Strange times...
Oct. 15th, 2004 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbIt is a time to be agreeing with your enemies. Pat Buchanan, former Nixon speechwriter, hardline nay-sayer during Watergate, obstinate right-winger: Pat Buchanan publishes, in the British weekly The Spectator (the tribal organ of unrepentant stone-age Tories) an article ripping the foreign and domestic policy of the Bush administration to shreds. I read it, and I cannot find a single word to disagree with. Not a single word.(http://www.raidersnewsupdate.com/lead-story36.htm)
The Daily Mail, the most detestable and hypocritical of tabloids, whose record for lies is second only to that of Rupert Murdoch's The Sun, and whose Tory tribalism makes The Spectator seem fair and open-minded, comes out with a front-cover editorial blasting Tony Blair's brilliant new idea of relaxing the gambling laws till every town in Britain is full of gambling palaces, raising the mighty shadows of the founders of Labour, the men who believed in self-improvement, respectability, and personal and civic virtue, in terms that almost remind me of what I myself had to say about "this age of thieves"; and again, I find myself agreeing with every word (almost). It is true that it is rich, billionaire-rich, for the Daily Jail of all papers to be praising men it persecuted when they were alive, men against whom it fabricated the Zinoviev letter and countless other smears, men against whom it invoked the rise of a British Fascist party; but even the dirty latter-day successors of a foul tradition can tell the truth, if the opposition is foul enough. It is almost natural.
The Daily Mail, the most detestable and hypocritical of tabloids, whose record for lies is second only to that of Rupert Murdoch's The Sun, and whose Tory tribalism makes The Spectator seem fair and open-minded, comes out with a front-cover editorial blasting Tony Blair's brilliant new idea of relaxing the gambling laws till every town in Britain is full of gambling palaces, raising the mighty shadows of the founders of Labour, the men who believed in self-improvement, respectability, and personal and civic virtue, in terms that almost remind me of what I myself had to say about "this age of thieves"; and again, I find myself agreeing with every word (almost). It is true that it is rich, billionaire-rich, for the Daily Jail of all papers to be praising men it persecuted when they were alive, men against whom it fabricated the Zinoviev letter and countless other smears, men against whom it invoked the rise of a British Fascist party; but even the dirty latter-day successors of a foul tradition can tell the truth, if the opposition is foul enough. It is almost natural.
