What’s Next?

I’ve got a new job so my posts here might drop off a bit but I couldn’t resist commenting on this.

So Bush reduced Scooter’s sentence from an actual sentence to just having to pay a lot of money (I doubt he’ll have much trouble coming up with it). I’m sure this comes as a huge shock to everyone. What’s more fun is watching James Forsyth try to defend it in The Spectator.

From the basis that the jurors (while quite sure he was guilty of hell of purjury) not being sure why they were trying him instead of the higher-ups who, you know, actually did it, Forsyth tries to argue that because Libby was loyal to the President, he was right to pardon him. Riiight. Libby is the former chief of staff to vice president Cheney, who recently tried to claim he wasn’t a member of the executive branch in order to escape handing files over. This is the class of clown we’re working with here.

Just because the much bigger crime nearly went unpunished does that make all others non-existent? I’d absolutely agree that Libby shouldn’t be the one on trial here, but the fact remains that Libby lied in order to cover up a crime. The reason why the people who deserve to be in jail aren’t going to trial is because Libby and people like him lied.

Libby’s readiness to put his boss’s interests ahead of his own throughout the case culminated in his defence team’s decision not to call Cheney to testify at the trial.

Yes…how self-sacrificing! He was willing to cover up his boss’s crimes instead of telling the truth, How noble!

This whole investigation and trial has been a political affair from the start. So it is only appropriate that it should end with a political decision, not a legal one.

This began as a political move to damage a political opponent by endangering lives, and ends with the President deciding to let someone off the hook for political reasons, they’ve abandoned all hints of subtly now. I think this is great for the narrative value; if the President had done the right thing and let justice progress it wouldn’t be nearly as good a story.

Simon Walter’s of the Daily Mail launched a scathing attack at blogger Owen Barder (whose site seems to be down as a result). Reflecting the best journalistic traditions of the Daily Mail, it’s full of mis-direction, half-truths and things that just flat out aren’t true. Tim Worstall did an excellent deconstruction of it. Here are the highlights:

A former aide to Tony Blair has posted on his website an attack on the Prime Minister which compares President George Bush to Hitler.

The attack, which has shocked Whitehall, appears on the outspoken, sexually explicit, website blog of £100,000-a-year civil servant Owen Barder.

I very much doubt the attack ’shocked Whitehall’ as it wasn’t even his comment, he’d just linked to a Guardian article. Which, while doubtless suspicious behaviour, isn’t in itself a crime. And ’sexually explicit’? Please, the only thing that comes was his rather frank accont of his vasectomy which Walters is infering is one of the least explicit things he’s written about. It’s just a cheap ploy to gain some shock value in his opening lines.

He’s also guilty of crimes like condemning the abduction of terrorist suspects to be tortured in parts unknown.

Mr Barder condemns ‘extraordinary renditions’ whereby America - allegedly using UK airports with Mr Blair’s support - snatched Al Qaeda suspects and tortured them.

Which wasn’t an entirely treasonous opinion last time I checked…and he’s quite right to do so.

Margaret Thatcher is described as ‘pernicious,’ while ex-Labour leader Neil Kinnock is praised for making ‘one of the finest speeches in British politics’.

It turns out ‘pernicious’ was a comment someone else had left on a post. Journalistic integrity of the highest source here.

And the real killer? All of this was written during an unpaid two year sabbatical, so he wasn’t even a member of the Civil Service at the time! Making the entire point of the article well, pointless.

The comments section on the article was closed rather quickly. It’d be more honest of the Mail to remove it all together if they don’t allow comments that seriously question the article (as many other newspaper comments sections are happy to publish). But maybe honesty in procedure would be asking a bit much of a newspaper that would print this garbage.

The title of this post is the immortal response by Martin Durkin, director of ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ to some criticism of the science of his programme. As Channel Four later revealed, the program was commissioned as part of a series of polemic films, in other words, films that were one-sided, anti-educational, and misleading.

The goal was to produce controversy, which it achieved very well. Was it an accurate and scientific presentation? Less so. I’m not qualified to question the facts presented, but those that are have done, in depth. It’s quite clear that most of the ‘evidence’ presented is nothing new and has almost entirely been discredited. What’s more, one of the interviewees Carl Wunsch felt that their position had been utterly misrepresented and that their professional credibility had been damaged as a result. It can’t be that Channel 4 wasn’t aware that this was a possibility; Durkin has a history of it. ‘Against Nature’ – a series Durkin had previously made for Channel Four was attacked for similar reasons resulting in the Independent Television Commission reporting that the programme makers “distorted by selective editing” the views of the interviewees and “misled” them about the “content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part”. Channel Four had to make an on-air apology for broadcasting the series. Either the institutional memory is extremely short, or a honest documentary wasn’t the point.

Do we gain from having a series of biased films as opposed to a few well-researched and balanced films? Having two extremes is not the same as ‘fair and balanced’. On the other extreme we get the Durkins of the world, content to ignore and dismiss the issue. On the other we get the fringe-environmentalists who advocate a return to a stone-age lifestyle to live ‘in harmony’ with nature and think that keeping people impoverished as long as they preserve their native culture is for the best. Both sides are equally wacko and all sensible debate gets lost by the wayside. Whilst Durkin is content to attack this extreme fringe of the environmental movement as ‘anti-human’, the sad truth is that to lie and mislead people about the danger of global warming to billions of the world’s poor he is advocating the most ‘anti-human’ position possible in this debate.

Whilst we must always question the status quo, there’s a difference between questioning and outright lies. Channel Four should not be in the business of commissioning shows where the object is not truth, but controversy. They didn’t want education, they wanted entertainment. They should have advertised it as such.