Never mind the fact that, as Adam Boulton says, the Conservatives’ Europe policy is a muddle. Hague’s speech in the Commons chamber yesterday – riffing on the theme of how Gordon Brown will feel if Tony Blair becomes President of Europe – is hysterical. Even David Miliband and Jim Murphy were cracking up. As Boulton puts it,
Now we no longer hear John Prescott’s Les Dawson routine (thank goodness) at the end of the Labour conference, the undisputed king of Westminster’s northern stand-up comedians is William Hague. As the Register of Members’ Interests confirms, the former Tory leader charges up to £20,000 a turn for his jokes on the after dinner speaking circuit. But as MPs in the Commons debated the Bill to ratify the Lisbon treaty, we got to hear William’s wisecracks, gags and mockery of Gordon Brown and the Government for nowt, as they say in Yorkshire.
Predictably, Hague ridiculed the Prime Minister for turning up late for the signing of the treaty last month and for not turning up at all to vote for it in Parliament. But he saved the best until last. His lampooning of Tony Blair’s apparent bid to become the new EU president, a grand new post created by the treaty, was hilarious and had MPs across the chamber howling and roaring with laughter.
Osama’s new video is worth watching / reading in full. He’s been reading Chomsky, and it shows. Multinational corporations figure heavily, and there’s even strong criticism of the US withdrawal from Kyoto.
John Llewelyn, a senior economic policy adviser at Lehman Brothers, had a great piece in the Observer yesterday identifying five distinct categories of belief on climate change:
The Ideological Mainstreamers: this group has been around the longest. Its members did not have to wait for evidence. They were certain there was a problem well before the rump of scientists reached today’s near-consensus.
The Ideological Contrarians: these people require standards of proof no higher than those of the ideological mainstreamers, but hold the opposite view. If they have an intellectual belief, it is that they are smarter than the crowd. More often, though, it is just a game of attracting attention by attacking the majority.
The Grey Conservatives: members of this coterie specialise in appearing reasonable. They are neither pro nor anti, they gravely insist: the problem is simply that there is not enough evidence to support policy action of any sort. Do more research, collect more data and continue the debate, they counsel sagely.
The Non-Sequiturians: various arguments are advanced by this group, but they share a structure. Warming was caused by sunspots, or fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit, or volcanic eruptions. Therefore it cannot be caused by mankind. The ‘therefore’ is the giveaway, the delicious non sequitur: just because Earth has warmed for one or another reason in the past is no reason why it cannot warm for a completely different reason in the future.
The Busy Executives: their argumentation is loftier, but no fuller than it needs to be. Elevating pragmatism to a virtue, they take the position that what matters is not whether the science is right or wrong, but what policymakers are going to do. Given that it increasingly seems that policymakers are going to do various things, the argument runs, skip the argumentation and go straight to the implications for business.
Writing in the Washington Post today, George Will poses a question that I’ve been wondering about lately: if political pressure on the Bush Administration forces a substantial withdrawal of troops sooner rather than later, just as conservatives in the US begin to hope that the tide is turning, what the hell will that do to any prospects for bipartisanship any time in, oh, the next couple of decades? As Will observes:
Come September, America might slip closer toward a Weimar moment. It would be milder than the original but significantly disagreeable. After the First World War, politics in Germany’s new Weimar Republic were poisoned by the belief that the army had been poised for victory in 1918 and that one more surge could have turned the tide. Many Germans bitterly concluded that the political class, having lost its nerve and will to win, capitulated. The fact that fanciful analysis fed this rancor did not diminish its power.
The Weimar Republic was fragile; America’s domestic tranquility is not. Still, remember the bitterness stirred by the accusatory question “Who lost China?” and corrosive suspicions that the fruits of victory in Europe had been squandered by Americans of bad character or bad motives at Yalta. So, consider this: When Gen. David Petraeus delivers his report on the war, his Washington audience will include two militant factions. Perhaps nothing he can responsibly say will sway either, so September will reinforce animosities.
Meanwhile, James Wolcott alerts us to lively goings-on at the snappily titled blog ‘John Cole’s Balloon Juice‘, where the combined intellectual might of the US blogosphere is still musing aloud about the (generally reckoned to be rubbish) CNN / YouTube question time for Democrat candidates.
More specifically, they’re wondering how the show might be improved upon if there were to be a Republican variant – and they’re busy dreaming up questions that hard-ass conservatives in the audience (or indeed sending in videos via YouTube) might put to their beloved GOP candidates. Now read on…
To Rudy Giuliani: What do the Islamofascists hate us for now that we no longer have freedom?
Governor Romney, Mormons believe in polygamy. Muslims believe in polygamy. What assurances can you give us that, if you are elected, you won’t work for al Qaeda?
Mr. Giuliani, if Obama is elected, will he declare defeat in Iraq and withdraw our troops before surrendering to Iran, or will he surrender to Iran first?
I’m a completely independent, undecided voter, and my question is, can you explain why Democrats hate America?
Mayor Guiliani, unlike most of your fellow candidates you have achieved a major tactical success – your brilliant campaign against the New York squegee men and panhandlers who once threatened that great city with a Caliphate of hassling. How would you apply the lessons learned to the war against terror?
If I masturbate to Jack Bauer torturing a suspect, does that make me gay?
