Revealing the true face of British journalism

The national press and their fellow travellers got plenty of airtime (and first billing for their interviews ahead of press victims) in much of the radio and television coverage, in which they gave their full mendacity and duplicity full vent.  In reality, the journalists have cut off their nose to spite their face.  Fighting the politicians answer for regulation tooth and nail, most of the editors refused to compromise (as The Guardian, FT and The Independent urged) and were themselves just as much the author of very distant political interference as the senior bods in Westminster.  Because of their war with the politicians from Leveson onwards, they effectively tied the moderate voices of The Guardian, FT and The Independent in a suicide pact to oppose the Royal Charter.  They were going to lose in the High Court and they knew they were going to lose, but still the editors drove on.  Who were they doing this for?  Posterity?  That didn’t work so well with David Koresh and his Waco disciples. 

But unlike the Republican Party, fighting for their tiny minority of partisans, they did not blink because ultimately no-one would die (well, the The News of the World whistleblower did and a private detective employed by the tabloids, both mysteriously, but that aside).  I heard one former national journalist who lives in the USA now, that, with the Royal Charter, nothing would change but ultimately everything would change.  That’s straight out of the Ministry of Truth.  It’s not the politicians creating a 1984-dystopia with doublespeak but the national press.  Attacking the politicans for their lamentable attempts at self-regulation, he questioned their ability to do the same for the press, ignoring the press’s grievous failures at self-regulations themselves.  He then went on to slate Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan as people now dictating terms to the newspapers because for a loser like this journalist, only elites matter, not ordinary people like the Dowlers and Christopher Jeffries.  He probably thinks that the phone hacking was nothing worthy of comment.  As I listened to him on the Today programme, I’m glad this arsehole has nothing to do with British newspapers – I searched for his name on the running order on Today’s website but it had David Miliband in his place.  Though Miliband is in America, it was not his distinctive voice over the airwaves.

At least Roger Alton, editor of The Times, was consistent in his wrong-headed arguments.  His claim that a hundred years of press freedom was now at an end was, to adopt Boris Johnson’s phrase, an inverted pyramid of piffle.  To change the press charter, a two-thirds majority in the House of Commons is needed, a stiff obstacle to surmount, though it would have been stiffer if Britain had a more proportional electoral system.  His claim that this was not a priority of the British public was fatuous.  The same British public did not view gay marriage as a priority either but a clear majority believed it was the right thing to do.  Further, Alton also cited how this was unthinkable in America.  Why should we emulate the USA in every aspect?  If we must, maybe Alton could explain to his boss, Rupert Murdoch, why it is unthinkable in the USA for a non-American citizen to own an organ of the media and how we must implement such a rule on these isles.  To emulate America of course.

All this hyperbole is against the British tradition of understatement but is the standard modus operandi for much of the national press.  They were only interested in freedom of speech for themselves and the power it conferred on their platforms and not interested in freedom of speech for anyone else (viz, Christopher Jeffries or even their attacks on The Guardian for releasing Edward Snowden’s communications of the National Security Agency on security grounds.  America – there’s that name again – is more concerned than Britain and is investigating the spooks, not the journalists.  In the UK, journalists devour their own).  This power they possessed corrupted them before phone-hacking was exposed.  Like the spoilt child, they stamped their feet and huffed because for once they were not going to get their own way.  It is not the death warrant of press freedom, it is David Cameron keeping his promise to press victims and displaying that, at certain times, he is a man of honour.

A contentious birth

This week, Turks around the world are celebrating the 90^th anniversary of the inauguration of the secular Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal replacing the Ottoman Empire and Caliphate with his paternalistic dictatorship.  It is not hard to understand the reasons why Turks of many hues pull together – for progressives, it is the moment Turkey joined the modern world (such as adopting the Gregorian calendar); for nationalists, it drew a line under 300 years of decline and gave Turks their first military victories for 100 years; for constitutionalists, it marked a reduction in arbitrary law.  In 2013, the government announced the long-held dream of a tunnel under the Bosphorus, linking the two halves of water-bisected Istanbul for the first time (Constantinople to Chalcedon in old money).

For myself though it is not a time for festivities.  I have nothing against Turks or modern Turkey and I fervently believe Western European antagonism is counter-productive and it should be admitted to the EU after a few further reforms (having more journalists in prison than Russia is embarrassing and the law of ‘insulting Turkishness’ must be repealed, for example) and withdrawal from Northern Cyprus, rather than finding its path blocked repeatedly.  It is not perfect but no country is and it has a vitality and energy that Europe needs sorely.  Yet, with the exception of a reined-in military, it is very much the product of 1923.

Just as many Hungarians lament the Treaty of Trianon, which punished the Magyars more ferociously than any other defeated Central Power, despite being effectively yoked to Austria (what else could the Budapest parliament do but follow Vienna’s lead in 1914?) and stripped it of two-thirds of its territory and one-third of its population (whether justified is another issue, but it was harsh), I lament 1923.  Not through any personal connections, you must understand, but through my familiarity with Greece and Armenia in my casual and academic readings.

The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, signed by the Ottoman sultan to end the part of World War One between the Allies and the Ottomans, pared Turkey right back to its Anatolian core, where 850 years previous the Turks had migrated.  Britain and France took League of Nations mandates in Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Trans-Jordan; Thrace and the Ionian territory around Smyrna were awarded to Greece (under a Gibraltarian-style arrangement where Greece would administer Smyrna but the Sultan would retain sovereignty); fledgling Armenia, still reeling from the genocide committed against its peoples, was awarded a large slice of eastern Anatolia, including ancient Trabzon (formerly Trebizond and Trapezus) and Erzurum; the Bosphorus was to be demilitarised and placed under international control; there were plans for an independent Kurdistan; and much of remaining Anatolia was divided into zones of influence between Italy, France and Britain.

Now, the zones of influence were grotesquely unfair, as was the humiliation of demilitarising the Bosphorus (counter-productive too given the triumph of the communists in Russia and it territories); I have not much sympathy for Kurdistan at this particular juncture given the role of Kurdish irregulars in the Armenian genocide; and the less said about the betrayal of the Arabs the better, given the shabby behaviour that shamed T.E. Lawrence.  But the ejection of the Greeks from eastern Thrace and Smyrna, the Pearl of the Mediterranean, ended 2,500 years of continuous Greek culture.  Arguably, the Greeks kind of had it coming by appointing a commander-in-chief who was indolent and certifiably mad (at times, he believed his legs were made of glass and sugar and would shatter were he to leave his bed), though it is still sad, like the extinction of the Dodo or the all female language developed by rural women in southern-central China.  On a different level of tragic is the non-establishment of Kurdistan and re-establishment of Armenia, Turkish advances and American isolationism making the terms of Sèvres a dead letter before any of it could be formalised.  The Armenia that re-emerged in 1991 was just 10% of ancient Armenia and 25% of what Sèvres proposed.  This was part of the bitterness that made the region of Nagorno-Karabakh so intensely contested from 1988 to the present-day.   Given that Armenians are seen as subversive agents in Turkey today and suffer low-level persecution, the opportunity to provide a homeland seventy years before an impoverished corner of the Caucasus is where the cold tide of history leaves one numb.  I also have to admit a fascination with the Byzantine Empire, to which the Ottomans delivered the coup de grace, swiftly followed by the dispatch of the 250-year old Empire of the Trebizond.

The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne superseded Sèvres leaving the Republic of Turkey essentially within its current borders (a subsequent treaty with the USSR formalised its north-eastern frontier).  Later, in 1939, Alexandretta (İskenderun) joined with Turkey and thereby avoided direct involvement in today’s Syrian bloodbath and Azerbaijan’s second-time independence in 1991 extended Turkish influence back to the Caspian Sea, but Lausanne gave the foundations on which modern Turkey is based, with the capital at Ankara.  For Turkey to rise, others had to suffer and so it is not unblemished like Finns celebrating their independence day on 6^th December.  For all the greatness of Turkey in 2013, I cannot be happy of the circumstances that gave birth to it.

A return to bad old habits

Back in the late 1990s, the BBC bought the full rights to Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show and then showed these sublime comedies on the late-night (i.e. post-Newsnight) graveyard shift in the middle of the week (i.e. a school night, both literally and figuratively).  It was scandalous but these were the bad, old days of John Birt the beancounter when quality and money were confused (e.g. a boring, lavish series of the life of Cecil Rhodes, the empire builder).
Now, they are doing it again on BBC3.  Who shows a new series at 11.45 p.m. on a Monday night?  Well, they are the bods appointed by the unlamented George Entwistle before he even became a short-lived Director-General (Tony Hall, I do not envy your in-tray).  I have a particular fondness for American Dad, by a nose the best in the Seth MacFarlane stable, but series eight is being treated very shabbily.  Maybe when the new episodes of Family Guy are temporarily exhausted they'll shift it to 10 p.m. on a Sunday (series seven of AD got a whole run in that slot), but until that point I may have to catch up with them on the off-chance when I am up late on a Friday, like one might do with rare, idiosyncratic treasures that suddenly appear on eBay.

First second time around

I finally received the results of my Masters degree – not so much a delay as the appointed time, as the dissertation was handed in to the Politics and International Relations office on Friday 16^th August, two months after undergraduates finish.  After I finished my BA (with Hons) in Politics and International Relations with a year in Finland with a 2:1 as a result of getting an overall 68% - the narrowness from being separated from the highest mark prompted me at the time (back in 2005) to say that were I to do a Masters, I would get a first.  Despite coping with a newborn baby, a full-time job and various church activities, I achieved that.

Given the prevalence of undergraduate degrees, making a Bachelor award (especially in the humanities) more of a social finishing school, there has been a marked uptake of Masters courses, to distinguish oneself from the rest.  Given this, one of my tutors said, in a Masters course, it is all the more important to finish with a first – I liked him very much, he gave one of my essays 78%.  However, it all came down to my dissertation.  I had achieved 72% across all my modules, which were I to get a 68% (they mark in blocks of ten, on the two, the five and the eight) in my long, long essay (over 15,000 words), my overall mark would have been 69.4% and the authorities only round it up to a first if you have 69.5%.  Thankfully, that wasn’t an issue as I got 75% in my dissertation, making it something like 73% overall (I haven’t properly calculated it yet).  I still can’t quite believe it.

Don’t send in the clowns

The recent murder of ex-drug lord Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix in Baja, Mexico by a man dressed as a clown (including wig and rubber nose) has received the censure of the International Clown Meeting n Mexico City.  One of the attendees, Tomas Morales is certain that the gunman was not a professional clown.  Well of course not, otherwise his gun would have popped out a red flag with ‘bang’ on it. Certainly The Joker would not have stooped to a gun-n-run.  But it cuts both ways, Tomas, to claim that clowns are non-violent, as they therefore cannot be secret agents like 007 (and 009) in Octopussy -plenty of violence while dressed as such.  On related line, a Mexican wrestler’s mask may not be as folksy as made out in American popular culture, Jack Black’s clowning in Nacho Libre aside.  To be fair, the killer should have worn one of the ex-president’s masks as did the protagonists in Point Break, given the enmity of the US federal government to Mexico’s drug culture, but it might have been even more conspicuous than wearing nothing at all. But for all that, you may escape and may never be caught, but if you are identified, the savagery of the Mexican drug war means your family and friends will suffer, gruesomely. 

Even if one of the 500 congregants at this Latin American comic convention has showed up, I doubt Felix would have needed mirth, given his name means happiness.  He had done his time in both Mexico and the USA and out of all his brothers, he was still alive and out of jail.  Yet like the Roman imperial province of Dacia, a region known as felix for its prosperity and so happy that even Hadrian could not abandon it, this latter-day Mexican was always in danger and likely to be assailed repeatedly by those of a barbarous and nihilistic nature.  Felix would never live in seclusion for long.

Alan Pardew watch

Middlesbrough have dispensed with the services of Tony Mowbray (not long after Carlisle did with their manager of five years) and that means as Mowbray was appointed almost exactly three years ago, Alan Pardew rises in the length of tenure ranks to 8^th out of 92 clubs.  This is according to the League Managers Association website, which has to be taken with a pinch of salt as it doe not include José Mourinho in joint 79^th place with the likes of Manuel Pellegrini, Roberto Martinez, Owen Coyle and Steve Lomas.  In fact, Chelsea isn’t included full stop in this part of the website (maybe because of the long interim status of Rafael Benítez it just dropped off the radar).  I did find out though Arsène Wenger, Gianfranco Zola and Mark Hughes all have OBEs to their name, the only league managers with honorifics, even though two of them are foreign-born (would Wenger be given an honorary knighthood if he won the treble, in imitation of Sir Alex Ferguson?)There are 87 teams listed, instead of the full 92 because, Chelsea apart, some clubs are managerless at the moment: Sheffield United are about to agree terms with Nigel Clough to takeover but as yet it’s not official; Gillingham are under the caretaker management of Peter Taylor; and, of course, Middlesbrough.

In a note as to how little time managers get these days, Gary Johnson of Yeovil Town is the longest serving manager not to serve a full two years in the job and he is at number 24 (appointed January 2012).  The average over the past five years is 1.91 years.  Alan Pardew is coming up for his third anniversary (kind of amazing given Newcastle United’s recent history) though whether he’ll make it to December or not is another matter.  He is already the Premier League’s second longest-serving manager, a position likely to continue with the upturn in Arsenal’s fortunes making Wenger unlikely to fall on his sword (despite his sabre-rattling over his contract which expires at the end of the season).  That means for Pardew to rise up the league rankings is for Shrewsbury Town, MK Dons, Leyton Orient, Cheltenham Town, Oxford United, Exeter City to have a collective rush of blood to the head and sack, respectively, Graham Turner, Karl Robinson, Russell Slade (though his team are doing very well at the moment), Mark Yates, Chris Wilder and Paul Tisdale, the last of whom has served an incredible seven seasons.  This may come across like the genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew but it shows that people have enjoyed lists for thousands of years.

Hermetically sealed self-delusion

I read an interesting act the other day.  Not only did Barack Obama and the Democratic senators score more of the popular vote to the tune of several million or more voters, House Democrats also had one and a half million more people vote for them than for House Republicans.  Yet because of the creation of ‘rotten boroughs’ in states controlled by local Republican legislatures, in the national House, the Republicans still hold a majority and, more importantly, the position of Speaker, who alone decides whether and when to bring a bill to be voted upon.  This creates the position where many Republicans have fear only from the right of them.  John Boehner claimed on a bad night for the Republicans in November 2012, that his party also had a mandate, but the popular figures show that the GOP really does not. 

There is talk of immigration reform and a farm bill but a federal commission to fix the borders into something which, hey, is representative is a must.  States’ rights have no place when it concerns electing people who wish to make representations to the federal government and who take decisions that affect the whole country.  But maybe the Democrats will not implement it until a right-wing Supreme Court retires (unlikely until at least 2017) or dies, fearful of the panel dividing along political lines, 5-4, like they did in 2000 to deny Al Gore his rightful victory, because the work of such a commission would be legally challenged by the GOP.

One can only hope that the Democrats can hoover up the seats of moderate Republicans politicians in the mid-terms who, ironically, they can work with, just so the role of Speaker can be wrested back.  Raúl Labrador, a Republican congressman from Idaho claimed “I think what [Obama] has done over the past two and a half weeks – he's trying to destroy the Republican party.”  It wasn’t the president who imposed demands for standard legislative procedures as funding the federal government or raising the debt ceiling (the equivalent of doing what the Republicans were doing, as Peter Foster pointed out, would have been to tie gun control to these votes – Obama didn’t).  In reality, Obama doesn’t need to destroy the Republicans - due to their zeal for living in a fantasy world of ideological purity, the GOP is doing a fine job of that by itself.

Tea Party over

Not quite yet though.  With the resolution of the debt crisis and federal shutdown a humiliation for the Republican Party, achieving only the most tokenistic of compromises, it will be the moderate GOP members who will be punished at the ballot box – the Tea Party doctrinaires are secure in their gerrymandered strongholds for now.  Barack Obama proposes immigration reform should soon be tabled but really an independent, politically unaffiliated commission should be created to fix district boundaries far more fairly than they are now.  Expect fierce resistance to another piece of commonsense principle were it to be enacted as the current arrangements favour the GOP far more than the Democrats.

But overall, the Tea Party have shown themselves to be incompetent and arrogant in equal measure.  I remember freshman Texan senator Ted Cruz in the early hours of 7^th November proclaiming his determination to take the fight to Capitol Hill, despite the overall endorsement of the president and his party (retention of the presidency and Senate majority, gains in the House).  He jumped the gun in forcing the federal shutdown instead of making the Democrats break more likely over the debt ceiling (although holding the country hostage is another reprehensible low for the Republican Party in general).  One right-winger called Cruz a Democratic sleeper agent, who gave the Democrats the whip hand and essentially all that the latter wanted.  In some ways, Cruz is an old-time Democrat, before LBJ committed the party to endorsing civil right and, allegedly, signing away the South for a generation.  Cruz would find being called a Democrat highly offensive but in the long-run, being a Tea Party favourite and thus poised to receive massive financial endorsements from crackpot SuperPACS (high-rolling political action committees) like the Heritage Foundation, he won’t suffer come 2018.

This morning, a Tea Party House member was quizzed by the BBC about holding a gun to the head of the American economy and he said that kind of language was just scare-mongering and all that mattered was getting the debt down, proving that these far-right Republicans have simply no grasp of economics (much less history, given that the USA has never defaulted on its debts).  Maybe for the same reason they can’t countenance the Earth being more than 5,000 years old, big numbers are mind-boggling, but the USA is far from being on the edge of a precipice, unless the Tea Party dragged the country over it.  There may be a current account deficit but there is no alternative for those holding US debt but to buy more of it which depreciates with inflation and so benefits the USA.  Conceivably the USA could run up twice the debt mountain it has before it might topple over – an arbitrary number to be sure but debt is not drowning the US – political deadlock is.  Moreover, the deficit is coming down – you can’t turn around, two wars, an egregious tax cut that added £1tn to the debt for basic political expedience and a banking crash and near-Depression in just four years.  Medical expenditure is running out of control and arguably Obamacare isn’t radical enough.  But when Tea Partiers talk about getting the debt down, it is code for removing all regulatory barriers that are so inconvenient to their super-rich friends (hence the insouciance about the federal shutdown) and slashing social safety nets down to their last vestiges so taxes can be cut for their rich buddies.  Combined with right-wing religious nationalism and you have a willing cohort of useful idiots who don’t understand their being manipulated to put you into Congress.  Their only conception of democracy is getting elected and Joseph Schumpeter would have been purring, but compromise is an essential part of getting things done in a democracy – it is one of the reasons why Russia’s post-1991 fledgling exercise in this foundered.  Tea Partiers though say it is their way or the highway and it they don’t get their way, they scweam and scweam til they are sick and then scweam some more, stamping their feet like the children they are (one unnamed centrist GOP politician said they weren’t just lemmings going over the cliff, they were lemmings with suicide vests, taking everyone else with them).

The GOP tried to tap into Tea Party fervour whilst –ineffectually- taming it and at the heart of this is a ten point manifesto in which you need to sign up to 8 of the 10 points, even though their saint, Ronald Reagan would have only qualified for seven of the points.  The non-negotiable point is no new taxes, even though Reagan and his successor George H W Bush both did so.  Invited to criticise the Tea Party loonies, ‘moderate’ Republican (a very loose term) John McCain said he followed Reagan, who said one should never criticise one’s fellow Republicans.  When it was pointed out that the Tea Party has been tearing lumps out of the rest of the GOP for weeks, he blandly replied that he couldn’t answer for them.  Claiming to be heirs of Reagan, yet the policies of the Tea Party are as distorted from Reagan as their history is of the American Revolution.

It is commendable of Obama to maintain the power of the executive and stand firm.  Conventional wisdom is that Democrats always buckle, bolstering the view that America is an inherently right-wing country.  This though wasn’t merely a battle over Obama’s signature health policy or even budget negotiations but a battle about who calls the shots in government and the hostage-takers were defeated.  Not negotiating with terrorists is a controversial and dangerous game but here saner GOP compatriots prevailed, albeit gulping hard.   The power of the presidency is therefore not diminished but that is the GOP is.  Republican senator Lindsey Graham said it has been a catastrophic fortnight for the GOP, their numbers going down faster than for the Dems or the Pres, while approval for Obamacare has “mysteriously risen.”  This another reason why the Republicans are numbskulls – so convinced they are of being in the right, they can’t admit that something might be popular for the correct reasons.  By focusing the spotlight on it, more Americans have realised that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are one and the same thing and as most support most of the provisions of the ACA, support for Obamacare has risen.  Not so mysterious after all – it is symptomatic of why the Republicans lose general elections and fail to learn the lessons.  They will never be a majority in both branches of the legislature unless they embrace the new normal.

Captain Fantastic axes anxiety

The day after the night before shines a little more brightly, even with persistent rain lashing the streets. The spirit of Jan Tomaszewski is no longer abroad and fear no longer stalks the land.  England put away Poland, as they had done on the previous five visits by the Poles to Blighty, but could only rest easy once Steven Gerrard jinked into the danger area and slotted home in the 88th minute, creating a two-goal cushion.  Thereby England avoided creating a cycle of failing to qualify for the World Cup once every twenty years (plus 1978, not to mention all the times they were too aloof to play in before World war Two).  1973 and 1993 can be placed back in the history books, instead of being on endless loop in print and television.  Two home games against mediocre Eastern European teams - two deserved wins, despite more than 30,000 whistling, jeering Polish fans that tried to turn it into a ferocious away tie.  But Tomaszewski was right about the modern England squad not being a patch on its 1973 counterpart.  When Poland qualified in place of England that year, they finished third in the 1974 World Cup.  By contrast, the quarter-finals are seen as the zenith of 2013 England's ambitions rather than a stumbling block to greater glory as it was in 2002 and 2006.  It was unnerving for Roy Hodgson to say he could select all his best players - with the exception of Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard, no-one looked world-class out there.  And this is comparatively recent, as even ten years ago, outstanding quality could be seen throughout the whole team.
Still, there is no humiliation about not going to Brazil.  Even failing to progress beyond the Group Stage in 2014 will only be a mild frustration.  Montenegro (who boasted, before a 4-1 drubbing at Wembley, that once they beat or drew with England, they had a home game with Moldova to allow them to leap-frog the Three Lions - Moldova monstered them 5-2.  Oops) and Poland can watch all the fun on which they missed out.  As can all the other Home Nations, though all of them had an upbeat end to their qualification campaign, away draws against Belgium (2014 dark horses) and Israel for Wales and Northern Ireland respectively and home wins for Scotland against Croatia and the Republic of Ireland versus Kazakhstan.
I am delighted that Bosnia-Herzegovina will be at the party - a unifying moment for a country that does everything in triplicate (Bosniak, Croatian and Serbian) and is in constant danger of fragmenting.  Going to the 2006 World Cup, didn't keep the union of Serbia & Montenegro together, but they failed to escape the group stages and anyway, the corrupt Montenegrin president was determined to increase his powerbase through separation from Belgrade.  Hopefully, Bosnia will be different.
Another hopeful case is Iceland.  They have reached the play-offs ahead of the perennially tasty Slovenia and would supersede that ex-Yugoslav constituent part as the smallest ever participant at a World Cup, population-wise, were they to make it.  I wish them all the best and feel they have a chance against all the 'seeds' (a declining Croatia, a workmanlike Greece and an uninspiring Sweden) except Portugal.
England probably won't play them as it seems the former won't be seeded in Brazil for the group stages - fair enough, England have been fairly lacklustre for a while and only made the last 16 in South Africa's 2010 experience.  They probably won't even justify a seeding in 2014.  But to be pipped by Switzerland who didn't make it out of their group in 2010 and worse, Belgium, who didn't even qualify for the last two World Cups (or the 2012 European Championship for that matter), is galling.  In 1998 and 2002, England were punished for their failure to make the 1994 World Cup but now the rules appear to have changed and just because Belgium are currently riding high in the world-rankings (it was only last year that England were third; they were, until tomorrow, 17th), they get to waltz into a seeded position.  Insanely, the Netherlands who finished as runners-up at the 2010 World Cup will not be seeded if Uruguay win their play-off against Jordan (as of today, 7th in the world versus 73rd, hmmm), yet a team that wasn't at the last two world cups does.  That is Alice in Wonderland stuff, but it is FIFA after all.

Fantasy world

I have been enjoying immensely Marvels’ Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. with its whip-smart wit, cracking, if contained, action and slow building of characterisation.  It has Joss Whedon’s influence all over it (not suprising, given that he is now in charge of Marvel’s cinema franchise for the comic Avengers and directed the first episode to get the series off the ground).  So far there are no heroes with ‘organic’ superpowers which is its high concept, dealing more with human ambition and greed.  Agent Coulson, who was thought killed off in Avengers Assemble, holding a terrible secret that maybe even he isn’t fully aware of, marshals laconically a team of incredibly good-looking people – after all, this is escapism not gritty reality (incidentally, for all American criticism of British dentistry, last night I saw a close-up of Bruce Willis in Armageddon with malformed teeth overlapping each other like in a slate quarry – having never noticed this before, is this character-acting as a roughneck driller or the double standards of the US entertainment industry?).

Like traditional James Bond escapades, it – largely, referencing the film from which it sprang occasionally – takes place in a black box – this action could conceivably, allowing for suspension of disbelief, be occurring in our world without us being aware of it.  Part of this illusion involves using real-world locations, unlike William Boyd’s posting of 007 to the fictional African state of Zanzarin in Solo.  However, this can run into trouble if the proper background research isn’t done.  The villain in the third episode has a hideout on Malta, which seemingly is immune from all international law.  Further, the smooth bad guy derides in a speech the US government, the EU and S.H.IE.L.D. and their collective reach.  This posits that Malta is outside these institutions, like some central Mediterranean version of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, despite the Maltese being part of the EU since 2004 and the government in Valetta has even adopted the Euro, not as a reserve but as its national currency.  It’s a small hiccup that could have been resolved by setting it in Northern Cyprus, but it would have gone unnoticed by the majority of people.

Whedon, in advance publicity of Marvels’ Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. had said that, though proud of Avengers Assemble, it was imperfect and flawed.  Nevertheless, as his creation, he loved it – “When I think of a great film, I think of something that's either structured so perfectly like The Matrix or made so lovingly like The Godfather Part 2. There was haphazardness in the way it comes together - not just the people, but the scenes. I don't think you'd look at it and go, 'This is a model of perfect structure'. You'd go, 'This is working. I like it'.”  I felt much the same, the film being visually impressive but lacking a core to revolve around and a feeling of redundancy – once you’ve saved the world, where do you go from there apart from saving the world again, which, given this is fiction and not real life, is repetitive.  Roger Moore had his reservations about, in my opinion, the worst of the James Bond series, Quantum of Solace, particularly the infuriating jump-cuts – “there was a bit too much flash cutting [and] it was just like a commercial of the action. There didn't seem to be any geography and you were wondering what the hell was going on.”  Many felt Daniel Craig carried the film and that is true, because it was a passenger overall.  Though my views can taken in isolation, it is comforting to know that industry figures share my angles as well.

Under press-ure

I like Peter Oborne on the whole, a centre-right commentator unafraid to give those on the opposing side of the spectrum due credit when he thinks it is appropriate.  Although I have had cause to find him not always so oracular, I do concede that he was right on Syria to oppose their mooted air strikes, something borne out by a BBC report that while the Syrian rebels fighting for democracy of a roughly liberal democratic kind were a disappointing 30% of the fighters, their effective fighting capability was a pitiful 10% of the whole rebel effort.  Although Assad is a barbarous butcher, a diplomatic solution seems all the more pressing with the news that the Libyan prime minister has been kidnapped by militias supposedly loyal to Tripoli.

Oborne’s stand on press regulation I find though is a party-line, both from his employers at The Spectator and The Telegraph and from his political Conservative home, as any curtailment of the press would be a curtailing of the in-built right-wing majority.  By playing the partisan, he degrades his credibility on the issue.

The invocation of ‘press freedom’, in much the same way that fanatical US right-wingers are always denouncing any liberal legislation as an attack on some nebulous abstract ‘freedom’, is designed to mislead and paint those sickened by calumnies and actions of tabloids in particular as enemies of one of democracy’s building blocks.  Oborne’s assertion that the “best means of dealing wither newspaper abuses is through the law of the land,” is plainly wrong.  Yes, people are finally being prosecuted in significant numbers after it has been exposed that phone-hacking was not confirmed to one bad apple and his private detective.  But this is only after years where the politicians and the press were determined to sideline the issue as a few celebrities who deserved no sympathy.  Saying the police were slow to act is also misleading – they buried prima facie evidence (why else would John Yates quit as Met Assistant Commissioner?), yet I understand the legal sensitivities preventing Oborne from stating as such.  Action only began long after The Guardian was forced off the Press Complaints Commission for refusing to retract its allegations – it took The New York Times reporting of it before wheels were greased.

The nastiness of the UK press is internationally infamous and this was before phone-hacking and the revealing of the payment of public officials thousands of pounds in bribes.  Ten years before Ed Miliband took on The Daily Mail for lying about his father’s feelings for Britain as a way of attacking the Labour leader, Hari Kunzru, a novelist, rejected the £5,000 John Llewellyn Rhys prize for his debut The Impressionist, because the award was sponsored by the Daily Mail and General Trust plc.  In 2003, The Guardian asserted that “[m]aking an enemy of the Daily Mail is a little like putting your head in a lion's mouth and then inviting it to bite.”  Kunzru boldly outlined his reasoning: “As the child of an immigrant, I am only too aware of the poisonous effect of the Mail's editorial line. The atmosphere of prejudice it fosters translates into violence, and I have no wish to profit from it.”  There is nothing the law of land can do here because the ‘violence’ Kunzru spoke of indirectly springs from the pages of right-wing rags, such as lumping together a few immigrants who have (allegedly) committed crime as representative of all immigrants from poorer countries.  Curiously, journalists don’t like being lumped together and represented as being the same as those colleagues who are alleged to have engaged in crime.

Crime is a big seller.  The reputation of Christopher Jeffries was so comprehensively trashed before he had stood up in dock, let alone convicted, that the Attorney General Dominic Grieve charged The Sun and The Daily Mirror with contempt of court, the former, at bay with the phone-hacking scandal, sucked it up but the latter had the gall to appeal, even though at this point Christopher Jefferies had been completely exonerated and the real killer of Joanna Yeates apprehended and convicted.  The Mirror lost.  Jefferies later won damages from a panoply of newspapers but he continues to be ostracised where he lives and had to change his appearance, including dyeing his hair, to live a semi-normal life.  No money in the world can compensate for the psychological damage inflicted on an innocent man.  The law of the land ruled in his favour but I’m sure he would have swapped all of the money for the incident to have never happened in the first place.  I think Lord Justice Leveson was most appalled by the workings of this case amongst all the evidence brought before him.  Phone-hacking came about because journalists thought they were immune – no-one would get at them because they and their colleagues would destroy them.  The hatchets jobs on the famous and the hitherto obscure alike bred the culture that led to phone-hacking and the bribing of officials.

One last word on 'the law of land' should be for Charlotte Church who was catapulted to celebrity-status long before she understood the significance of it all as a prepubescent teenager.  One of the tabloids targeted her family, leading to the break-up of her (non-famous) parents’ marriage.  So, Mr Oborne, what law of the land is best for stopping that happening?  Determined to pursue News International for having her phone-hacked and not be ‘bought off’ as the group was doing left, right and centre with other celebrities, she only relented to an out-of-court settlement because Rupert Murdoch’s lawyers wanted to put her mother, who had suffered a nervous breakdown and was close to suicidal, on the stand with an aggressive cross-examination.  Church compromised to save her mother.  Like Steve Coogan, she was not going to have the life of herself and her loved ones on trial when it was not her that had committed any crime.  Mr Oborne, the law of the land manifestly failed here and thus is patently not the best means for regulating the press. 

The ‘intrusive assault’ of a royal charter you allege would carry more weight if you had not used scare tactics, talking about Rubicons, slippery slopes, one-way processes and regrets.  Other western European countries have certain restrictions without becoming like Belarus.  Germany, especially given its past, has a vibrant press that know the boundaries and don’t overstep them, without emasculating themselves.  Denmark, whose statutory system is very similar to what is proposed, hasn’t descended into a totalitarian hellhole.  Unless Oborne is suggesting that there is something peculiarly dark in the character of the British establishment, that high-ups in the Anglo-Saxon-inflected world are prone to an unslakeable thirst for 1984-style control, the arguments advanced by himself and his right-wing kin are risible.  No level-headed person is saying democracy is about to be rolled back and TV broadcasters are far more tightly regulated. 

Oborne previously wrote that as a commentator he has no ability to change the course of events and there is some truth to that, but the collective right-wing corps can bring about a shift in broad societal attitudes on certain issues (the entire press is responsible, say, for the demonisation of GM ‘Frankenstein’ foods and no public debate was not coloured by it).  The fear is that the influence of the right will be pruned back as they are reduced in their capacity to tell open lies and, ultimately, that will be felt at the ballot box in the election of fewer Conservative candidates.

20/20 focus on a memory

Going to the opticians, I couldn’t shift from my mind Family Guy’s mockery of Disney’s straight-to-video offerings.  Specifically focusing on the Aladdin sequels, they imagined ‘Aladdin 4: Jafar goes to the opticians’, in which the evil vizier-turned-genie has his eyes tested being the main plotline.  Then again Toy Story 2 was meant to be a straight-to-video but thankfully its quality rescued it.

Ironically, though the last time I had been to the opticians I had visited them sooner than the recommendation of a biannual check-up, this time I went the other way, leaving it far too long – four years apparently.  Happily, despite my fears, my eyesight had not deteriorated significantly and I even got the test free, courtesy of my workplace vouchers.  Not so pleasantly, my new spectacles (with a special tinting to reduce monitor and television glare) will cost £110 and there is no remittance from my work due to their potential dual-use in the office and at home.

I learnt a few things about my eyes that I hadn’t conceived of before.  Not only can opticians identify brain tumours (a very rare occurrence I learnt, after I enquired about some headaches I had been having), but also cholesterol levels, blood pressure and many other things.  Also, the little ‘floaters’ that can arc across the vision are not a sign of failing sight, rather remnants of the eyes in their formative stage that the body never fully discharged.

All things must pass

Though I have no obvious connection to the football club Hinckley United, the acceptance for its petition for insolvency I find sad.  £200,000 worth of debt is less than a week’s wage for Wayne Rooney but gargantuan for anyone of more modest means.  My paternal grandfather in his tenth decade lives, still in his own home, in Hinckley and whatever FA Cup triumphs the local team had, I derived pleasure. 

I wonder what happens to the fans?  Where does one redirect one’s passion?  Is it diminished and they drift away from the game?  Do they hold the faith, pining for a phoenix rebirth?  The tenuous existence of the country’s non-league clubs must lead to a pragmatism among those who follow the exploits of their precarious passion, like Victorians who lost children to disease and death, never without sorrow (expressed or otherwise) but with a weary understanding.

One of my closest friends is generally a Tottenham follower but first and foremost a Rushden fan.  When Rushden and Diamonds (so called, apocryphally, becase when they were formed Moscow Dynamo were touring England in the aftermath of World War Two and it was simple case of a misheard statement becoming fact and the Diamonds was appended to the name) went out of business two seasons ago, despite rising as high as the third tier of the football league at one point and holding a then-mighty Leeds United to a draw in the FA Cup, there was no question of lying down and taking it.  A reformed Rushden AFC (sadly lacking their Diamonds signature) was in business in time for the start of a new season, at the very bottom of the pyramid, winning their division.  The crowds were smaller but all the more fierce for that and far in excess of those supporting their opponents at this more humble station.  Upwardly mobile at the moment, they aspire to Wimbledon AFC who made the successful transition from the bottom back to the football league after MK Dons ‘stole’ their league position.  Meanwhile, Kettering, bitter local rivals took over Rushden’s old ground.  Kettering themselves are now liquidated.  It can be a transient existence.

At a higher level, people feel more comfortable to play games that are only tangentially related to 22 men kicking a ball around.  Alan Pardew confirms he met Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley and director of football ‘Joke’ Kinnear after the 3-2 defeat to Everton and insists it was to establish the way the club was going.  I rather think they were going to sack him after the Magpies slumped to 3-0 at half-time in an abysmal performance and held their fire by the Toon’s second-half fightback.  Though Pardew’s side got a fine away victory at Cardiff (their first ever in the top flight against the home of the ‘Blue’birds, rubbing it in that the Magpies wore their away strip of blue), briefly hoisting the team to 10^th in the table, the manager remains one heavy drubbing away from receiving his P45.

David Moyes is another manager under pressure.  He has already written off the UEFA Champion League, saying he is four or five top-drawer players short of realistically competing for it.  This is clever wordplay as it implicitly lowers expectations for a successful retention of the Premier League.  Moyes knows the players he will buy in January will be cup-tied in Europe, hence his dismissal of winning a European trophy but Man Utd might still remain champions come May.  As it stands though currently Moyes thinks they won’t be, but can’t possibly say that just seven games in to the season.

Greg Dyke, the new big bod at the FA said that England would win the World Cup in 2022.  This is not pie-in-the-sky as it might be usually as it is predicated on the Qatar World Cup being held in winter, when English players will be at their prime, plus will have fewer injuries than they do in april/May and other leagues won’t get their customary benefit from the winter break.  Michel Platini said that English players were like lions in autumn and lambs in spring.  Dyke’s clever posturing seems to back wholeheartedly a winter World Cup.

Ne'er a Giap in his knowledge

This week, one of the twentieth century's greatest military masterminds died at the impressive age of 102.  Vo Nguyen Giap beat drove the French out of Indochina, ditching his Chinese advisers and their frontal assaults in preference to his own instincts at Dien Bien Phu (though he still developed a reputation as an 'expensive general').  The Viet Minh triumph was short-lived as the Americans persuaded the South Vietnamese to not recognise the national elections exalting Ho Chi Minh, thereby dividing the country for 20 years.  As North Vietnamese defence minister in 1968, he opposed internally the Tet Offensive and, militarily, he was correct as unable to melt back into the jungle, the communist forces were exposed to American firepower.  With many thousands of irreplaceable cadres killed, the Viet Cong was never an existential threat to the government of Saigon.  But the sight of the storming of the American embassy and the startled reports from journalists (such as Walter Cronkite) who had been told that the USA was winning the war, turned the American public against it decisively, leading to the US standing off in 1975 when North Vietnam launched a conventional invasion.  Giap's opposition may have led to him being side-lined  and, allegedly, Hanoi does not know how to properly announce the death of Vietnam's - and the world's - most exceptional commanders, such was the disfavour, if not disgrace, he had fallen.  It wasn't quite Hannibal being hounded to suicide in the Crimea by vengeful Romans, but Giap's national status may have been threatening to the Party.
He lived to see not just the end of the Cold War, but also the warming of relations with the USA to the point of de facto alliance.  This warming with the West allowed him to be interviewed for the BBC History programme People's Century.  A lightweight series and even more so as a book, I still remember Giap in his late eighties, a crumpled man in an army uniform but with a pleasant yet knowing smile and displaying the charisma that must have inspired his troops to give their all for him.

Nasty and stupid

On the Today programme the other day, I heard one American right-winger argue that it wasn’t enough to lose elections; they had to stop Obamacare, no matter what the chaos caused, because, as she put it, entitlements are like a drug and once you have a new bunch of addicts, you can’t remove that drug.  Many prominent right-wingers in Anglo-Saxon-heritage democracies have no qualms about deploying the most offensive of language, in this case, treating the hitherto uninsured like drug addicts.  It’s like when Moscow’s former mayor (in a troubled democracy at best) referred to homosexual people as junkies, but the former medically uninsured don’t have Stephen Fry to be their advocate (given his international gaffes, maybe no bad thing).

It illustrates the contempt the majority of Republicans have for ordinary people – 30 million ordinary people to be precise.  The crime that prevented these people from having access to non-exorbitant healthcare – either not having a job (not unusual when unemployment is above 7%) or having a pre-existing medical condition through no fault of their own.  It is not an entitlement to guarantee the provision of health to all of one’s population, it is basic civilisation.

Yet, the extreme right have made Obamacare a cause célèbre on the grounds that it is unaffordable, forcing the Democrats to fight on the Tea Party’s choice of battleground with a powerful moral argument.  The rabid right believe they just need to show enough determination, enough willingness to destroy everything, that the Democrats will cave in, like they frequently do.  The Republican extremists may have picked the wrong fight and even gerrymandered districts may not save enough of them in the 2014 blowback – as former Republican speechwriter David Frum said, shutting down the government is playing with live ammunition, defaulting on the country’s debt is playing with nuclear weapons.

What is missing in all this is that the provisions of the Affordable Care Act save money in the long-run and to the sector of the American economy whose costs are ballooning fastest.  Doctors can’t select the most expensive treatments because they are chummy with the pharmaceutical companies, nor can they keep in patients long after the latter have recovered to gat paid longer for doing little – this is not about turfing out the ill as letting the healthy return to work, another boost to the economy.  Insurance premiums therefore come down benefiting the average American overall (and their firms) and the insurance companies have 30 million new customers to who they can sell their products.  Healthcare would be even cheaper for all if Scott Brown has punctured the Democrats super-majority by winning Edward Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat in Massachusetts (he was punished in 2012, being thrown out by the electorate).  This stopped the government providing competition with all the private health companies and drive costs down further – nine-tenths of a loaf became less than half.

So, frankly, it is disingenuous for the right to argue it is unaffordable.  The Supreme Court treated it like a tax and this is essentially a tax cut for all Americans, having to pay less for their medical bills.  Shame that the Democrats don’t emphasise this, especially as the Republican extremists are hurting the US economy to the tune of $300m a day.  Trillions of dollars worth of debt can seem gargantuan but given the credit guarantees of the US government and the US dollar being the global reserve currency, the Chinese in actual fact end up paying to hold US government debt.  The USA could rack up twice it current debt before it gets into serious problems.  That is, unless it defaults on its international debt obligations.  If the Democrats blink on this, they will be broken for a generation, such will be the grassroots disillusionment.  The Republicans must, in Republican governor Bobby Jindal’s words, “stop being the stupid party.”  That starts with breaking the hold the extremists have on the leadership.

Reaching for the stars

Tom Clancy, who died yesterday, is most remembered for his novels, especially The Hunt for Red October and his recurring character, Jack Ryan (played on screen, variously, by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck).  He was accused of having a nuts-and-bolts approach to his creations, being far more interested in the technical aspects of the equipment and vehicles used, than with development of those operating these.  Yet the image of him that stands out for me shows the positive side of this rudimentary authorial path, when in a documentary about commerical space flight, Clancy explained why he had sunk a good chunk of his fortune into one such project.  Asserting that the 'railroad' opened up America to economic expanision, Clancy compared spaceflight open to ordinary people would be a vast opportunity and his spaceship - and all others - would be the railroad of the future.  It's an extraoridnary and compelling vision  and with Virgin about to launch its own version soon, it's a shame that he never had a chance to be one of the 'pioneers'.

Gambia’s gamble

Yesterday, Gambia became the first country to withdraw from the British Commonwealth since Zimbabwe in 2003.  Though the Foreign Office is alleged to have been taken by surprise and has issued ‘regret’, they must be privately relieved to not have to associate with the possibly mad despot of the west African state, President Yahya Jammeh.  Though not quite stooping to the genocidal policies of the late Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, he is just as capricious, rounding up 1,000 people accused of being witches who killed his aunt and, like Nguema, is severing ties with Europe under the pretence of opposing colonialism (though the very fact of the country is a result of colonilaism).

Jammeh also claims to have invented a herbal cure for AIDS and persuaded many of his compatriots suffering from the affliction to stop taking anti-retroviral drugs in favour of his concoction.  No-one has heard from these people again.  How Gambia avoided being suspended from the Commonwealth after Jammeh’s 1994 military coup (though he didn’t really lead it, being rather the first to reach the presidential palace) while Pakistan was for its constitutional transgressions is anyone’s guess (though the first official suspension – of Nigeria – took place in 1995).

The Man Booker prize people will be glad they don’t have to add another caveat to those that qualify for it – all writers holding UK, Commonwealth, Irish, Zimbabwean or Gambian passports – since they opened it up to the whole English-speaking weather.  Gambia isn’t even a real country, just a sliver of land bisected by a mighty river and shaped by duelling by far-off imperial powers, as evinced by its ill-starred attempt at union with Senegal in the 1980s (and even this had 18^th century colonial echoes).  Like Djibouti, it has a diplomatic power out of all proportion to its size e.g. membership of the UN, WHO, etc. but by cutting itself off from the Commonwealth, an organisation increasingly dominated by former colonies rather than the metropolis, it has deliberately taken away a vast networking opportunity for itself, where it can foster trade links with diverse parts of the world.  Maybe Jammeh was repeatedly given the cold shoulder by other Commonwealth leaders for the multiple humans rights abuses and his risible AIDS-cure (though he could have compared notes with Jacob Zuma)..  Whatever the real reasons, Jammeh has hurt Gambia just as the Commonwealth is becoming less a talking shop and more a hub for concluding commercial deals with each other (India’s rise has played a big part in this).  While it is never nice for anyone leaving such an august institution, Gambia will miss the Commonwealth more than the Commonwealth will miss it.  Sadly, Jammeh is only 48 years old.

Share and share alike

Looking after Kimberley today, she wants to be picked up while I'm at the laptop.  She leans forward and splays her hands all over the keyboard.  Then, when she is done, she picks up the hand of mine that isn't holding her and drops it on the keyboard, as if "it's your turn now, Daddy."  A few minutes later this whole process is repeated.  Recently, she is apt to eat a bit of food and then try to share the rest with whoever is feeding her.  And all this is completely untaught, at least directly.  Maybe she's picked it up from us as parents and her granny, maybe it's innate, but either way it's adorable.

A return to their roots

Michael Foot called it 'The Forgers' Gazette', but to quote the late Labour leader might leave one open to being smeared from The Daily Mail as an incorrigible opponent of all that makes Britain great.  The broadsides against Ralph Miliband 'The man who hated Britain' and his 'evil legacy' are, of course, intended to be an attack on Ed Miliband, not just for being left-wing, not just for being a Labour member but for trying to draw the toxin from British journalism - by broadly supporting the Leveson Enquiry's findings - whose mainstream elements are notorious the world-over for their savagery and cant.
The Wail's hatchet job on Miliband Snr is actually a result of being frightened by Labour's poll bounce following their conference as if this was some great surprise.  The Liberal Democrats had a rise in the polls following their annual get-together, as does almost any caucus that garners increased media attention.  But the newspaper has blundered on a colossal scale as far from denting Labour, this story is overshadowing the Tory conference and harming any poll bounce the Conservatives would otherwise have received, much as Godfrey Bloom and his 'sluts' remark 'destroyed' UKIP's time in the sun recently (according to Nigel Farage).  Secondly, it makes Miliband even more determined to bring in press regulation ('an evil' because the Wail believes in the right of barbaric freedom of speech for itself but no-one else, allowing Miliband a right-of-reply but only surrounded by the most intemperate and vituperative articles and language) and less likely to be 'got at' by more lily-livered colleagues.  Thirdly, it shines a very uncomfortable spotlight on the intensely private Paul Dacre, editor-in-chief of the 'middle market' rag.  Far from the flamboyant Piers Morgan and Rebekah Brooks, Dacre prefers to operate in the shadows like a Morlock somehow transported back from the future.  In this recent brou-ha-ha, unlike editors who are to the forefront of defending their papers, like Alan Rusbridger and the Snowden imbroglio, Dacre sent his deputy editor to defend the Wail's handling of the affair.  It leaves him open to the charges of being a bully and a coward, terms repeated throughout yesterday and today and the more times they are said, the more they tarnish this silent emperor, as befell Tiberius Caesar.  In terms of proportion, I would say that Dacre has more hate in his little finger than Ralph Miliband had in his whole body.  Fourthly, the Wail's unsavoury past of supporting British Fascists, Hitler, the Nazis and of Jew-baiting is dredged up in regard to who really hated Britain and its values most.  Up until 1945, the Wail was virulently anti-semitic until images of the death camps came back and it was commercial suicide to continue such an editorial line and so the venom was switched towards other 'outsiders'.  The current Lord Rothermere, owner of the newspaper, therefore suffers taint by association with his fascist-leaning forebears, something which I am sure will not have endeared Dacre to him.
Though the Wail claims, the 'sins of the father' should not be visited upon the son, they will make an exception for Ed Miliband - some might call that hypocrisy.  By saying Ralph Miliband 'disapproved' (note, a climbdown from 'hate') of the the monarchy, the Church of England and the army, institutions which must be supported by anyone who loves their country in the Wail's view, he was apparently at odds with British values.  One can't say republicans are consumed with hate, they just prefer the head of state to be an elected non-entity.  Even if Ralph Miliband had believed in a higher power, he would have been an observant Jew and therefore unlikely to 'approve' of the Church, which had partly been responsible for anti-semitism.  And throughout the 1960s and 1970s, there were rumours of a military coup in response to crises in Rhodesia and domestically.  Of course, the Wail would have been at the forefront of supporting military strongmen, but Miliband and others of decency would have found this an affront to British values.
Then there was the lie that socialism=Marxism=Communism and to be a socialist in the Wail's sorry mind is to support the the brutality of the Communist Bloc.  Marxism and Marxist democracy are mulit-faceted theories and very different to the Leninist-Stalinist creed that evolved in the USSR.  But the spirit of Joe McCarthy is alive in the Wail.
Essentially, the newspaper has gone back to its roots in attacking Jews.  It's prejudice and its nastiness show a true hatred for British moderation and its pollutes our politics with its lies and smears.  The people who run the Wail are the ones who hate Britain really.

Closed minds close government

The spirit of democracy is a sense of compromise - one of the reasons for the failure of democracy to take root in Russia in the early 1990s was that civil society was weak and elected politicians did not appreciate that give-and-take is needed.  Now, Republicans who wish to destroy every success Barack Obama has achieved simply because he is a Democrat, are forcing a government shutdown.  They will only pass a budget bill -  a routine motion in normal times - if the Affordable Care Act is delayed or destroyed.  Because they resent poor people having access to healthcare, they will harm American economic health.   Like Nero (apocryphally), they will fiddle while America burns.

Bizarrely, The Telegraph spins it that the Democrats rejected the plan to avert a government shutdown, but much of Telegraph reporting in the USA is in thrall to the extremist Tea Party.  Why should the Democrats in the Senate remove what they have been trying to achieve for decades and would be vetoed by the White House, even if they did so?  Even if the Democrats crumbled (not unheard of), the GOP would be back at the next negotiations in November with a fresh set of demands.  It would be the tail wagging the dog.

What the Republicans cannot understand is that they lost the 2012 election - they lost the battle for the White House, they failed to reclaim the Senate and their number of seats in the House of Representatives fell from their 2010 surge.  The House Speaker, John Boehner, who resembles a pope in the 17th or 18th centuries i.e. everyone ignores his strictures and so has to fall in line with those he is supposed to corral, is attempting to boost his weak position by saying any budget bill must be passed by a majority of House Republicans rather than reaching across to House Democrats, but instead has made himself a creature of the Tea Party, like the popes of the 14th century were dominated by French kings.  It is astonishing that he would become president if both Obama and Joe Biden were incapacitated.

Obama has no need to move from his position, the benefits of not having to seek re-election, unlike in 2011 when he made concessions and it is better to emerge the victor from when the government runs out of money than leave it festering when the actual country runs out of money two weeks later.  He didn't blink when the Republicans refused to compromise and so enacted sequestration.  Moreover, despite The Telegraph, it should be fairly easy to pin it on the Republicans and their mania to kill ObamaCare, who were punished electorally when they shut down government in the mid-1990s.  Regaining the House must be a Democrat target certainly.