Why oh why can't we talk about the real issues?

'In the absence of analysis, voter choices are hardly more meaningful than the options of reality television. Dial 02 for Adair Turner's pension plan or 03 for Gordon Brown's; 04 to withdraw troops from Iraq or 05 to keep them there; 06 to replace Trident or 07 to scrap it.'

I offer a link to this piece in the Observer not because it's worth reading but just for the fun of adding an extra layer of media self-referentiality. Anyone who wishes to link to this post and supply a commentary lamenting Mr Grumpy's preoccupation with media froth is very welcome to do so. And dial 08 to watch Z-list celebrity Mr G consuming marsupial gonads.

Wordpower

The Beeb on the Egyptian elections:-

An Islamist supporter was killed by a gang of thugs in Alexandria on Sunday, monitors said.

'Militants', surely?

Clinton the stopper?

Did Bill Clinton say, as the Independent’s Rupert Cornwell claims, that ‘the war in Iraq was "a big mistake"’. Yes and no, it seems, but more no than yes. The AP report quotes him as saying ‘The mistake that they made is that when they kicked out Saddam, they decided to dismantle the whole authority structure of Iraq’. Nothing in the report suggests that he condemned the invasion per se.

Did he say anything remotely resembling ‘the sooner American troops leave the better’? No, that is Mr Cornwell’s view, echoing the comments of a congressman whom, I am wiling to bet, not one Indie reader in a thousand has ever heard of. What Clinton did say was ‘We never sent enough troops and didn't have enough troops to control or seal the borders.’ Which doesn’t exactly make him a ‘stopper’. But clearly if you want an eye-catching headline Congressman John Murtha doesn’t quite do the business. So ‘Clinton: The big mistake of the Iraq war - Ex-President leads the critics’ it is.

Is the Independent even trying to be a newspaper of record these days?

The benefits of hindsight

‘Had we intervened in Rwanda in 1994, for instance, we might have stopped the genocide that killed nearly a million innocent civilians.’

The LA Times, for a change, but the suggestion is no stranger to the British papers that lead anti-Iraq war opinion.

What’s interesting is that the assertion draws its force from the fact that it didn’t happen.

Imagine that Clinton had sent troops in and (a more athletic stretch of the imagination) they had been spectacularly successful in stopping the bloodshed. Would he have gone down in left-liberal opinion as:

(a) a great humanitarian who saved hundreds of thousands of lives

or

(b) a cynical imperialist who must have got wind of Rwanda’s previously unknown oil reserves?

Respect, Dave

Meanwhile, the organ of the imperialist bourgeoisie has this from the running-dog Aaronovitch. I suppose he thinks he's very clever.