Sunday, December 18, 2005

Tripping Point

The Slingblade types at BBC public affairs radio programming have had an exceptionally absurd weekend – first they have crypto-moonbat Mary Robinson on “The Interview” where she insisted that she ‘depoliticized’ the approach to human rights when it came to Russia and China, but INSISTED that human rights are being eroded because of the behaviour of ‘Amerikur,’ and was rather proud of taking Secretary of State Rice off guard when she came to Europe with a specific, and entirely different, set of issues to discuss. Proud, indeed to have jacked her... ‘depoliticizing’ human rights... blah, blah, blah.

She said, you see, at the beginning of the millennium she was very proud of ‘what so much of the world signed up to’, and went on to characterize the US as a kind of Birkenau builder.

Then there’s the Talking Point programme where they gave extensive airtime to a guest who said he was a Sargent (SFC?, SSGT?, hm?) in the Massachusetts National Guard. He was attempting subtlety, until it all slipped away quickly. All he could say about knowing about what’s going on in Iraq was ‘from the intelligence reports of one battalion,’ and couldn’t tell us what KIND of sergeant he is, whether or not he was actually deployed in Iraq, and the like. Where it really fell apart is when he said “I don’t think the Commander in Chief set foot ONCE in Iraq, except for when he came with a PLASTIC TURKEY.

Naturally they ate it up, and left him on the air for a solid tem minutes, permitted the guests to talk to his points, and vise versa.

Another American calls with a reasoned view of why a exit timetable is a crappy idea, and he was given the ‘thank you very much, have a nice day’ treatment in about 60 seconds. AKA: the bum’s rush.

Erik’s argument about the vulgarity of symbolic coverage of the view held by the ‘enemy ideology’ of a news outfit being used as proof that they aren’t biased has never been more true.

With no evidence of her ever having bullied a despot at all, the lead in referred to Robinson this way:

«As the United Nations Human Rights commissioner, Mary Robinson was once described as "a scourge of despots and bullies around the world".»
Similarly, Scott Burgess dismantles another keeper of delusion, Germaine Greer, who is more that willing to turn her passing emotions into attempts at news.

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