For a former lecturer of American and British studies at Oxford Tim Hanes truly does know startlingly little about his topic. This is the man who predicted that the Republicans would hold both Houses so firmly that he was forced to eat the article coated in tobasco after their thorough electoral humiliation. How exactly a man who seemingly knows quite so little about the shape the future will take yet {be it what would happen to Iraq after foreign soldiers took control of it or…Well…Anything at all} gets to continue to make ham-fisted attempts after so many shocking failures is beyond me.

This week he stared off with a premise as weak as it was offensive:

He [Obama] has been the General Lee of the competition so far.

Yes, mixed-race, half-black Barack Obama is much like the man who came vaguely close to protecting American slavery. Can you actually get worse than that? Yes, it seems like you can.

If he were to win the Pennsylvania primary, he would indeed become unstoppable. Yet adversity has brought out the best in Mrs Clinton. She has fought for seven weeks in Pennsylvania and while no one has been killed or wounded (unlike the 8,000 dead and near 50,000 casualties and losses at Gettysburg) it has been a bruising struggle with Mrs Clinton landing the most blows. The odds are that she will at least emerge strong enough to take her cause on further.

This analysis is, to put it lightly, shockingly poor. The only perspective from which this could be the “Best in Mrs. Clinton” is if you are either a journalist or a Republican. The former have delighted in being provided copious headlines by Clinton’s vicious mud-slinging while the latter have seen their electoral prospects soar and woefully inappropriate candidate unchallenged.

Furthermore she may have landed the most blows but this is primarily because she is the one who has been doing the most punching. Obama has started to retaliate of late, perhaps because of so many people saying that he looked like a “Wimp” after the last debate, but for the most part the month and three weeks have been an exercise in Clinton doing her best to maim her opponent, causing endless vats of rightist joy to be filled.

The chances are that Mr Obama will end the nomination season with more pledged delegates than Mrs Clinton. His admirers argue that it would be profoundly wrong for those who have not been elected as delegates to overturn the will of those who have. It’s a seductive claim, but there are good reasons why the superdelegates should ignore it and instead endorse Mrs Clinton.

Sounds dreadfully “Democratic”.

The first is, what is the point of the superdelegate system if all they do is follow the majority of pledged delegates? Why bother with them? Why not just allow them to turn up at the convention as mere observers?

Shockingly enough there is no point.

The Democratic Party created the superdelegate system about 25 years ago because it feared that the party’s most ideological supporters were quite capable of choosing a candidate who many ordinary Democrats would not feel able to back at polling stations. If the primaries and caucuses were to be the gearbox of the nominating procedure, then the superdelegates were designed to serve as the handbrake. That is their role.

Yes, the elite knows best. Let us place our trust in the establishment. The wishes of the party who actually showed up to vote are an irrelevance.

Secondly, any advantage that Mr Obama will have among pledged delegates is misleading. Not only will Mrs Clinton have won in most of the largest states but she will probably have secured the bulk of delegates won in primaries - where turnout is comparatively high, while he has romped home in the caucuses - where participation is notoriously feeble.

It is here that Hanes exposes his blundering ignorance. He would have half a leg to stand on if he was actually correct in his claim concerning the number of Democrats which have voted for which. This is being measured and is known, predictably enough, as the “Popular Vote”.

At present Obama is thrashing her there, too.

That noise is the debris of Hanes’ argument hitting a hard surface as his case falls to pieces like a house of cards encountering a falling brick.

Furthermore, if all the superdelegates were compelled to vote for the person who won the most votes in their state (which they should not be, but it is an interesting exercise), then Mrs Clinton, who is likely to end the season having triumphed in eight of the most populous ten states (including Florida and Michigan, which had their results discounted by the Democratic National Committee as punishment for scheduling their primaries too early), would benefit hugely.

Because, of course, a vote where neither candidate campaigned is perfectly justifiably claimed as one in which she “Triumphed”, as is one where the named “Obama” was not even to be accepted as a write-in candidate let alone to be found on the ballot. Hanes’ partisanship is quite bewildering to behold. Either that or it is a level of ignorance that would be yet more shocking. I am highly thankful that I never endured him as a lecturer.

Finally, enough is now known about the strengths and weaknesses of these two contenders for superdelegates to come to the following conclusion. Mrs Clinton is the 5347 option and Mr Obama is the 5542 one. By this I mean that it is tough to imagine her obtaining more than 53 per cent of the national vote against John McCain, but it is hard to envisage her falling below 47 per cent either.

Given that half of Americans have stated that they would not vote for her under any circumstances I think that it is safe to say that it is impossible to imagine her winning at all.

Most of those Democrats who prefer Mr Obama to her (African-Americans, affluent whites, the young) would nevertheless back the New York senator in November

This is where Hanes becomes simply tiresome in his disconnection to America. I have visited chat-rooms, read blogs and talked to friends over AIM but not actually been there since I was still in the womb so perhaps the same is true of me. But there is one message unmistakable: Hillary will not be getting the black votes she lost back. Not since all that carnage. If she wins the nomination the people disgusted with her actions and “Fairytale” and “So did Jesse Jackson” remark of her husband will not flock back to her. Neither will the “Obamaniacs”, who loathe her. Neither will the MoveOn.orgers, who she lied about and lost forever when she backed the war.

They will simply not be there.

(particularly if their man was in the vice-presidential slot)

Yeah, he actually won the election through popular vote and through delegates but he’s certain to settle for that. I fear I see the specter of race hovering here, or at least opposition to youth {not that Obama truly is one} but as neither are mentioned explicitly I will not speculate.

Mr Obama, by contrast, has a somewhat higher vote ceiling but a much lower floor to his vote. If Americans decide that they are desperate for “change”, pure and simple, then he is a better vehicle for that mood than a woman who has the history of the 1990s attached to her.

Americans are pretty clearly in favour of that, as demonstrated by the theft of Obama’s buzzword by Hillary.

If, though, voters are after “change (with reassurance)”, as one suspects is the case, then she is a smarter bet against Mr McCain. A sizeable slice of working-class Democrats who back her may switch to the Arizona Senator if she loses. In the worst-case scenario, the Republican champion may well wipe the floor with Mr Obama.

Yes, nothing like a man who wants to stay in Iraq for as long as it takes to “Win” {whatever that means} to offer “reassurance”. No match exists for a man who is not only incapable of understanding the economy at present but also seemingly devoid of much interest to do so in the future. The working-classes are bound to move towards a man who proposes their families continue to die in Iraq and suggests that they get no assistance after having their lives ruined by corporate lies.

Iraq is, of course, the unspoken issue here. I suspect that Hanes prefers Hillary for much the same reason the right does: they know that she is incapable of removing troops and they are wary of someone who had enough foresight to show them up long, long ago, while they were still crying out that it would be the seamless toppling of a tyrant followed by liberal democracy reigning and free civil liberties being distributed evenly to all by a crack-squad of friendly, benevolent GIs.

Obama is deeply challenging to those who were fooled quite so thoroughly in a way that a fellow victim {Clinton does at least care about the political aftermath, which she did not foresee} never can. Clinton will never gain the political leverage necessary to extricate America and this is an out-come that the unrepentant neo-cons and their blushing apologists find favourable. The rest suggest that we should abandon the White Man’s Burden, an act of heinous dereliction.

Assuming she is victorious in Pennsylvania, then Mrs Clinton should keep on running. The superdelegates must ask themselves not only “who can win?” but “how might they lose?” For the reality of Gettysburg is not that in pure military terms the North actually won, but that it did not lose. It was this that later made it such a decisive moment.

If the superdelegates wish to destroy the relationship of an entire generation with their party and have a burning desire to lose an election that a one-eyed monkey with mange could triumph against the Republican Party with then they should unquestionably override the wishes of those they supposedly represent and force Clinton into position. This would result in a rupture within the party and the ultimate in culture war elections: Vietnam vet who reckons America should have stayed in and reckons they should stay in now against technocratic liberal of the elite and of the establishment. A speech at Wellesley versus years being tortured by the Viet Cong.

More dire baby-boomer drama, in other words.

Brian Paddick gave a wincingly poor interview in the Evening Standard today.  Observe:

“I am really trying to get my head around this. Do you want somebody who is a really nasty little man in the shape of Ken Livingstone, very unpleasant and rather nasty, or somebody who just appears to be somewhat eccentric but otherwise really harmless as an individual - except I wouldn’t trust him to run anything for me?”

This appears to be his most substantive attack on Ken; that he is a “really nasty little man.”  That’s more than weak.  It’s vacuous.  Ken may well be a deeply odious man on a personal level.  So what?  His personality in itself does not matter. What matters is how he’s run the City, and, if you must drag it in, how his personality has affected that. That’s what matters to London, and that’s what’ll make a difference to their lives.

If Paddick attacked that record, then it might be worth at least listening to him. But really, when the best he can do is to call Ken nasty, then I can only assume he has nothing more damaging to say.

Oh, and if he thinks Boris is “harmless as an individual”; does giving away the number of a man he knows is going to be beaten as a result not make Paddick’s sharp, policeman’s nose twitch, just a little bit?

Moving on:

“I didn’t say I was equidistant between the two of them [Boris et Ken]. It is very difficult to gauge where I am between the other two candidates because it is like comparing chalk and cheese.”

Surely that would make it easier to place Paddick between them?  The greater the contrast, the more room there is for you to play around with on the spectrum.  Perhaps his difficulty in placing himself has more to do with his (and his party’s) uncertainty over what precisely he stands for…

“I seriously considered, for a few hours, the approach from the Conservatives. But on principle I couldn’t stand for what the Conservatives stand for. I am a Liberal Democrat, that’s where my heart lies.”

Brian Paddick’s heart lies with the Lib Dems - which presumably explains why he’s been a member for less than a year.

And now, onto Paddick’ other big assault, on Iain Blair:

“I spent 30 years in the police and it became increasingly Stalinist in the restrictions that the Commissioner and Dick Fedorcio [director of public affairs] placed on senior officers and what they could say. This is what happens in times of trouble, you batten down the hatches, and Ian Blair was in a lot of trouble.”

Now, Paddick could be making a good point here.  Perhaps Ian Blair does act like a tyrant within his own organisation; and perhaps public trust in the police has diminished. But when he mixes that with ysterical language about “Stalinism” he rather undermines his credibility. It almost seems that he’s introducing that simply to discredit Blair - as there’s no way it can be anything but a rhetorical phrase, given the death-camps Stalinism implies - and excaggerate his point.  Which makes us question the point a little…

That seems to be Paddick’s problem much of the time here.  He has the potential to make a good point, but ruins it with ill-supported personal attacks.  Perhaps the ES cut large chunks out - it wouldn’t be surprising. Here, though, it comes across very negatively.  Paddick’s very exclamation that he can’t understand why anyone would want to vote for Ken and Boris suggests that he knows most of his votes are anti-Ken-and-Boris votes. There’s not even an attempt to explain why people should vote for him positively. Just attack after attack.

So, either a very distorting piece of editting - or another indicator that Paddick’s campaign lacks any real content beyond a, “not Ken, not Boris” platform.

The Evening Standard has, I think, reached a new low.  Observe the headline of their lead article today:

Suicide bomb backer runs Ken’s campaign

Really?  Let’s compare that accusation, printed in big, black letters across every newboard in London, with what’s actually in the article:

“It includes a campaign of vilification aimed at his Conservative rival, Boris Johnson. It is being waged by Muslims 4 Ken, led by 39-year-old lecturer Anas Altikriti and Palestinian-born Azzam Tamimi, a supporter of Hamas, the militant group dedicated to the creation of an Islamic state of Palestine.”

So - Tamimi runs a group backing Ken. He does not run, “Ken’s campaign,” with the official sanction and funding this implies. There’s a difference.

A man who endorses suicide bombings is undoubtedly vile. Ken might do well to disown him, just as Boris did the BNP’s second preference endorsement. But to conflate being supported by a group and that group running the campaign is absurd.  Did they claim the BNP ran Boris’ campaign when they endorsed him?  Of course not.  And yet this is the way they spin it with Livingstone…

It’s to be expected from the Evening Standard, of coursser.  They’ll smear any leftist who ever has a chance of winning as much as possible.  I’ll still complain about them, though…

Ali’s asked me not to fill the site with Green propaganda - and I’ve no intention of doing so. This, however, isn’t so much an argument for the Greens as a demonstration of how awful a paper the Evening Standard is.

Today the Green Party launched its manifesto for the London elections. It’s a fairly long document, about 15 pages in length. Most of this is devoted to the twin cause of making London greener and more affordable. It includes commitments to policies such as the living wage, public ownership, support for small businesses, cutting fares, affordable housing, sustainability and governmental accountability.

There is very little space - less than five lines, to my knowledge - devoted to chickens and vending machines. And yet this is the Evening Standard’s coverage.

I believe the comment I left on the ES site will suffice as my response:

This article heavily misrepresents the Green campaign.

Proudly emblazoned at the head of the article is the commitment to ban vending machines and junk food in schools. And yet, for the Greens, it’s a peripheral policy at best. It occupies one small corner, less than two full lines long, of a manifesto stretching well beyond ten pages.

It’s not Sian’s first concern either - nor is it a new one, for the Greens or anyone else. This isn’t a new policy originating from the Green party. The removal of vending machines is almost a standard part of improving schools. Any school hoping to be awarded the prestigious Healthy Schools award must get rid of them. All this commitment does is to bring London in to line with accepted national policy.

Meanwhile, key policies such as those on local businesses are relegated to the nether end of the article - as if they didn’t matter. Far from it. The Greens are absolutely committed to fostering strong local economies in London. The motor of these local economies are their small businesses, which provide far greater community value than many larger corporations. It’s virtually one of the core messages.

I’m sure (I’d like to hope, anyway) that this strange representation of the Greens is down to a lack of understanding rather than any deliberate bias. But it looks shoddy.

That last line is, of course, a lie. I’m fairly certain the people at the Evening Standard are intelligent enough to read and digest the simple strings of simple sentences explaining in simple terms the Greens’ policies. Which rather leaves one view of their reportage…

For more questionable reporting, check their article on last night’s hustings. Or should I say, their article on Boris at last night’s hustings? For such a poor performance (witness parts here) he gets a remarkable amount of positive writing.

I could pee myself with glee. The new Politics Home Index website has launched, and it’s about 50,000,000,000 times better than one could have imagined. There are many downsides to it, but first allow me to explain why it is my new web homepage (at the cost of my own domain, which I pay good money for). My initial assessment may well be premature, but I like to think of myself as an impulsive kind of guy.

Instead of visiting 10 different news sites and blogs each time I log on to the web, I can now see all I need to know in one place. I used to get a gist of what was going on in the world by reading the BBC news website, then scanning several other sites for full reports and better analysis. Such action is now redundant: Politics Home links to five sources of the top stories, so it acts as a hub for all of my political browsing needs.

There is a live blogfeed across the top of the page, pointing you to the latest posts from 100 blogs. For fear of missing posts, I cannot imagine people using this to navigate blog sites, but the range of sources included will certainly draw traffic to blogs that might not see many visitors normally.

There is a tumbnail image of the front pages of the daily papers - my daily visit to the Sky News site is rendered unnecessary.

The “Green Box” does exactly what it says on the tin - linking to all of today’s top stories as they happen.

The Comment and Analysis section points you towards (you guessed it) comments and analysis pages. In reading a broadsheet, I read comment pieces; in browsing newspaper websites online, I do not. No longer do I need to navigate from the News > UK News > Politics section of a paper’s website to its comment section: quality articles are linked from the Politics Home page.

Everything is centred on one page. All links open in a new tab (or window, depending on your browser settings), and you can simply switch back to see more of the same. There is no sub-category system where different kinds of articles are linked on different pages: everything is listed together, so one is more inclined to read a wider range of types of coverage from a wider range of sources. That can only be a good thing.

My favourite part of the site is the Phi Numbers section, in the right hand column. This gives a breakdown of the latest opinions of 100 “Westminster insiders”, giving a genuine insight into political developments. It also provides a breakdown of which stories are gaining the most attention in the media - calculated by column inches in one graph and by an apparently arbitrary “news priority” index in another. This is a huge step forward in media-watching.

No review of the site would be complete without dissecting its failings, and there are several downsides to the website. Some faults are easily fixed, but others are simply a natural part of this kind of website.

The blog aggregator risks concentrating traffic on “high-ranking” weblogs, leaving the smaller and more independent-minded blogs shut out. By the nature of collaborative blogs funded by the mainstream media organisations, the aggregator is dominated by a few sources, such as the Telegraph’s Three Line Whip. As such, only a handful of individual, non-commercial, traditional blogs are featured. An “us and them” mentality already exists in the British Blogosphere, where individuals such as Iain Dale boast monthly of rising web statistics, whereas your average bloke with a Blogger account gets a few hundred hits each month, mainly from a very small group of readers. Quality control is difficult, and manual blog searches are time-consuming, but there is something quite perverse about aggregating 100 cherry-picked blogs for reading. Iain Dale’s “Daley Dozen” (tacky name aside) provides links to some blogs I have never even heard of, and I appreciate the effort he takes to list these quality posts.

Politics Home acts as a hub, linking out to all kinds of news and comment sources. There is a danger with such a site that it becomes a cold, faceless site with no character. I recoiled at the sight of the homepage when I first saw it, literally scared by the amount of information being thrust at me. It may well be the Bloomberg of the political world, but it inherits the same demerits. I like character to shine through what I read: there is a danger that Politics Home will distill the character of the sites it links to.

The Magazines section is a great source for more in-depth articles, but I can’t help but feel that it would benefit from a media section.

There may be just a bit too much information there, updated just a bit too often. I gave up trying to read some of the MSM collaborative blogs because there were too many posts per day; I felt I was always missing something, so stopped trying to catch any of it. Politics Home allows you to catch up with a previous day’s news - a tool I can see as becoming very useful - but it is clear that it is impossible to keep abreast of everything it offers. I hate to think I am missing out on half the functionality of a website just because I have too few hours in my day to enjoy it. (For what it is worth, here at Scribo we average about 4 or 5 posts per day; not too much, not too little.)

Politics Home Index (taking the name Phi, and using the Greek character as its logo for no apparent reason beyond the want of a logo) penetrates deep into the heart of opinion-forming in the UK. It polls 100 MPs, journalists, bloggers and others. It links to every good news source, making it important to bloggers and web editors alike. It provides unique information that will be reported in the press regularly - ConservativeHome’s monthly polling of Tory members is uniquely valuable. It provides unrivalled system of sending readers out from the homepage to dozens of media sources. It charts the day’s developments - more than any other site is capable of. Politicians’ media appearances are logged, and their dialogue quoted. How long will it be before journalists start scanning the Politics Home blog for inconsistencies or divisions of opinion, then quoting verbatim in their print articles?

Make no mistake, this website will change the way the print media makes its presence known online. I fear that it might have a negative impact on political blogging, but it will be an invaluable resource for bloggers.

There was an unusually good article in the Sunday Times today on Boris’ mayoral campaign. It hints that he verges on being secretive, frequently economic with the truth and surrounded by questionable individuals - in short, everything that Boris accuses Ken of being.

There’s a lot in the article.  I’ll draw out a couple of enlightening sections, though.  All emphasis mine:

“The diarist asks about Johnson’s policies, which remain unclear. Ritterband says he has little grasp of policy, and leaves that to the wonks – a division of labour that might explain why politics strikes outsiders as slickly manipulative and false. But Ritterband does reveal Johnson’s strategy: to be “not Ken”.”

Couldn’t that be summarised to: “Boris lacks policy of his own and relies on oppositional politics”?

“It’s not uncommon to find the holders of power withdrawing from scrutiny; and for some time now it’s been all-but-impossible to interview Ken Livingstone. It’s less common to find a would-be office-holder, in mid-campaign, adopting the same elusive approach. But the two leading contenders to run the capital appear to have taken on the character of some rare beast. You catch a glimpse of the eyes and – whoosh! – they are gone.”

Ken’s office is very secretive, yah?  Maybe Boris is preparing himself for the role…

“Why are they so paranoid? Because Boris is desperately hard to control. His biographer, Andrew Gimson, gives an account of how badly the Tories mishandled his trip to Liverpool to apologise – to the entire city – for an editorial in The Spectator. A press officer who watched it on TV told Gimson: “Our hands were wringing in despair as it went from one catastrophe to another.”

Brian Paddick, the former Metropolitan Police commander who is standing as mayoral candidate for the Lib Dems, has questioned Johnson’s decision to give up alcohol until polling day, suggesting that he did so at the insistence of Conservative minders, to avoid making any blunders during the campaign. “What Londoners have got to realise is, four years is a long time for the mayor to be kept out of the media so he doesn’t make any gaffes,” Paddick said, “and for him to give up drink.””

I think that extract rather speaks for itself.

“In his speech, Johnson talks about people’s difficulty getting on the housing ladder, and Livingstone’s tendency to pepperpot the skyline with odious buildings. He says it was high time that the thumbs of the RMT were prised from the neck of the commuter, with a no-strike agreement. And he expresses a love of London buses. “But we have many of them filling up an elephants’ graveyard in Oxford Circus.” This gets a big laugh. He promises to replace the bendy bus with a new kind of Routemaster, and to secure a free bus pass for “Ken Leavingsoon”.”

Boris is an intensely serious person who has serious policies for London, his campaign says.  Perhaps it’s just that he doesn’t talk about them in his speeches.  Would that be because his campaign is lying and Boris has no policies, or because his campaign is lying and they’re crap policies?

“Johnson’s experiments with truth are linked by his foes to a wider inconsistency. In 2006, at the Conservative conference, he seemed scornful about Jamie Oliver’s school-dinners campaign. “I say, let people eat what they like. Why shouldn’t they push pies through the railings?” But David Cameron, the party leader, had lauded the campaign as “social responsibility in action”. Johnson subsequently described Oliver as a “national saint” and a “messiah”.

Livingstone argues that such shifts undermine Johnson’s managerial credentials. “Johnson used to denounce the congestion charge and now says he supports it. He supported the Iraq war, then opposed it. London does not need a mayor who constantly changes their positions because they have been proved to be disastrously wrong.””

That, again, speaks for itself.

“He talks about home ownership, transport and safety, cracking the same gags as the night before: the “elephants’ graveyard” for bendy buses, the Pyongyang-style free sheet, the free bus pass for Ken Leavingsoon. These had seemed funny the previous evening, but hearing them repeated was startlingly flattening. Nor is his pitch absolutely spot-on. When he talks about his plan to work with the non-profit organisations that aid disaffected youth, the blank expressions suggest he might as well be describing voting systems in his beloved ancient Rome. I suspect that he’s aware of this, because to compensate he cranks up the volume. I write in my notebook: “Speaks at top of his voice. Slightly crazy expression.”

He talks about bureaucracy at City Hall. “There are 630 officials in City Hall. Some are on salaries of more than £100,000 a year – not an enormous amount to some of you” (lots of laughter) “but they’re being subsidised by some of the poorest people in the world, in Caracas.” Somebody says: “Hear, hear.” But there’s something desperate, almost sick-making, about all these young zillionaires pretending to care about impoverished Venezuelans.”

“Hear hear.”  If voters think Boris really gives a toos about impoverished Venezuelans, they should perhaps examine how his Thatcherism would affect poor Londoners…

And finally:

“He’s entertained them, and hinted at policy, but people want to know why Johnson wishes to be mayor. Is it mere whimsy? Is he hoping to lose and make a killing on some book about it all, hoik his public-speaking fees higher still? I’ve seen him speaking two nights running, addressing audiences that could hardly be more warmly inclined towards him, and I have no idea what the answer is.

Johnson has brio, wit, intelligence, courage, and an engagingly anarchic quality. I truly wish that those qualities were more common among politicians. But the prigs want him to be serious, and if he’s serious then he must conceal the qualities for which he’s loved. So, for his own sake, please don’t Back Boris.”

In a previous article I described the difficulty that all organisations would face charging for information in the near future, and indeed are encountering already as a consequence of a shift in this generation’s mindset. I was reminded of this today by an article where FLDem5, a writer for the Daily Kos, noted the inaccuracy of the conventional media.

She closes with a list of a website and two media conglomerates e-outposts making an error which a commenteer points out the New York Times was guilty of as well. There are, doubtless, better examples of bigger mistakes being observed by smaller blogs but it is worth bearing in mind that with all the funds that are brought to them from cable subscriptions and the cost of hard-copy none of these outlets have managed to be as efficient as a blogger on a website that has never charged for access and presumably never will. Their role is to deliver information to the public and in this they have failed, while a contributer to a website that exists entirely off of the proceeds of pay-per-click ads {which can be ignored or instead voided with the use of adblocker} has reported accurately.

Therefore although there may seem to be some future for such organisations if this is the level of relative precision that shall be demonstrated it is by no means one which is assured.

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.

No less than three Danish newspapers have plans to publish some cartoons.

Is this odd? Well, a little unusual to have them all do it at once with exactly the same ones, but otherwise the only thing that I find unusual is that even the supposedly daring newspapers over here {The Indie, The Spectator, The New Statesman…} were to terrified to.

That and that fact that there are both those deranged enough to want to kill over this event and those cowardly enough to appease such sociopaths.

Some of my compatriots here on Scribo Ergo Sum have long been championing the assorted articles of Johann Hari.  Today’s Independent carries a column suggesting that Rowan Williams has “unwittingly” dragged us into a wide-reaching debate on multiculturalism, and asserts that most of us have come out the other end fighting for liberalism to prevail.  To demonstrate the point, I stubmled upon the article via CentreRight.com.  The Independent’s newly reconfigured website carries the piece.

We can defend multiculturalism, Hari suggests, as a defence of the rights of groups of people to collectivise around shared beliefs.  On the other hand, we can treat everyone as an individual, in a tolerant liberal society.  In Friday night’s Newsnight debate on the Williams/Sharia PR farce, Paxman asked an Islamic Studies lecturer from Oxford how the Archbishop’s speech had gone down in the “Muslim community”.  It is right and healthy for Muslims to congregate in Mosques and such like, just as I like to go to Church every Sunday, but I resent the idea that there should be a “Muslim community”.  I resent the idea that Jewish voters in New York acted with one voice to support Clinton over Obama last week.  I like to think we have but one community - a society that tolerates sub-groups because of the inidvidual will of the respective members of those groups.

As Hari writes, “Multiculturalism patronisingly treats immigrants as homogenous blocks – when in fact they are as diffuse and dissenting as the rest of us. Would anybody lump me in with Richard Littlejohn and Nick Griffin as part of a ‘white community’?”

The alternative to multiculturalism is not WASP domination, at the price of all else.  It is a creed of tolerance and accepting our differences while cohabiting amicably as a cohesive society.  I can only imagine how the so-called “Muslim community” feels at being pigeon-holed into such a constrictive position.  Multiculturalism has long been opposed by those who reject diversity - this is living proof of a disgraceful neglect of duty by the liberal majority.  We should not masquerade racial stereotyping as a progressive vision of social and religious identification.  Individuals are, primarily, individuals.  Religious freedoms can and should be manifested with the freedom to engage in collective worship, but this should never be the first identifying feature.  We are, above all, individuals.  We should be treated as such - by the government, by the media, by our acquaintances and by those we have never met.

The freedom of religious belief, when seen as an individual’s choice, suddenly has a new potency.  Hari concludes with this affirmation:

Where a multiculturalist prizes the rights of religious groups, a liberal favours the rights of the individual. So if you want to preach that the Archangel Gabriel revealed the word of God to an illiterate nomad two millennia ago, you can do it as much as you like. You can write books and hold rallies and make your case. What you cannot do is argue that since this angel supposedly said women are worth half of a man when it comes to inheritance, and that gay people should be killed, you can ditch the rules of liberalism and act on it.

The job of a liberal state is not to stamp The True National Essence on its citizens, nor to promote “difference” for its own sake. It is to uphold the equal rights of every individual – whether they are white men or Muslim women. It has one liberal culture, with freedoms used differently by different people.