Sorry for the hiatus

. Christmas is a busy time for personal life and a quiet time for news, or rather, news bias. What’s the point in the BBC launching an offensive against their bettes noire or an extensive cover-up of ‘bad news’ when the punters are flat out with surfeit of this or that mind altering substance (even if it’s just the old post-prandial-orgy-chasm their minds have fallen into)? There’ll probably be another absence of posts in the coming days, but you never know. As Mark Steyn helpfully pointed out on his lovely website (not a blog, honest!), BritXmas lasts two weeks. Convenient, huh?

Well, I’ve still been watching the Beeb with my beady eye and my head in my hands (odd angle, but still) and it’s still dire. One general issue I find myself considering at the moment is why the BBC is so much more animated discussing the problems in Iraq compared with their interest in the ongoing Serbian crisis that has dragged on painfully and is enduring its fifth year. Today the Beeb has reported the Serbian election, where friends of Slobodan- the guy the international community is trying to try to try for war crimes in their lovely shiny Hague courts- have cornered over a quarter of the popular vote. Slob’s party, the Socialists, have a respectable 7 percent. Would this have anything to do with the rarely mentioned persecution of Serbs in UN liberated Kosovo, I find myself asking? (in this link you will find a prized Beeb report on persecuted Serbs- notice that they don’t blame the UN, but publish a call for more resources to be given to acronymic police).

Anyway, the Beeb doesn’t run an article on the pathetic failure of UN-led forces to plan for the post war situation, or speculate on whether there’s a connection to the fact that Slobodan and other suspected criminals have yet to be judged and in some cases yet to face a court. It doesn’t blame ‘multi-lateral’ action as weak and corrupt, or discuss the feasability of a ‘multi-polar’ world. It doesn’t even mention that the French and the Germans, and Bill Clinton too (not forgetting our Tone), were the authors of this particular post-spring 1999 chapter of European history. The Beeb in general presents all the pomp of the UN and none of the failings- since here the typical UN trumpeting mysteriously fades away and becomes instead the ‘international community’. It seems more convenient to blame ‘ghosts’ . When these chains of command are conveniently blotted out, exactly who do I write to to complain about these states and affairs? Santa Claus?

Far from concentrating on the proven problems with getting results against nasty Serb nationalists the Beeb focusses ‘in depth’ on the speculated ‘problems’ in bringing Saddam Hussein to trial. I don’t know why: even the one and a half years mentioned sounds a really good timescale compared to the thinking time lavished on Slobadan and his chums. I also don’t know why they consider that there will be such problems proving the guilt of Saddam, since much of what he did he was so proud of he had it videotaped. The catalogue is so extensive, the Saddam-cult so primary in Iraq’s murderous political life, where’s the problem? Ah, but I am remiss- the Beeb are better at covering speculated problems than real ones.