Where Ignorance Is Bliss

The opening night of the Democratic National Convention and the First Lady’s speech were a rousing success, according to Mark Mardell, the BBC’s US President editor. And his ignorance is on full display.

For Michelle, the personal is political

Mardell has been seeking inspiration for months, and seems to have found it. But first, a little sneer while making a lazy attempt to compare Michelle Obama’s speech to Ann Romney’s:

Both women stressed their husband’s compassion. Both talked lovingly about their love. Both talked about their early life with their husbands in relative poverty. Tell me, is a coffee table found in a rubbish lorry and an ironing board as a dinner table a requirement for keeping down with the Joneses?

It’s very amusing to see this sniffing at class war rhetoric from a man who has no problem using it himself. Just the other day he was reporting that Mitt Romney made a statement “from his lakeside vacation home”, as if it mattered from where he was, and writing as if taking the day off was something strange and unlike how most Americans marked Labor Day. Mardell knows perfectly well what this is all about. and has played his part in creating the environment.

Obviously the main rap on Romney is his wealth. That’s just about the only thing the Dems have on him, really, so it’s a no-brainer that Ann Romney would have to play that game. But the First Lady? It’s especially amusing that Mardell’s readers will be confused by why Michelle has to “keep down with the Joneses”, with all her talk of struggle and a working-class background. The BBC has censored all news of her lavish vacations, and the backlash caused by them, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop, yet has fawned all over her expensive designer dresses without shame. Unbeknownst to those who get their news from the BBC, there’s a lot of concern in the US about the Obamas, particularly Michelle, being out of touch, with their Martha’s Vineyard dalliances, fancy clothing, and expensive parties. Mardell can’t point out why the First Lady would even bother with this angle, because then he’d have to reveal a lot of unpleasant things. Can’t have that. So he moves quickly on.

Here’s Mardell suggesting that the President should be a cynical manipulator. He quotes this from Michelle Obama’s speech:

“Barack knows the American Dream because he’s lived it… and he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are, or where we’re from, or what we look like, or who we love.”

And then says this:

Note, by the way, that last part – there is a big appeal to the gay vote here. Just think how powerful that would have been, if Obama had announced his support for gay marriage in the middle of last week’s Republican Conference, if Joe Biden had not blown it for him, and forced his hand.

Yes, just think how powerful that would have been in the President had been able to cynically manipulate voters’ dreams like that and use what they say is a human rights issue for political gain. Is that the kind of Hope that inspires Mardell? Would it be even more courageous of Him to wait until the right political moment?  Mardell isn’t even thinking about that. All he sees is political angles and theater. What’s more is that it gives him away as a supporter – of both the issue and the President – moaning about a missed opportunity.

Now about that ignorance. Mardell acts surprised at the major focus on women voters.

It is ironic that just as the convention got underway there was some evidence that women are going off Obama. ABC’s pollster Gary Langer writes about the new opinion poll under the headline “Obama’s popularity dips underwater”.

It is, he says, “the lowest pre-convention personal popularity of an incumbent president in ABC News/Washington Post polls since the 1980s.”

But the dip in the women’s vote is perhaps even more important.

Ironic? I don’t think that word means what you think it means. It’s only ironic if they don’t know about it.

Whether the Democrats knew about the polling evidence or not they had designed their first day to allow women to tell stories portraying President Obama’s re-election as important for them.

Is he kidding? Of course they know all about this. Who imagines that Mardell has some poll data that the White House doesn’t? They probably get the press release before he does. It’s actually a sad statement on how out of touch with reality the BBC’s top man in the US apparently is. The President has been concerned about the female vote for months.

Last year His stock among women voters was slipping, and the Dems were happy to see a rise in approval from them in February of this year. If there wasn’t an ongoing concern, it wouldn’t have been news in March that He was “gaining in popularity“.

In May, Romney started to do better with Republican women, which helped close the overall popularity gap between him and the President, who was actually losing ground among women. Like I said, it’s been a concern for months. Where has Mardell been?

Of course the Democrats were going to make a big focus on women this week. They’ve only been unsuccessfully pushing the Narrative that the Republicans are engaging in a “War on Women” for most of this year. That was part of how Rep. Akin’s foolish remark got such top billing that people could be excused for thinking he was the third man on the Republican ticket.

MSNBC sure was aware of the connection between the “War on Women” Narrative and the focus on women at the convention. They’re about as in lockstep with the White House as you can get. Did Mardell not know about this? He gets the same campaign emails as everyone else. What is he thinking?

As if this isn’t enough evidence for him that the Democrats know all about their need for focus on women voters, even without the very latest poll result. Why does he think they have two different abortion activists – one from NARAL and one from Planned Parenthood – speaking at the convention, plus the infamous Sandra Fluke, who wants the government to pay for her birth control?  Alert people knew as soon as Akin’s statement hit the fan that the Dems were going to make the “They want to steal our lady parts” a key message at the convention. Two weeks ago people were reporting that they were filling the speakers’ list with women. And you know Mardell and the Beeboids saw the speakers’ list long before I did. Furthermore, women have always been a Democrat core target. Women swing voters more or less gave one election to Bill Clinton (see: “Soccer Mom”). Where’s Mardell been hiding?

No, this is silly. It’s just plain ignorance on his part to wonder if the White House machine knew about the latest poll, or if it was mere coincidence that the first night focused on women like it did. What a failure.

On second though, though, what if Mardell isn’t so ignorant and is playing some kind of game here? What would be the journalistic purpose of feigning ignorance? I’d have thought being more honest about the whole story would make for a more interesting report. Knowing the full facts and background would make both Michelle Obama’s speech and the rest of the evening’s proceedings make more political sense. Mardell knows her speech was political, so why hide what’s behind it? Is he protecting her and the President by declining to mention why she had to “keep down with the Joneses”? Is he somehow protecting the President by acting as if this dip in popularity is sudden and unexpected and by playing the Party for Women they’re acting ironically?

Maybe someone else can explain what he’s thinking here. It’s a very poor effort either way.

Mrs Thatcher Bites Dog

The BBC never knowingly allows a chance to attack Mrs Thatcher go by however unlikely:

Dr Daniel Conway, author of a paper on the politics of Margaret Thatcher’s clothing, and Tory MP Claire Perry, debate the what these suits reveal about the Iron Lady.

According to Conway Thatcher’s dresses were a physical manifestation of her politics…. which were all about ‘narrow, selfish class concerns.’

No they weren’t…if anything the complete opposite of that.

Conway clearly drinks too much coffee and doesn’t have a real job….a paper on the politics of Margaret Thatcher’s clothing?  Who in his university authorised funding for that research?  Never mind world beating technology and engineering design…let’s fund a course on ‘power dressing’.  Is Conway at a university or working for Cosmopolitan…or Private Eye?

Still I suppose it saves Labour having to go cap in hand to the Union Barons for more money if the BBC coninues to provide so much free anti-Tory propaganda.

Growth: Stimulate to Simulate

Wake Up To Money

A classic example of the BBC proving that they play the man and not the ball…..or rather attack the Tories whatever policy they come up with.

How many times have you heard someone dragged onto the BBC to complain about banks not lending to them? How many times have you heard the answer to low growth is building more houses? How many times have you heard a BBC economic guru tell you that governments only go for policies that have short term benefits that can win a few votes in a coming election? (And isn’t China the model of government that we should follow…not having to bother with awkward democratic requirements like winning votes and the People’s consent, they can do as they like for as long as they like).

Apparently, now George Osborne has decided to cough up £40 billion for construction projects, relax planning laws and guarantee lending, and perhaps create a government business bank, all those concerns were rubbish…we want short term answers, we don’t want massive spending when we don’t know where the money comes from, we don’t want more building if projects aren’t financially credible..

If Osborne is shelling out money the BBC now tells us we’ve got to ask where’s the money coming from, is it going to make the deficit worse and isn’t this a long term project that helps no one immediately, and isn’t there a contradiction here…if to get a guarantee your project needs to be financially credible then presumably the banks not lending is because the project is not credible…and isn’t all this just to massage the economic figures for political benefit?

You know it’s a funny old world…those are the very questions you might have been asking about Balls’ ‘spending big for growth’ plans…..unfortunately the BBC generally wasn’t too concerned about asking such questions of Labour’s economic genius.

It looks as if whatever Osborne does, even if its pretty much as he’s been pressured into by the Media, he’s wrong…because he’s not a Labour Chancellor.

In a healthy economy you wouldn’t absolutely need growth…it is only because we were left enormous debts to pay off that we need growth to pay them off or even larger cuts in government spending. There’s nothing wrong with having no growth ….what is growth anyway (is it exports, or earnings or spending, or borrowing?)…and why do we need it?…the BBC never explains…to do so might undermine the ‘drive for growth’ that they have used as a weapon against Osborne.

Growth can only come from suddenly finding oil under this green and pleasant land or some such resource, or by training our people with skills they can sell abroad or use to make products that we can sell abroad, by people working longer or harder for the same money…and by exports. Growth does not come from governments borrowing money to build houses paid for by people borrowing more money for mortgages….and filling them with sofas and plasma TVs bought on the never never. If I borrow £100,000 and buy a Ferrari am I suddenly rich? The neighbours might think so…but they don’t see the debt, only the Ferrari on the drive. Your income hasn’t grown a penny…in fact it’s dropped ..because you are paying interest on the loan as well as capital.

Such ‘growth’ is illusory and purely a short term book exercise…much like Labour’s PFI spending.

It looks good for a while until the bills start rolling in…and then you’re back to square one or worse…..teetering on the edge with even bigger debts….and financial markets upping the interest rates on your loans making repayment even harder.

Still….if the BBC tells us that’s the answer who are we to doubt? After all Stephanie Flanders thought that the government should employ more public sector workers…because they would pay tax and the government revenues would go up. Clever girl that. Try that with your bank….say you will repay your loan if they will lend you another loan to pay off the first loan.

So it seems the BBC were all for ‘Stimulus’ when balls was trumpeting  its merits but aren’t quite so sure now Osborne has succumbed…and perhaps they are right to be sceptical…China isn’t looking so hot just now even with its own stimulus package…….

Has stimulus really helped China  or is it a short term mirage?

‘More determined stimulus measures could help the economy regain momentum and resuscitate the investment demand that is crucial to China’s growth model.

But they also could produce nasty side effects of the sort that followed a huge stimulus package in the wake of the financial crisis in late 2008. Combined with lower interest rates and a flood of bank lending, the spending package helped the economy bounce back quickly in 2009. However, it also led to high inflation, soaring property prices and an increase in loans that could ultimately go sour.’

 

And of course it was a property boom and soaring prices that got us here in the first place!  (Not ‘casino’ banks….but retail banks overlending mortgages that would never be repaid…….Vince Cable talks rot)

Mardell Plays The Race Card

At first, as I was reading this latest report by Mark Mardell I was thinking how amazing it was that it was not about this or that candidate, that it wasn’t about some political issue which affects the President, and that he had made a rare excursion outside the campaign trail to discover something else about the US besides political polarization. Here he is, I thought to myself, talking about art and something interesting.

How wrong I was.

In reality, this was Mardell telling you that we need to re-elect the President cos He is black. Aside from any niceties about the artist, Kahinde Wiley, being used to promote an agenda interviewed about his vision and a brief discussion of his work and what it represents, the message could not be clearer. The editor even has is as the highlight quote:

“I’m looking for a sense of self-possession, a type of swagger, a sense of grace in the world”

Oops, sorry, that was the superficial praise of Him, the revival of the “Oh, look how cool He is,” meme, which has so often passed the lips of Beeboids since He came among us. That’s really all He’s got these days, which is sad. What any of this has to do with running a government I have no idea. But that’s not the point, is it?

The actual quote I’m talking about:

“Obama stands as a signal, that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what’s possible”

See, we must re-elect Him so that other countries think we’re cool. For no reason other than the color of His skin. This is racial thinking, and I object.

The whole thing is really about His race, and about how we need to keep Him in power as a racial symbol. Nothing about His accomplishments, nothing about merit, nothing about ability or achievement. It’s all about race. These are Wiley’s words, not Mardell’s, but it fits in perfectly with Mardell’s own beliefs and the story he wants to tell.

“The reality of Barack Obama being the president of the United States – quite possibly the most powerful nation in the world – means that the image of power is completely new for an entire generation of not only black American kids, but every population group in this nation.”

Yes, it does. We’ve done it. But what does it tell an entire generation of black American kids if we say the only reason to keep the President in power is because He’s black? Do we really tell them that a black person’s only intrinsic value is the color of their skin?

“The way that we’re coded for power has been recontextualised in terms of race. Now there are children who are four or five who would have known only a black man at the seat of power in this nation. It’s an important social message.”

Yes it is. That’s why we elected Him in the first place. Not because we thought His ideas about nationalized health care were so great, not because He was against homosexual marriage at the time, not because we wanted to send George Bush packing, as he wasn’t running for office. We elected The Obamessiah because of the color of his skin, to send that social message. Mostly so the whites among us could pat ourselves on the back more than to actually uplift black people. But why is that a reason to re-elect someone who isn’t up to the job?

I realize that this last question comes from a Right-wing perspective. Mardell, of course, wouldn’t see it that way. As far as He’s concerned, as we’ve seen over an over again from his “reporting”, the main reason The Obamessiah hasn’t been a brilliant President who fixed the economy and saved us all is because He wasn’t allowed to by intransigent Republicans in Congress. So Mardell will see this idea that we will continue to send a positive racial message as mere icing on the cake.

It gets worse:

“There is a cultural shift in the nation that says possibility is not necessary impacted or determined wholly by the colour of your skin.”

Really? Then why is this entire piece about how we must determine our nation’s future wholly by the color of His skin? This doublethink drives me crazy. On the one hand, we’re supposed to accept – which I do – that the election of a black man to the White House means that we have made at least some progress towards seeing beyond skin color, that enough of the country is not as racist as we were led to believe. While on the other hand, we’re supposed to say that we must keep Him in power simply because He’s black. Again, I must point out that there’s nothing here about His character or accomplishments, or trying to prove He’s done a good job and deserves a second term.

“That said, this society has a long way to go, and – as we go through this election cycle – there are echoes of racism that continue to enter and occupy the American imagination.

“There is – and always will be – the legacy of chattel slavery in this nation, an obsession with racial and gender differencec, but I think that, at its best, this nation is capable of creating standards for itself and reaching towards those standards.

“Obama stands as a signal that this nation will continue to redefine what it means to push beyond the borders of what’s possible.”

And so on. There’s quite a bit more on this theme: it’s important to keep a black man in power, regardless of His competence or policies, because the US has an unfortunate history on racial issues.

The BBC has gone from the 2008 election message that if we don’t elect The Obamessiah it’s because we’re racist to saying that any opposition to His policies is based on racism, to how we must re-elect Him because of past racist sins. This really isn’t much of a positive statement about how He’s done as President, is it?

This is all they’ve got.  Mardell is dimly aware that the President is going to have a tough time running on His record, which is why the campaign is all about how evil the Republicans are. Mardell simply cannot let go of his racialist views, and so sought out Wiley to use as a tool to promote this message: the US is a racist country, and not only did we have to elect Him to assuage some of that guilt, but we must now re-elect Him because of it.

There can be no other message taken from this. It’s sad not so much because it attempts to dismiss any legitimate objections to the President’s policies and how might govern if given free reign in a second term. It’s sad most of all because this infantilizes black people.

At the end of the day, people of African-American descent are not valued by Mardell or his kind for their character or their accomplishments, but only for the color of their skin. This is racialist thinking, and it’s coming from the BBC’s top man in the US.

If you don’t vote for Him in November, you’re a racist who wants to send the wrong message to black children, and wants to tell the world that we’re not cool, and that there is no longer any Hope. What’s that? You have an objection to one of His policies? Racist!

Think I’m making it up? Seeing something that isn’t there? In his next piece, Mardell says it explicitly:

The core political debate about the redistribution of wealth is sharpened by redistribution to people who “are not like us”.

This is the same slander he babbled to the BBC College of Journalism last year. The rest of the very long outburst is about how this election is all about race, and if we don’t re-elect Him, black children will feel bad.

If, on the other hand, he loses, many African Americans will take it personally, will be worried and hurt, and see the result as another reverse in their long struggle.

Say It Ain’t So!

Did he walk or was he pushed?

Parting words from Richard Black:

Farewell and thanks for reading

This is my last entry for this page – I’m leaving the BBC to work, initially, on ocean conservation issues.

While this page will no longer be updated, it will stay here for reference.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my blog down the years – I’ve enjoyed writing it, and have appreciated your comments.

To keep up to date with news and views about the environment, I hope you’ll keep reading the science and environment pages of the BBC News website, and my science correspondent colleagues Jonathan Amos and David Shukman.

 

 

THAT NEW UN ENVOY…

So, after Kofi Annan’s abysmal failure in Syria the UN throws up (I use the term advisedly) UN-Arab League envoy  Lakhdar Brahimi, and the BBC gives him a very sympathetic hearing as he declares a pre-emptive pessimistic view of the task ahead of him, as he takes up his new post. But I was wondering if THIS Lakhdar Brahimi is in any way related to this guy?

 Lakhdar Brahimi was pro-Saddam when he was Minister for Foreign Affairs of Algeria from 1991 to 1993 and Under-Secretary-General of the League of Arab States from 1984 to 1991.

Not only did Brahimi endorse Saddam Hussein and remained a close ally to him, he also denied that Saddam Hussein, the glory of Arab Leader as he described him, had ever used chemical weapons. Brahimi announced on French radio that “The great poison in the region is this Israeli policy of domination and the suffering imposed on the Palestinians” as well as the “equally unjust support of the United States for this policy.”

In an interview, regarding the thugs and criminals in Faluja fighting United States forces, Brahimi said, “In this situation, there is no military solution.” He added, “There is never any military solution to any problem.”

Naturally the BBC sanitise all of this in their portrayal of this “peace envoy”.

SHAMELESS

Given the shocking mess that Labour made of our Education system, one would think they are in no position to carp about efforts being made by this Coalition government to try and improve things.  But of course that is not the case, Labour has no shame. The BBC has been pushing the Labour line on the news that more “Free Schools” are opening this morning and I heard one BBC correspondent talk about the “waste” that accompanied some of these new Free Schools. (Bradford was singled out) Funny how the BBC NEVER talks about the enormous waste that characterises the bloated State sector schools. It never talks of the staggering inefficiencies, the inept teaching, the lack of discipline or indeed the grotesque social engineering that Labour helped build up within our Schools. Just shameless, BBC.

RAINBOW’S END.

Just imagine. The Thatcher Government is in power, The Miners are striking and police open fire killing 34 of them.  BBC would be in meltdown.

In South Africa, with the blessed ANC in power, the Miners are striking and police open fire killing 34 of them. Then, in a surreal move, the ANC government charges the Miners with making the police kill them. BBC explains this is “an apartheid  era” law. Ah, I see. Blame on the Apartheid, blame it on the boogie but DON’T blame on the murderous ANC.