Dukakis is just one that I am going to disregard entirely. I would feel defiled even debating that point.

Note, however, that he thinks that his perception is “For all the world”. Baker lives in his own fantastical planet, this much is clear, one with it’s own Iraq, not to mention its own America where the “Ordinary” American is in favour of remaining engaged within the aforementioned fantasy Iraq {and why not? It sounds like such a nice place} and now, it seems, Obama’s talk of working with Republicans, his strictly limited {but still utterly shocking to almost all leftists} praise of Reagen and his flanking of Hillary over healthcare from the Right simply never occurred.

This is a fantasy world where amongst the “real causes for American pride in the past 25 years” is “the victory in the first Gulf War in 1991″, where Suddam was left to slaughter the Kurdish rebels rising against him at his own leisure with helicopter gunships and other weaponry bought by the US as GIs stood by and did not even blast those airborne artillery batteries flying through their no-fly zone. A true triumph, that was.

This is a world where when an American sees an American will

fill up with understandable emotion whenever they see a report on television about the tragic heroics of some soldier or Marine who gave his life in Iraq or Afghanistan.

and amongst those feelings will not be blood-curdling rage at the pointless death of someone killed for no cause at all or remorse that this absurd spectacle of aimless carnage had been permitted to continue.

I could caustically rant on for hours about this fool and his distorted vision of an already warped country that deserves far more hatred than its earned yet at times seems defended solely by the blind to the bloodstains rather than those who can accept the horrors it has committed yet do not consider it the Great Satan but this commenteer on the Times website has already done my job for me:

What you claim as the “mainstream of American politics” is neither mainstream nor American. You are simply expressing the age old fear of the status quo, a fear of loosing the lucrative control the status quo has over Americans….You are afraid of Obama and what he stands for and frankly you should be.

Between 1 and 2 million people marched on the streets of London on 15 February 2003.  3 million in Rome.  Conservative estimates say 10 million took to the streets in 300 cities around the world.

Five years later, and the British public has not been motivated like this since.  Your thoughts in the comments section,  please.

Update: Well, would you look at that?