The Fur Flies In UK Politics

Quote of the day: "There are tensions in Parliament. Stand-offs, bristling, screeching and hissing. And no, we aren't talking about the Labour Party."

If you thought people fighting in UK politics is bad, you have another think coming.

Life Imitates the Onion On Every Front

A few days ago I thought I had found the perfect visual distillation of this deplorable year.  As so often happens in situations like this, the year has, within the span of a mere week, somehow managed to get even worse.

Today is a day in which these things exist in the universe (in no particular order and with no attempt at being comprehensive):

• This loopy argument about an utterly reprehensible human being somehow still makes a certain kind of sick sense if you want the news media to stop being the lapdog of the executive branch and go back to being a watchdog. (Sweet Christmas, did I just say that?)
• This fangirly writeup about Nigel Farage, one of the UK's most hated public figures, doesn't seem to be ironic.  I'll say this for him: he said he wanted the UK out of the EU, and he actually saw his once-quixotic dream come to pass.  How many politicians can say that?  I mean, really.
• Since we're talking about the Brits ... The Tories have descended into a rocket-powered roller coaster of backstabbing and power-grubbing, and last I looked, the two top contenders are embroiled in a catfight of hiss-terical proportions because one apparently said something of such grandiose stupidity that it can't be real ... can it? One of these two is supposed to be the heir of Maggie Thatcher?
• Meanwhile in Australia, some frightened French holidaymakers had to call the cops to save them from "spiders as big as dinner plates." Bonus Aussie goodness: the cops said offhandedly that the tourists really should have been more worried about the 6-foot-long snake that had crawled into in their camper without being noticed. Riiiiiiiiiight.
• Oh, well, we can escape the nonstop bad news and overheated political polarization by enjoying a little art, right? NOPE.
• Now from the bastions of cherished academic freedom ... Haha, just kidding! That's PROFESSOR Big Brother to you! 
• Hell, you can't even play the universe's hottest new game without running into corpses.
• Et tu?  ET TU?  The whole thing reeks of a tawdry publicity stunt showmance as paparazzi-bait, and I definitely thought you had better taste than to stoop to that.

So let me sum up the current state of everything: "dumpster fire."  I was going to go with "omnishambles" since there's so much Britishness in the word, but I think the image of a mountain of combusting trash is so much more evocative.  In fact, I'll even hit you with some linguistic factoids about the terminology for this epic dumpster fire of a world in which we all are living.

Oh, all right. Not everything is horrible. Some things are merely batcrap crazy. Behold my pick for Headline of the Day: "A Fleet of M&M-Shooting Drones is the Black-Footed Ferret's Last Hope." And you thought it was Obi-Wan. 

The Perfect Metaphor for 2016

Nothing that I could possibly write about Brexit or US politics or Venezuela or anything else (and all related mass hysteria on social media)  could be better than this image as a metaphor for the entire kit and kaboodle:

#Flood water pushes a burning #home down a creek in #WestVirginia. #wvwx
🎬 Amanda Carper pic.twitter.com/zJSMe95nLk

— AMHQ (@AMHQ) June 24, 2016

Zing! The Best British Political Insults on Record

With all due respect ... (Those words that always precede a truly ruthless attack, natch.)

After the UK Election: 3 Quotations

Well, politics-watching is fun again ... when it isn't my own!  I am already sick of the run-up to 2016, but it's been fun to watch the UK election for the sheer unvarnished Schadenfreude of seeing Ed Miliband's Labour get completely smashed.  Frankly, any party that engraves its campaign promises on a huge slab of stone and thinks cozying up to Russell Brand is a winning tactic deserves to lose.   At least Miliband can now use the other side of that stupid stone to write the epitaph of his political career.  Anyway, here are 3 quotations now that we've had a few days to think about the results:

Quote the First: Amid the usual howls of the defeated Left, one Labour voice actually talks some sense (and is quoted in the Guardian no less):

There’s absolutely no point in blaming the electorate. Any suggestion that they didn’t ‘get it’ is wrong. They didn’t want what was being offered.

YOU DON'T SAY.

Quote the Second: From Daniel Hannan, MEP, on how Labour overestimated its support:

If you want an explanation of the 2015 election in a single sentence, it’s hard to improve on the words of that great Whig, and founder of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke: "Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field."

Quote the Third:  David Cameron in victory might need a swift kick in the pants.

We must end the idea that as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.

WHAT? 

Addendum and Bonus Quotation:  Now that the election's over, I'm even more tickled by Boris Johnson's verbal assault on Miliband's epigraphical excess with its 6 promises:

It is no joke, my friends. This thing exists, and Ed fully intends that this tasteless, verbless, truthless stele should loom over No 10 like some kitsch version of the laws of Hammurabi, or some new Decalogue – except that he couldn’t think of 10 things to say.
...
Let us therefore consign Milibandias and his tombstone to the bafflement of future archaeologists. Let it go down as the last act of a desperate candidate, and the heaviest suicide note in history.

And You Thought the *American* Press Was Nakedly Partisan

As the Washington Post reports:

"With just one day to go until Britain votes in its general election, it looks like the British press has lost what little restraint it once had and launched into open political warfare."

I suppose this at least eliminates the hypocrisy of claiming to be objective and impartial.

Quote of the Day: Green Purges Are Still Purges

It's the desire to purge that should worry us immediately, no?  This news piece just reinforces my conviction that a lot of these Greenie/lefty folks are crypto-tyrants constrained only by the puniness of their actual power:

Imagine if there were a campaign to sack every senior government adviser who didn’t believe in God. There’d be outrage, and rightly so. Purging politicos from power on the basis of their private beliefs, on the grounds of what lurks in their conscience, would be seen as an intolerable assault on freedom of thought. 

Well, the Green Party is proposing just such an assault on senior government advisers – not on the basis of whether they believe in God but on the basis of whether they accept the climate-change consensus.

Britain's Saucy MPs

Sorry, not that kind of saucy.  A slapfest over regional liquid condiments has broken out in Parliament.

The British Parliament's Syrian "Omnishambles"

Oh dear.  What a mess, not just for David Cameron but also for Ed Miliband. It's not looking too good when one analyst entitles his piece "Labour's line on Syria can now be summed up in six words: 'Oh God. What have we done?'"

Quote of the Day: Rhetoric Meets Reality

From yesterday's explosive House of Commons debate on Syria, chemical weapons, and military intervention:

“Isn’t the real reason we’re here today, is not because of the horror of these weapons and the horror exists – but because the American president foolishly drew a red line and because of his position now, he’s going to attack or face humiliation?” - Labour MP Paul Flynn

Must be more of that smart diplomacy.

Saturday Night Live on Thatcher

An SNL skit that's actually funny and timely.  Maybe these guys are on a roll!

Soundtrack for an Iron Lady

I found this little story to be very entertaining!  Thatcher fans and Thatcher haters are duking it out on the UK music charts with their respective songs of choice.

A Woman of Consequence

A historian looks at the legacy of the Iron Lady.  Oh, and she was right about the euro too.  How about this for our quote of the day:

The reaction to Margaret Thatcher’s death is painfully predictable. 

The right is honoring her service in standing up to socialism and communism at home and abroad, while the left is vilifying her for standing up to socialism and communism at home and abroad.

As someone else said, Maggie Thatcher p*ssed off all the right people, and I think that is a honorable epitaph indeed.  Anyway, look at this, this, this, and this:

Ave atque Vale: Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013)

The lady's not for turning.  Farewell to a remarkable woman and the UK's first female PM.  Love her or hate her, there was no ignoring her.  

UPDATE 1: Oh, and on social media, the haters are coming out of the woodwork now and literally rejoicing.  Stuff like that doesn't make you look good, haters.

UPDATE 2: Meryl Streep, stay classy!

"Why the Spectator Won't Sign the Royal Charter"

From the mess about oversight, regulation, and press freedom in the UK comes a moment of clarity from The Spectator:

It is just as the advocates of press freedom feared: politicians cannot stop themselves. Give them control over print and they’ll come back for digital. Next they will want to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ journalists, to reward their friends and punish their enemies. Just a whiff of this sort of power has intoxicated Alex Salmond, who commissioned a review which recommended that Scotland make licensing of the press compulsory. His devolved government would license bloggers, a handy tool in the run-up to the 2014 referendum. He was forced to drop the plans after they caused an uproar, but his intention was clear. 

Perhaps the general public think state regulation is a good thing; that hacks should be restrained by people who aren’t themselves in the media. But what may not be appreciated is the insidious influence politicians already try to exert over the press: the quiet words over dinner, the phone calls made to editors, myself included. I have been asked to chastise ‘irresponsible’ reporters and remove articles that politicians find insulting from the website. On minister called to ask if I was aware that a Spectator journalist had been rude about him without first seeking the advice of his spin doctor. It’s as if MPs have lost sight of what a free press is for. 

When the public think of a ‘bad journalist’, they imagine a hack who plagiarises, lies, or in some other way breaks the law. When a politician thinks of a bad journalist, more often than not he imagines someone who has criticised him, unfairly in his opinion. So of course there’s political lip-smacking about an era in which politicians have the power to define what is acceptable journalism. Or, as Labour’s Jim Sheridan put it on Tuesday, expel the ‘parasitical elements’ within the press. But this is an attack on freedom.

Rant: Press Freedom in the UK

Take a good look.  Here's a more humorous commentary on the topic by the famously eccentric Mayor of London.

The British Military ... Or What's Left Of It

A gloomy look at massive cuts.

Book Review: Daniel Hannan's "A Doomed Marriage"

The always-thoughtful Theodore Dalrymple reviews Daniel Hannan's new book on the relationship between the UK and the EU.

One British Perspective on Romney and Obama

Daniel Hannan, a Conservative MEP, shares a few thoughts as an outside observer.  A blurb: "Whether Mitt Romney can eliminate the deficit is not clear. What is beyond doubt, though, is that Mr Obama cannot."  Hannan had supported Obama in 2008.  What a difference a term makes.

Friday Fun, Olympic Edition: Boris Johnson's Introduction

Someone with entirely too much free time on his hands has come up with this hilarity featuring London's mayor: