A Tangled Web

THE SPECTATOR HAS BECOME A SPECTACLE...



I stopped buying the (UK)Spectator a while ago. (Though the US Speccie is great!) In essence, I found Boris Johnson insufferable. He is not recognisable to me as a Conservatve. I like this take on him from Denis Boyle.



"Boris Johnson, the glib, Blair-crazed editor of The Spectator (and the MP for Henley and the newspaper columnist of the year and this year's Robert Fisk and the only visible means of support for Rod Liddle and according to the Guardian, the new shadow arts minister, etc., etc.), asked his Daily Telegraph readers, "How could the American army have been so crass, so arrogant, so brutal as to behave in this way?....Was this really the operation I had voted for? Did I really think, when the House of Commons voted to support the American action on March 18, 2003, that it would be carried out with such boneheaded stupidity? These people seem not only to lack the faintest idea of how to bring peace to Iraq; they also seem not to understand the values — such as basic human rights — which we hoped to bring to that country."



Judging the merits of an entire war by the stupid acts of "trailer-trash troops" (to use Johnson's phrase) in one incident in one battle in that war is dumber — and far more irresponsible — than the acts over which Johnson and the the Euro-press are waxing hysterical; even in the short-run, this kind of cheap posturing is much more dangerous and threatening to lives, American, Iraqi, British, and otherwise. "How would we feel if Britain had been overwhelmed by a vastly superior army," Johnson wrote, "and we then saw pictures of our relatives stripped naked and tortured by smirking jezebels from the Appalachians?" Like Loaded readers, Boris."



Read more of what Denis has to say here.