Thanks a lot, Mr. President. You insulted our Queen by giving her an iPod as if she were some primitive tribal leader wide eyed for magical technological totems. You treated our Prime Minister as if he were the boss of a small waste management  company touting for a drain clearing contract in some Chicago precinct  (I don’t like Gordon Brown but he is sending our young men and women to fight and sometimes die alongside your troops in Afghanistan). You also sent back a bust of one of our greatest heroes, Sir Winston Churchill, loaned to the White House since 9/11.

You obviously prefer to bow low to the Emperor of Japan, placate Vladimir “Il Duce” Putin of Russia and not get too overly fussed about the savage repression of pro democracy demonstrators in Iran – but somehow we’re beginning to get the feeling that we Brits don’t really mean all that much to you.

Washington refused to endorse British claims to sovereignty over the Falkland Islands yesterday as the diplomatic row over oil drilling in the South Atlantic intensified in London, Buenos Aires and at the UN.

Despite Britain’s close alliance with the US, the Obama Administration is determined not to be drawn into the issue. It has also declined to back Britain’s claim that oil exploration near the islands is sanctioned by international law, saying that the dispute is strictly a bilateral issue.

But what about that insignificant little sideshow in 1982 when an Argentinian  army  invaded and illegally occupied the Falklands?  Some of the newly elected President Reagan’s advisers, like UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick , tried to argue for strict neutrality. They, and many others, including the Argentinian military junta, saw Britain as weak in will and conviction – there might be angry words and vague threats but eventually there would follow a series of diplomatic manoeuvres ending in some sort of facesaving device that awarded Argentina a foothold in the islands.

But they reckoned without UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She was determined to use this incident to show that Britain was no longer going to play the part of the world’s punchbag. Within weeks a task force was assembled and despatched to recapture the islands – and if anyone doubted the steeliness of her will the sinking of the Argentinian light cruiser “General Belgrano” proved beyond doubt that that the pundits had made a massive miscalculation. But Ronald Reagan was not surprised – he knew the lady’s measure and also how she spoke on behalf of the vast majority of British people.

But President Obama and his Cook County cronies have little feel  for history.

Senior US officials insisted that Washington’s position on the Falklands was one of longstanding neutrality. This is in stark contrast to the public backing and vital intelligence offered by President Reagan to Margaret Thatcher once she had made the decision to recover the islands by force in 1982.  

Instead the administration appears more concerned with appeasing the radical left wing Latin American regimes aligned with President Chavez of Venezuela. The bizarre State Department mishandling of the recent political upheaval in Honduras was an early symptom of this behaviour. It seems that now Obama is more concerned with getting credit with the Kirchnerist regime in Argentina than supporting a long standing ally.

Kevin Casas-Zamora, a Brookings Institution analyst and former vice-president of Costa Rica, said that President Reagan’s support for Britain in 1982 “irked a lot of people in Latin America”.

The Obama Administration “is trying to split the difference as much as it can because it knows that coming round to the British position would again create a lot of ill will in the region”, he said.

The Falklands today are very different from the isolated and old fashioned community that existed in 1982. It is a thriving, energetic power house rich with natural resources – which, of course, is the reason why the Argentinians have once more begun beating the tattered “Malvinas” drum. However there is also a far stronger military presence in the area which means that their sabre might be rattled but is unlikely to be withdrawn from the scabbard.

The graves of British servicemen at San Carlos Cemetery reflect the price paid for the eviction of the Argentinian invaders. Not even the gang of shifty and self serving confidence tricksters who make up the current Labour government would dare to renege on such a compact.

Britain and America will not always see eye to eye – it is in the nature of families that disagreements will arise. But surely the bonds of friendship between us, sealed with blood and bone, should signify a little more to Barack Obama than the desire to elicit a grunt of approval from the likes of Chavez, Kirchner and their fellow posturing, prancing, left wing clowns…..

In 1915 John Glasson Thomas, a teacher  – Tommy to his friends – met Miss Gertrude Brooks at a London church social. A few months later he volunteered to join the army. During his  few months training in England they were able to meet up several times but in October 1916 his unit was sent to the Western front. Over the next few months they corresponded by mail and their letters became less formal and more loving and clearly they were both desperate to meet each other again.

But it was never to be. Tommy was killed in August 1917.

Miss Brooks never married and later told family she would die ‘still loving and remembering Tommy’ and eventually passed away in her 80s.

Relatives have only just discovered the letters and the family has passed them on to the local library where, over the years, Miss Brooks was a regular visitor.

I suppose Courtney Cook would see this as very odd and unliberated. She posted a piece at Salon entitled “How to Leave a Soldier” describing how she made the decision to leave her military husband for a  “lithe, blue-eyed Marxist”  who had been an anti-war activist

You’d be surprised how easy it is to leave a soldier on deployment. You can do it with a letter. (He can’t argue with you. He doesn’t have a phone.) If you lay the groundwork early, saying to the soldier before he leaves, “This will be the end of us, we might as well admit it,” it’s that much easier. The letter won’t even come as a shock.

There will be no moving truck, no boxes, no house torn asunder. The soldier is peeing in a bucket as you pack. He doesn’t care who gets the couch.

I wonder what Miss Brooks would have thought about Courtney Cook? Of course one could always argue that if Tommy had survived the war the strains and stresses of married life might have taken their toll. But it was never to be and they both died with an idealised image of each other imprinted on their very souls – unless Miss Brooks had suddenly taken a fancy to a someone else by the summer of 1917 and written a “Dear John” to Tommy which he read just before he met his death in the trenches….

But somehow I don’t think Miss Brooks would have been that sort of woman…..

The Ivy League Professor charged with the Alabama shootings incident is not unfamiliar with firing guns according to the Boston Globe

The University of Alabama biology professor accused of opening fire and killing three colleagues at a faculty meeting Friday shot and killed her teenage brother more than two decades ago in Massachusetts, according to authorities

Another interesting little factoid…the local DA involved in the Massachusetts incident was Bill Delahunt, now in the US House of Representatives and a cousin of Robert Delahunt who was Andrew Sullivan’s lawyer when it was decided not to bring Sullivan to court on a drugs charge, much to the annoyance of the judge.

If you have a brush with the law then Massachusetts seems a great place to be…..for certain people. I wonder, however, if the same would apply if your name was Palin – or Bush…

Meanwhile, over in San Francisco, Sherlock Holmes is alive and well and posting from The Chronicle’s SFGate blog and he thinks he might have cracked the case  – it’s those pesky ignorant rednecks at southern universities who just hate anything intellectual….they could have provoked her with their country music and confederate flags…

But what’s clear to this blogger is there’s a weird “Southern” issue with a “Harvard-trained” professor. The Alabama media stuck that tag as if to imply it had something to do with her alleged shooting of the three faculty members.

A bulb just switched on at HuffPo, thanks to Joan Williams.

Williams is an out and out Obama supporter but she deserves a tip of the hat because, though not sharing Governor Palin’s politics she has considerable respect for her as a politician.

Addressing the Tea Party, Sarah Palin wrote three notes on her hand: “Energy, Taxes, Lift American Spirits.” Why? She already had notes in front of her on the podium. Surely she could remember three simple themes. Why write notes on her hand?
Here’s my take on why: she knew that they would be visible when she gave the speech. And she knew that she would be made fun of — as so stupid that she needs to write notes on her hand. And that’s one of her most effective tactics — to be made fun of. It’s an integral part of her strategy of standing in for hardworking, Middle Americans, derided by the condescending, know-it-all liberal elites.

I must confess that I am tempted to agree with the Williams view of this affair – the way she glanced at her hand in the Q&A session was perhaps a little too obvious? She possibly knew the media would take the bait – and they did, including the London Daily Telegraph’s ponderous hack Toby Harnden, the UK’s leading purveyor of Palin “airhead” graffiti (how I wish I had his job – paid a fat salary just to regurgitate WaPo and NYT talking points…)

Then the President’s Press Secretary, Robert Gibb got in on the act with his own feeble imitation which did nothing to undermine Palin but was in effect a public declaration of how much she is getting under Obama’s skin…

Thus the White House became a vehicle for Palin’s narrative of the snooty elites who think they’re better than average Americans.
Palin is a brilliant strategist. First, note that I just repeated Palin’s key talking points: Palin has even us fellow travelers at The Huffington Post repeating, “Energy, Taxes, Lift American Spirits.” Talk about earned media.

I know it’s painful but it’s worth entering Arianna’s dark and brooding mansion just to read the rest of it here….you won’t agree with everything but it is surprisingly honest….

h/t Susan W of Team Sarah

Neat…..

Good stuff from Melanie Phillips at the UK Spectator and one of the few pundits over here who does not regurgitate the CNN/MSNBC “lines for the week” or regard Frum/Brooks/Sullivan as the Oracles of the American Conservative Delphi.

First she oh so brilliantly satirises the officially endorsed anti-Palin incantation inscribed on each broomstick inserted as a replacement backbone up the rectum of almost every media pundit and/or political hack on either side of the pond.

As all sentient people on the planet are now aware, Sarah Palin is a figure of extreme derision. She has been mocked for her ignorance of the world beyond Wasilla, Alaska, her total absence of education let alone sophistication, her wince-worthy wordplay, her homespun hicksville homiletics, her God-bothering gabbiness, her chavvy dysfunctional family (is she the grandmother of her son?? is she the mother of her grandson???), her hair, her glasses, her hockeyness, her beyond caricaturableness…has there ever been such a total idiot and embarrassment in political life?

Then, having got everyone at the North London dinner party sagely nodding heads and about to launch forth their own well polished nugget of Palin Airheadedness to screeches of laughter from the assembled hoi oligoi, Phillips then confronts them with her version of the First Law of Palin Metaphysics…..

How is it then that such an all-time airhead who, we were reliably informed, was ‘toast’ when she bowed out of Alaskan politics, has now put herself at the head of the most significant grassroots movement in America, the ‘Tea-Party’ populist revolt?

Read the rest here. I tell you, reading a Palin friendly article in the London prints is a secret vice almost as pleasurable as dunking a digestive biscuit in your mid morning cup of tea (but please, not a word to the Lovely Mrs P about the latter…..)

Apologies in advance for presenting a post which, at first glance, appears to be related to British politics. It certainly reflects my own fears and concerns as a lifelong Conservative Party voter (and sometime activist) here in the UK. But on the eve of Governor Palin’s address to the Tea Party Convention, a moment that may well turn out to be transformational  for American politics, Fraser Nelson’s cri de coeur about the future path of a Tory government must resonate with those conservatives in America who, in the dark fastness of night, still have feelings of unease about the upper echelons of the GOP.

We have an election coming up next May and the runes look good for a Tory victory. Triumph, however, is never assured until after the event and voters in all democracies sometimes have a nasty habit of giving the pundits and pollsters a bloody nose (a salutary warning to all my American friends wallowing in the euphoria of the Scott Brown victory)

Nelson, however, frames his concerns within the context of a Conservative victory which places David Cameron and his team in control of the levers of power in Westminster. Previous Tory leaders have stepped into Downing Street over the bloodied corpse of a broken Labour regime, most recently in 1970 and 1979, but with differing outcomes.

To win power is very different from winning office. To win the keys to No 10, a prime minister needs to be skilled in electoral combat. But to take power, a prime minister needs an agenda. Without one, he is a slave to his predecessors.

The last two times that the Tories took power from Labour ended very differently. Ted Heath, in 1970, was forced into a U-turn and lost power after four years. Margaret Thatcher transformed the country. Which is David Cameron likely to follow?

The problem is that, since the middle of the previous century, conservatives have allowed the left, aided and abetted by their surrogates in the media, to dictate the parameters of political debate. Certain concepts have been embroidered into the fabric of cultural discourse with such skill and discretion that many people on the right have subconsciously shifted their own positions of what is and what is not acceptable – for if they do not they risk being branded as neanderthal by the great and the good

Part of it is pure political reflex. Westminster is notoriously slow to work out which ideas have been abandoned by the public as not fit for purpose. We must also remember that the party is still shellshocked by three election defeats and its own internal warfare. The temptation is to get rid of anything that anyone might criticise. There is talk of keeping to a “mainstream” — one that seems to run through Fleet Street and Westminster.

Hands up those who thought “David Frum” when reading that quote. Believe me there are plenty of Frums on the right in London, ceaselessly pontificating about the need to adapt political positions to accommodate the sensitive antennae of shape shifters, or moderates, as they are more often described in polite society. “Capturing the middle ground” is usually their recipe for political success, ignoring the fact that the most electorally successful Conservative leader in modern British political history was a woman who made very little attempt to capture the middle ground. Furthermore she was eventually felled, not by the electorate, but by a conspiracy of Frum-like dwarves driven by motives of petty revenge and the desire for applause from the galleries of the BBC and the assembled ranks of the punditocracy who had had never recovered from the shock of having their advice ignored by someone as common as a grocer’s daughter.

Thatcher’s guru during the 70s and 80s was Keith Joseph, originally, like Thatcher, a minister in the Edward Heath government which took power after the defeat of the incumbent Labour government led by Harold Wilson in 1970. Heath won power on the strength of a strong fiscally conservative smaller government manifesto but within a year had made a complete U turn. In 1974 Harold Wilson returned to power.

Nelson points out that both Joseph and Thatcher realised that the Tory failure had sprung from an inability to shed the restrictive carapace of conforming to the liberal left agenda.

Keith Joseph declared that he had been “converted” to Conservatism in April 1974 — two months after that defeat. He said that he suddenly realised that, for all the bold talk about taking over from Harold Wilson, it was the same Government doing the same things.

Truly to take power, he said, one had to set the terms of debate. He had a phrase for it: the “verbal snares” that Labour sets for Conservatives. If a Tory party takes power yet uses Labour’s language, judges success by Labour’s yardsticks and confines itself to Labour’s ambitions, that’s not change. It’s more of the same.

What Thatcher did was not only to alter the parameters of debate – she also took the battle directly to the Labour party and their media cheerleaders in the BBC and the chattering classes. She was aggressive in her political stance, never apologising, always pressing the left onto the back foot by calling them to account whenever they, and the Frums in her own party, waffled on about the need to be “caring” and cautious.

For eleven years, with just a handful of loyalists in her party but to the delight of millions of ordinary people in our country she totally ignored the great and the good who felt they had the natural right to tell us what to do as they chattered self righteously at their North London dinner parties. But, lacking a well organised network of support within her own party she was unable to ensure an effective succession and, with her political demise, the old guard of trimmers and calculators were able to quench the revolutionary fire and return to the mantra of living corpses everywhere, “steady as she goes”….

Nelson isn’t yet convinced that David Cameron will sell out. But the siren voices are there, whispering in his ear…

But against Mr Cameron’s good angel, making the case for radicalism in his ear, is a bad angel urging caution. This angel will say that any meaningful policy offers a hostage to fortune. It will try to persuade him of the greatest political deception: we should be cautious now, and do what we want to do later.

This is the mission statement of every failed prime minister: because when does this moment for radicalism come? At what point will the Tory party not be in election mode? When Margaret Thatcher’s ministers presented her with a five-year plan, she would point out that Britain won a world war in less time. But the bad angel will tell Mr Cameron that winning, actually, is enough this time: the radical reforms can be left for the second term. Ted Heath thought the same. Mr Cameron will either be a radical or a failure. There is no middle way.

When Sarah Palin mounts the platform in Nashville she will, of course, be herself. She invokes comparison with Reagan and Thatcher but it is unwise to clothe contemporary figures in the raiment of the past – different times, different situations. But she will talk the Thatcher message of trusting people to make their own decisions rather than having decisions made for them and she will fearlessly take the fight to the left and the Frums and the trimmers. But with the Tea Partiers she will have something that Thatcher never had, a potential army of grassroots soldiers ready and willing to send a surge of electricity through the GOP machine giving it a will to power, not to gain office and enjoy the trappings but to transform the political and cultural fabric of the nation.

Her own role in that process remains shrouded in the swirling mists of the unknown future. She might be the leader ready to march in front to capture the citadel and accept the sash of authority from the grateful legions or just the prophet providing the impetus to surge the movement forward, enabling new leaders to emerge on the march. But one thing is certain – it is difficult to imagine any other public figure more suited to that moment than Sarah Palin.

Camille Paglia said of her in the autumn of 2008 when the entirety of the left and many on the right were treating her with disdain that Palin was a gifted politician whose time had not yet come.

Perhaps February 2010 is her time….