The March of the Zombies (aka the Republican Party’s Presidential Primaries campaign) suddenly caught fire with this interesting duel between Newt Gingrich and Juan Williams

It is fascinating to watch because Williams clearly played the race card and Gingrich trumped it with the personal responsibility card. He gave a masterclass in detoxifying a liberal left attack point with a rebuttal using cold hard facts delivered in a calm, logical manner.

The audience loved it – not just because the race card was and will always be the key weapon in the Democrats defence of Obama but it is always good for the soul to see an establishment media figure cut down to size.

Even better – it irritated Chris Matthews and Dave Weigel

Straws in the wind? The inevitability of Mitt Romney dented? Who knows – but it earned Newt some kudos from the “totally irrelevant” Frum disdained Sarah Palin and Robert Stacy McCain seemed to put his Rick Santorum lovefest (whoops, nearly said Herman Cain…) briefly on the back burner while he blamed feminism for the Italian cruise ship disaster…..

Allahpundit at Hot Air, ever eager to use the governor to gain traffic, described Palin’s remarks as an endorsement. It wasn’t, of course as can be seen from the clip. But then, of course he could never really get a handle on Palin’s praise of Newt and the impact it might have on Tea Partiers because it would need major surgery and a decade of therapy to unscramble the little neural glitch he has about both Palin and the Tea Party in his brain.

The whole UK media, spearheaded naturally by the BBC, has been in maximum emotional overdrive with the Lawrence case.

Fine…..

It was a vicious murder and two men have been sent to prison – indeed there is already pressure to lengthen the sentences even though, according to the law, since they were juveniles when the crime was committed, they had to be sentenced as juveniles.
So, all the great and the good at the BBC are agreed, hurl them into the slammer and throw away the key.

That’s good.

It means that for a few weeks we won’t have any of those tear jerking hand wringing BBC pieces about how prison doesn’t work and how even hardened criminals need to have the opportunity to be rehabilitated by a swift return back into the outside world……

Rick Santelli for President? The man who played a major part in sparking off the Tea Party movement?

Santelli is a financial journalist who previously was a trader at the Chicago Mercantile exchange.

But he’s not a politician.

Surely the only sort of person who can unravel the mess that politicians have created is another politician – and anyway Colin Powell has decreed that nobody who identifies with the Tea Party could possibly win because compromise is the name of the game.

Powell’s sentiment has also been bolstered by the threat of the magisterial David Frum that he will leave the GOP if anyone but Romney or Huntsman is nominated

Still Santelli has one major ace in his hand should he actually make a play for 2012.

UK Guardian left wing AGW guru George Monbiot hates him

the most alarming example of cheap demagoguery you are likely to have seen.

Obviously the BBC has not made much of this story…..I wonder why?

Oxford educated left wing Guardian hackette Marina Hyde (“one of the funniest and most admired journalists in the UK”) might be getting the smallest Oxfam charity Christmas card this year from her editor Alan Rusbridger who had to endure the humiliation of seeing his face spread over The Sun as the tabloid helpfully pointed out

The much hyped Ms Hyde, the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, blends in perfectly with the well born radical chic crowd at The Guardian burnishing their NW1 dinner party credentials by bashing the “rich” and the Tories. But it’s perfectly clear that this was a story that fitted so neatly into the Guardian’s Murdoch manic obsession she didn’t even bother to check it out.

Epic fail.

But her career will not suffer. Socialist hacks live in a risk free environment when it comes to peddling untruths because the golden rule of left wing journalism is that truth = what ought to be true rather than what is true. There will be no explosion of indignation from media colleagues for this shoddy piece of gimcrack “journalism”. No thundering broadsides from the BBC for it is now open season on Murdoch, not because of the hacking and blagging that anyway was probably par for the course for all tabloids, including the left wing Mirror – but because Murdoch and The Sun switched their support from Labour to the Conservatives in the final months of Gordon Brown’s tenure at No. 10 – and the many years of Murdoch supporting Labour were immediately conveniently airbrushed out of history.

Hence the lack of BBC interest in this story.

But imagine the outburst from the BBC if it had been a Sun reporter inventing stuff up about The Guardian. …..

Aaaaahhhhh….the sweet sense of liberal left hypocrisy in the morning…..

OK they want you to buy stuff from their shops but set that aside for one moment.

John Lewis is one of the most profitable retailers in the UK with branches in every big city, renowned for quality, value and good service. It rarely advertises on television since it’s reputation in itself is sufficient to generate footfall but for Christmas a TV commercial is regularly screened. As always the production values reflect the public’s perception of the store.

In 90 seconds this advertisement says more about love and family than a regiment of pundits could ponticate about in a thousand books….

Same report, different reactions….

Overheard at a Guardianista North London dinner party

Overheard in a pub in South London

Overheard in a golf club in Dorking, Surrey

How do I know in my bones that the coverage of the 2012 US election will be total crapola, not just from the card carrying rainbow and unicorn lefty luvvies at the BBC but also from the “official” so called right wing media?

Like any sane, well balanced and nuanced English conservative populist I hardly ever bother to get my information about US politics from the established UK media.. BBC (MSNBC in drag), Telegraph (Country Club GOP), Mail (National Enquirer)…or the right wing blogosphere.. ConservativeHome (Douthat/Brooks/Frum), Spectator Coffee House (Frum/Brooks/Douthat)

Why should I bother with yesterday’s stale bread when I can go to Hot Air, Stacy McCain, Dan Riehl and Prof Jacobson to get the just baked bagels? Or fly around the Twitterverse with @SissyWillis, @pepper_10, @ginthegin and other wild Tea Partiers/Palinistas

It was from Hot Air & Co. that I first learned about the Tea Party as early as February 2009, long months before it appeared on UK media radar. It was also from those sites, articulating a fierce anger, not just against the Obama stimulus and healthcare plans but also against the Douthat/Brooks/Frum nexus of GOP choirmasters that I began to realise the strength of the fireball that hit Washington in the 2010 mid terms.

Until well into 2010 the UK media and blogs were following the Brooks line of working with Obama and the Democrats because they had won so overwhelmingly in 2008. Avoid outright confrontation and maybe, in 2016 or 2020 an Obama- lite GOP figure might be able to slip into the White House – the Huntsman scenario.

Palin, of course, was sniffily dismissed as an airhead. Herman Cain was blanked when he was an outsider and still is being relatively ignored even though he is currently pushing out Perry in the polls. Neither of them passed the David Brooks trouser crease test.

At almost every stage the UK media and “official” blogosphere has got it wrong about the US political scene.

Which is why I am dreading the forthcoming coverage of the 2012 primary and presidential campaign

We could really do with a UK website that totally ignores comments from NYT, WaPo and the official newsletter of the DNC, Politico, and the legions of lobbyists, consultants and seedy academics paraded by Rentaquote.

There has been progress – the relatively new Commentator isn’t interested in what David Frum opines, Spiked is wildly anarchic poking it’s rapiers from both the left and the right into the pompous and self serving political/cultural media elite and Biased BBC continues its never ending crusade against the smug, arrogant North London dinner party cartels that run the BBC. But it’s an uphill battle against a powerful network of establishment quislings who rely on the collective mental inertia of a an intellectually disenfranchised population more easily seduced by watching the degrading antics of publicity seeking clowns and charlatans and being politically masturbated by the politics of greed, envy and ignorance…..

We are beset by snakes – why isn’t there a mongoose around when you need one……

I suppose I can always dream….

Why am I creepy? I’m hardly pro Palin, if that’s your insinuation.

What sort of person would use that as a defence?

But let’s begin at the beginning.

Perusing the UK Daily Telegraph online, yesterday (I refuse to put a portion of my hard earned pension into the wallets of the Barclay brothers for the dubious pleasure of reading the latest trillings from Bryony Gordon printed on a dead tree) I came across this review of Nick Broomfield’s documentary on Governor Palin by the DT’s film critic, Tim Robey.

Now as I am on a fixed income and therefore have to count my pennies I must confess that I don’t usually read Mr Robey’s pieces because I can rarely afford the luxury of a visit to the cinema or the renting of a DVD – it would be like pressing my nose against the toyshop window lusting for the £50 robot dog with my 25p clutched in my hand. But I understand in the world of the cultural media elite he is highly regarded by the great and the good (including that arbiter of all things artistic, Guy Lodge) and, on the few occasions I have read his musings, I have no reason to dispute the contention that his place in the higher levels of London’s Culture Heap is richly deserved.

So, having a passing interest in the world of US politics, I linked onto his Broomfield article to find out his opinion of the film.

To be fair to Mr Robey he wasn’t particularly impressed with it either technically or artistically. Of course he was rather sniffy about the Governor’s parents (“all homespun pieties” with “an impressive mountain of antlers in their yard”) and ended up with the usual stuff about the significance of “approval ratings” more than a year before an election but hey…what do you expect – he’s a film critic and it’s the Daily Telegraph for crying out loud….par for the course…

But then I read this..

There’s something creepy, for sure, about the fierce guarding of Palin’s reputation in town

…and I thought creepy? He thinks it’s creepy for people in Wasilla to treat Broomfield like something unpleasant stuck on the sole of your shoe?

So I looked up Mr Robey’s profile at the Telegraph, couldn’t get that word out of my head and took off for Planet Twitter

TheAgedP The Aged P The creepy @trim_obey at UK Telegraph creepily predictable on Broomfields Palin film (which bombed even with US left)tgr.ph/olVclY

Which prompted a reply which I initially regarded as hilarious but on further reflection seemed to be rather sad….

trim_obey Tim Robey @TheAgedP Why am I creepy? I’m hardly pro Palin, if that’s your insinuation.

He had assumed, I fancy, that I was some sort of lefty wingnut who had felt he was being too soft on her. Did he suddenly have visions of being cold shouldered at the next North London dinner party or struck off the BBC Newsnight invitation list for being a crypto Tea Partier or, even worse, another David Starkey?

Worrying….

What had triggered my response, however, was the fact that, although he had regarded the film’s technical and artistic values as rather shallow, Mr Robey had appeared to accept, at face value, Broomfields presentation of “the facts”

Gradually, though, the gossip they dig up from erstwhile friends and campaign managers – giving the lie to popularity-boosting Palin myths about her sports prowess and family life – prompts the communal cold shoulder.

I thought that was a sloppy piece of journalism, especially when I recollected what The New York Magazine had said about Broomfield in their review

• Broomfield wants to show what a superficial individual Palin is, so he includes a sequence about her alleged plastic surgery and Bump-it hairdo. Ah, sexist and inconsequential! Point: Palin!
• Broomfield attempts to highlight the suffering Palin caused others by introducing scandal after scandal, then cutting to a shot of its victims trashing Palin. The result: Regardless of the viability of their grievances, her enemies just look like spurned brats. Point: Palin!
• To try to paint a compelling portrait of Palin’s two-faced, evil nature, Broomfield regurgitates just about every blog post from the last three years, throws in clips of the Katie Couric interview (which at this point would put even Rachel Maddow to sleep), and digs into the revelation that Palin wasn’t actually nicknamed “Barracuda” because of her intensity on the high school basketball court, but rather because she liked the Heart song of the same name. Point: Palin!

The NYM is the newssheet of anyone who is anything in the hip cultural elite of US media, more Tina Brown than Tina Brown herself, light years from Wasilla and as Palin unfriendly as you can get – yet even they smelt something fishy about Broomfield.

Which is why I tweeted this

TheAgedP The Aged P @trim_obey a more honest review from a source that could never be described as Palin friendly http://bit.ly/r6LvKb

This obviously touched a nerve.

trim_obey Tim Robey @TheAgedP Perhaps that’s me being credulous, which you’re more than welcome to argue, but I don’t see how it’s dishonest.

There were further exchanges between us of a similar nature but I hope you get the drift of the debate, such as it was. There was, of course, no resolution. Mr Robey could obviously not accept my point that anyone who gets paid, probably quite generously, for writing in the public prints, needs to do a little of what R S McCain calls shoeleather on a topic or, at the very least, employ that golden “get out of jail” card of every hack – the word “alleged”

Should I have bothered? Was it worth all the hassle? I think it was. People like Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, Margaret Thatcher and other conservatives unafraid to challenge the assumptions held dear by a media/academic elite overwhelmingly imbued with the ideas of the liberal left will always have to endure the prospect of death by a thousand cuts – phrases, comments slipped so often into discourse that, Lysenko like, they become accepted as truisms. The beauty of the internet is that, at last, the journalists can be held to account. With a much smaller megaphone, of course, but at least something can be heard – though Mr Robey might not agree

trim_obey Tim Robey @TheAgedP Yes, I’m sure my media career is finished. Good luck with yours.

Heh – as Prof Reynolds would say – how about that Army of Davids?

PS…..I am distraught – I have been crucified by Guy Lodge himself…..

@GuyLodge:@TheAgedP @trim_obey What’s creepy about this back-and-forth, if I may, isn’t anyone’s stance on Palin, honestly influenced or otherwise…. It’s that you’d use a fairly coolly argued review as a springboard for a personal attack on someone you don’t know.

..as distinct from “a fairly coolly argued review” which implies that someone he doesn’t know who has a political background with which he appears to be totally unfamiliar has not discouraged untruths about herself for political gain, Mr Lodge?

Heh….

This and this show a side of George W Bush that appears not to have been reported by the BBC…..I wonder why? Surely they cannot have an agenda…..after all didn’t they do a massive highlight on this report about Katrina, debunking many of the myths? I’m sure they did….

Would you buy your organic yoghurt from one of these hunky Somerset farmers?

My how those Somerset farmers have changed….

Yeo Valley pitched their commercial especially for the UK X Factor – it comes to something when a lot of viewers find an advert more interesting than the over ramped narcolepsy inducing Simon Cowell TV dross…..and The Wurzels are still going strong after forty years or so. Great music, their gigs are always sold out but they would never ever win X Factor….probably a moral there, somewhere….