My post on ‘Blogging for Peace’ was timely. Larry Hamelin, the Barefoot Bum, has ordered me to take him off my ‘neoCon blogroll’ because he is personally affronted by my reference, in my earlier post ‘Idiots’ Corner’, to the ‘lickspittle Left’.
Larry – usually a highly reasonable breath of sanity amidst American blogsites awash with irrational triumphalist religiosity and extreme right wing gung-ho politics – has completely misconstrued my meaning. I didn’t have him in mind at all when I used that phrase, but I can’t tell him so as he has admonished me not to reply to his rude emails as he “doesn’t want to be associated with me in any way” and has placed me in his killfile. Oh dear! What next? Conversing with even ostensibly sensible Americans is like walking on eggshells…..
The Barefoot Bum, I sadly conclude, is abysmally ignorant of the minutiae of British politics – utterly insignificant as they are to 99.9 per cent of self-absorbed Americans. If he knew anything about the lamentable state of political debate here, or ever visited sites such as the Guardian’s ironically named ‘Comment is Free’, he would be aware that liberal discourse in the UK is infested by the pathetic “Muslims can do no wrong and their religion should never be criticised because we have wickedly invaded Iraq” babble of Respect supporters and other SWP-type loony Left groupuscules who cannot see the wood for the trees, or the non-sequitur of their absurd ‘argument’, and are so viscerally anti-American – regardless of who is in office there – that they welcome any setback or defeat that the USA suffers in the world. It is these people whom I label the 'lickspittle Left'.
My position, as I set out clearly in my original post, is that the American-British invasion of Iraq, without United Nations’ authorisation, was – quite apart from being illegal and immoral, which latter is the only aspect which seems to worry Larry – criminally stupid and – as many of us were saying it would do before it commenced - has resulted in undermining the West’s moral, military, and material strength. The US and UK should never have gone in there, but as they did there has to be a better option for phased withdrawal than an ignominious helter-skelter pursued by the triumphant jeers of fanatic Islamists. The sooner the UN and other appropriate international bodies are involved in constructing a credible international force to take over in
If the Barefoot Bum thinks that this is a ‘neoCon’ attitude, his usual rational stance has sadly deserted him.
OK, Larry, I’ll remove the Barefoot Bum from my blogroll. A pity – because I hoped that through me your generally sensible and sometimes wise posts would reach some new readers who wouldn’t otherwise have found you.
But I would have had to do it anyway, because as I said in ‘Blogging for Peace’, life’s too short to bother with people who descend to trading personal insults and obscenities, as you have chosen to do. So Goodbye.
