On the surface just a regular business-as-usual contribution to the ongoing Clinton hagiography at the BBC.

In a gushing, slobbering, sycophantic piece of Hello style candyfloss on the BBC website Katie Connolly goes all Sylvie Krin over the Clintons and their daughter’s wedding.

Moreover, the Clintons are icons of a different, seemingly more youthful time in America’s history – a pre 9/11 era when the country wasn’t weighed down with wars, bulging deficits and billowing oil leaks.
Chelsea is a reminder of that time, and people feel invested in the life of that young girl who held her parents hands through their darkest personal days

Darkest personal days? Great therapy codespeak for this, methinks….

The Clintons, of course, are part of a select few that belong to the BBC’s Royal Family (Arafat, Castro, Nehru, Tony Benn etc) who are always treated with reverence and their transgressions initially minimised then airbrushed out of the “narrative”.

If it was a Palin or a Bush daughter getting married you can be guaranteed there would be plenty of veiled (and not so veiled) sneers and quotes from vitriolic haters (think Thatcher) and not so much of this.

But perhaps another part of this puffball is more sigificant….

But mostly, the wedding details have been overshadowed by debates over the guest list – specifically which of Bill and Hillary’s celebrity pals will make the cut.

President Obama ended speculation that he would attend by telling the ladies of US talk show The View that he didn’t receive an invitation.

Famous friends like Oprah Winfrey or Barbra Streisand may appear, but the Clintons have carefully clarified that each of the 400 guests must have a personal connection to the bride and groom.

Remember how the Romans tried to discover the will of the gods by slicing up a chicken and the Vikings did it by reading stones?  And Kremlinologists looked at a man’s placement on a podium overlooking Red Square?  Well, the American left elite sends it’s signals via the media elite (WaPo, NYT etc) and sometimes, oddly enough, this is bounced through the UK’s BBC because, as any fule kno, there is a symbiotic relationship between the great and the good of both nations.

The BBC was always heavily into the Clintons so it must have been with a heavy heart that, alongside the US MSM, it entered into Obama’s styrofoam temple but, of course, the magnetism of the symbolism was too powerful to resist. However, now the columns of hopenchange are beginning to crack and the President is  revealed as the Daley machine hack he really is,  the Beeb is perhaps getting the message from certain salons in New York and Washington that the flirting needs to end and it’s time to return to true love – and what better way to convey the  black spot  than by an oblique comment by the BBC upon not being allowed to rub shoulders with Oprah Winfrey at the wedding of the century……

The plot thickens……..

Just like everyone else in these hard times the Clintons and the Kerrys are keeping things lean and mean….

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Greg Sargent at The Washington Post berated The Daily Caller for implying that Journolist might have been a left wing platform for message coordination. Nonsense says he – founder Ezra Klein emphasised to members that it was a discussion list and any idea about message coordination was just not kosher.

No doubt that is what Klein said and there is no reason to doubt his sincerity when he said it.

But Klein also said that he felt that the list should only contain journalists, not political operatives and he took great pains to exclude such people though “it’s possible I missed one”

The Daily Caller made a discovery…

In fact, he did. Jeff Hauser wrote scores of posts on Journolist during the time he was managing the New Jersey congressional campaign of Democrat Dennis Shulman. Hauser didn’t do much to hide his affiliation. Indeed, his posts on Journolist were signed, “Campaign Manager, Shulman for Congress,” followed by the campaign’s web address. After the election, Hauser took positions at a 527 group and a political action committee. He never left Journolist.

One of his posts arrived just before a McCain/Obama debate

The single biggest thing journolist can do is to lay the analytical framework within the media elite necessary for an actual Obama debate win to be viewed as such by a sufficient proportion of media elites that voters know it was a win.
Of course, this only works if Obama does as we expect (and McCain is a terrible debater, btw).
………
Journolist’s greatest challenge is to make sure an actual win by Obama translates into winning the battle for political impact.

Fairly explicit, wouldn’t you say? Yet The Caller discovered that no journolist questioned the nature of that post – not even Greg Sargent.

In the conversation that followed Hauser’s post, not one Journolister expressed surprise or disapproval. No one rebuked Hauser for telling journalists how to carry water for a politician. Despite the group’s supposedly “very strict” ban on political operatives and explicit partisan coordination, Hauser remained a member of Journolist for almost two more years.

Not a single dog barked.

Time to call in Sherlock Holmes – or Ed Morrisey?

It’s official – the British government has officially endorsed the body of actress Christina Hendricks, who plays foxy secretary Joan Harris in the Madison Avenue 1960s ad agency saga Mad Men as the ideal for every woman.

“Christina Hendricks is absolutely fabulous,” says Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone, who held up Hendricks’ outline as an ideal shape for women.

Highlighting the “overexposure” of skinny models and the impact they have on body image among young people, Ms Featherstone went on: “We need more of these role models. There is such a sensation when there is a curvy role model. It shouldn’t be so unusual.”

Of course as a mere male I could not possibly offer an opinion on this matter except to point out that when I first met the lovely Mrs P in the early sixties she was wearing a dress very similar to this and she wore it extremely well….

Perhaps I could call on Little Richard to provide a more rigorous rationale…

If she walks by, the men folks get engrossed
If she winks an eye, the bread slice turn to toast
If she got a lot of what they call the most
The girl can’t help it, she was born to please
And if she’s got a figure made to squeeze

Any suggestion that I am making a feeble attempt to ingratiate myself with Robert Stacy McCain via Rule 5 will be emphatically denied by my therapist…..

Aaron Guerrero, cub reporter at The Daily Caller, gets all wee wee’d up over Governor Palin’s remark to his adult supervisors at the website that the media was “a key reason she decided not to finish out her term as governor.”

Sensing the chance of getting on the Couric Award For Balanced Journolism shortlist he plays his gotcha! moment to perfection.

For someone who relishes the fight in the public arena, this is a rather startling admission. One that seems wildly out of sync with a political exterior that has her somewhere between a pitbull with lipstick and a Mama Grizzly.
By her own admission, Palin let the press play a key role in her decision to pull the plug on her governorship, sparking new questions over her toughness and ability to handle the pressures that come along with elective office. But more importantly she may have raised alarming concerns over a future presidential run.

“By her own admission”….he’s smelling red meat…

The rest of his piece is standard “she can’t take the heat stuff” because she so far she has not “indulged the alphabet networks”. This makes young Aaron question her viability as a potential resident of the White House. You get the feeling he is implying that Barack Obama throughout 2008 was facing hard nosed interrogation from hostile and suspicious TV pundits and thousands of keen-eyed hacks poured into Chicago to do a forensic audit on his background and experience – so why should she complain?

Aaron obviously has ambitions to become a journalist so Palin’s undisguised disdain for the media clearly offends..

From California to Maine, most are aware of her broad based contempt for the journalistic profession, and whether it be on Fox News, or through Twitter and Facebook, she uses every venue at her disposal to remind her supporters of how raw a deal she got, and continues to get, from the “elites” in the media.

Trouble is, young Aaron, your own article is prime evidence that Governor Palin is completely justified in being contemptuous of many “journalists” – indeed some might question your own claim to be a “journalist” because you obviously have failed to exhibit any evidence of a real journalist’s key skill – the use of shoeleather.

A proper hack would have actually gone back to the video of Palin’s resignation speech and watched it. Then said hack would have riffled through the pages of her book and read the pages pertaining to her resignation. Or, even if she or he didn’t have the energy to actually do some investigation they could still have referenced the actual article from which our youthful aspirant culled his “gotcha” quote.

Palin says the feeding frenzy culture of the media galvanized her political opponents in Alaska. “The media incentivized political opponents to file false ethics charges and expensive, wasteful, frivolous lawsuits against me, my family and my staff, in an obvious attempt to destroy us,” Palin said.
When those lawsuits — which Palin said she won, but the media didn’t cover — caused legal costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, Palin had finally had it, she said.
“I said, ‘Enough. Political adversaries and their political friends in the media will not destroy my State, my administration, nor my family. Enough.’ I knew if I didn’t play their game any longer, they could not win. I would not retreat, I would instead reload, and I would fight for what is right from a different plane.”

Sorry, young man, but you still have an awful lot to learn before you can call yourself a journalist. Why not buck the trend and put a few years experience on a local newspaper under your belt? Go to Utah and do some legwork for The Richfield Reaper. There’s not much glamour in digging deep into a story about the Monroe City Sewer Project but it will teach you about the significance of the mundane and the importance of routine investigation at a microcosmic level.

So, Aaron, to paraphrase your own verdict on Palin, one might say this about you

Aaron Guerrero’s press performances in 2010, fairly or unfairly, might lead to his undoing, as perceptions of his being severely underqualified for the position he is pursuing takes hold.

Don’t take it personally, son – we’ve all been adolescents ourselves and messed things up by acting pretentious. Come back to the big league in ten years time and you can then mix it up with the grown ups….

The slightly unbalanced scales of justice….

• They caused the death of an elderly grandfather as he stood in the street with his 3 year old granddaughter so that they could laugh about it later as they replayed the assault on their phones. Though given a nominal sentence of four years they will be out by next year.

• A jobless lorry driver who pulled off an “elaborate and outrageous scam” to sell London’s Ritz Hotel for £250m has been jailed for five years.

Paul Dacre, much feared editor of the UK Daily Mail, wanted a journalist to go to America to find out about the Tea Party and Sarah Palin. One would have hoped that this might have produced a reasonable and fairly balanced bit of reporting on two topics that have not really been treated seriously in the UK media. Unfortunately he wanted to do it on the cheap.

So he sent airhead celebrity gossip hackette Jane Fryer instead. Fryer, who likes to pimp herself as “quirky” and “cutting edge”, is in fact a long established “filler” – that is when the paper needs a thousand words or so to fill an empty space she will scribble something on a topic nobody else is interested in….think paper clips, unicycles, turnips…..just to fill the gap. Think of her as a decorator rather than a journalist (I am sure there are millions of such hacks in the US…)

Still, equipped with her one brain cell and her company blackberry Fryer tootled off to flyover country to give us Brits the lowdown on what was shaking up American politics and came back with this.

Garbage. Garbage on stilts. A mephitic, palpitating pillar of guano – and what is worst, unlike the bats she actually got paid for depositing this malodorous mess onto virgin paper. For that reason alone I feel she could be a firm favourite to win the coveted Glenda Slagg Award.

She obviously went to the US and travelled around a bit so her expenses were probably quite fruity – hacks on expenses never stay in cheap motels or fly coach. She met up with Tea Partiers in Kansas and Illinois and played the usual hack game – all smiles and understanding nods with the “stiffs” (journalese for non journalists) then caricaturing them with an air of supercilious disdain once on the plane back to Blighty.

Palin, of course, gets it with both barrels in a way that is quaintly retro to those who keep up with the PDS scribblers of the MSM (RINOs and lefties). Even they have ditched the Palin as ditz meme now – the party line is the cunning and crafty Wicked Witch of Wasilla. Clearly Sullivan, Ambinder and Huffington didn’t send Fryer the memo.

So from which dark cave did Glenda (whoops, Freudian slip there folks….I mean Jane) collect and process her bat’s dung on the ‘Cuda?  The stuff about the Lear jet, Levi, the resignation speech etc. – was it someone else’s cave she visited, was there other DNA on the guano?

Enter “Sally from Anchorage” who told her that Palin had quit to make money and was now dead fish in Alaska. Fryer was so impressed by Sally’s honesty and perspicacity that she felt no need to vox pop beyond one (and anyway maybe the bean counters in the London office were sending a few texts about expenses)

Now here is a conundrum. Is there a familiar odour about the source of this Anchorage guano? And would we need to call for Sherlock Holmes to tease this one out – or maybe “Sally from Anchorage” is really someone else whose name also starts with S….

With her brain cell working to the max Jane is puzzled why the “Tea Baggers” (now where would she get that from?) should take Palin seriously as a politician as “She appears to know little about government”. She’s also “batty” with a “tawdry” family and ignorant about Russia and Africa.

Of course outside the weird world of right wing Republicans Fryer found nobody had anything positive to say about Palin

Investor’s Business Daily? They lied.

Roger Simon? You might be a big cheese at Politico but Jane Fryer has got your number. 

Camille Paglia? What would she know – and who the hell is she?

Willie Brown, former Mayor of San Francisco – obviously seduced by Fox gold.

Veteran Chicago newsman Clarence Page? Probably a GOP sleeper…

None of them have a clue about Palin. It needed a feisty, fearless and cut price hackette from London to tell it how it is, someone who knows about wrestlers….

Paul Dacre you have in your employ a true symbol of the current state of the dead tree press, a woman who embodies the core values of journolism.

She is already worthy of following in the footsteps of Glenda Slagg in terms of literary style but maybe some might go even further – is it possible that Jane Fryer’s investigative reporting skills are as well honed as those of that giant of The New York Times…..Jayson Blair?

You, dear reader, must be the judge……

Conservativehome has, in just a few years, become the leading website of the UK right. It tends to be Thatcherite in tone though contributions come from several positions on the conservative spectrum. It supports the Conservative Party but it has its own vision of what the party should be. It is often critical of the leadership and is not greatly enamoured of the coalition though, unlike many conservatives here and elsewhere it recognises that pragmatism is not a sin and that politics is about power as much as purity.

It also takes an interest in conservative movements in other countries and regularly comments on upcoming elections in Australia, Canada, Germany and, of course, the USA – and it’s the ConHome approach to American conservatism that is really beginning to wear me down.

Take, for example, this piece about David Cameron’s recent visit to the USA. From the headline – “ Could Cameron Provide Republicans With The Model To Beat Obama” – UK readers unfamiliar with the American political scene would assume that Cameron had made a massive impact on the American right – so much so that Republicans were no longer running around like headless chickens because Cameron had told them about budget cuts…

Read – and despair…..

Tuesday’s New York Times piece described David Cameron as a “Slasher of Government Bloat”. The article by John F Burns was premature in comparing Cameron to Thatcher but the fact that it appeared on the front page of America’s most important newspaper is noteworthy. Americans are partly interested in Cameron because they know that the Obama administration cannot delay its own budget cuts much longer. Cameron also fascinates the Republicans as they seek to be more than “the party of no”.

There’s the clue – “the party of no”……but then what more can you expect if you are reading about Republican politics in the New York Times? Well you can expect references to “Former Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson” writing in the Washington Post and – yes, you guessed it, the douchebag himself, the NYT’s conservative-in-residence Ross Douthat.

I couldn’t resist a comment

“America’s most important newspaper” – the fish wrap of record? You must be joking – and if you think Gerson and Douthat have their finger on the GOP pulse from their Beltway perches then you are mistaken.
In many parts of the US the GOP is more energised than it has been since the early 90s as a result of the Tea Party and they are turning away from the GOP establishment and choosing candidates who will fight Big Govt, not adapt to it.
Please please PLEASE stop getting your political insight from the NYT and WaPo – for a UK conservative site it is just not good enough…

You see almost every time conservativehome references American conservatism it is via people like these – plus, naturally, Brooks and Frum. That’s why very little has appeared there about the town hall meetings, the Van Jones affair, the Tea Party, the Palin endorsements, the Tea Party, ACORN, the Tea Party, the NAACP….and did I mention the Tea Party?

Toby Harnden at the Daily Telegraph is a hit and miss hack but at least he was savvy enough to include some names in his list of the top ten US conservatives that you will rarely see mentioned at conhome – except disparagingly ( 2,3,4,6,7 FYO)

The cure for this myopia? Visit my blog and regularly check out the sites on the right hand bar if you want to get a feel of what real conservatives (mostly outside the Beltway) are buzzing (OK I’m a traffic whore….) but if you’re really short of time just go to Free Republic and Hot Air – that’s worth twenty Douthats…..

Last year those on the left – and the right – who were writing off Sarah Palin (and they were legion) were directed to some wise words from the Chinese philosopher Lao Tse….. “No disaster is greater than underestimating the enemy.” This sage advice was given by a veteran who had cut his journalistic teeth in the mean streets of Chicago politics.

Roger Simon is the Chief Political Columnist of Politico. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago where politics was a contact sport.
At the Chicago Sun-Times, where he wrote a column four times per week, Simon was taught that the only way for a journalist to look upon a politician was down. He now fights against that impulse daily.

Not the first person who would spring to mind as a defender of Sarah Palin against the howls and sneers of a dismissive and disdainful pack of media pundits from right and left when she resigned as governor of Alaska last summer,

More than 13 months ago, I wrote a column that began: “Sarah Palin can be the Republican nominee in 2012. I am not saying she will be, but she can be. Those who underestimate her do so at their own risk.”
It was not the most popular column I ever wrote. I remember snickering and mockery from those who could not find actual vegetables to throw

I remember reading Roger Simon’s Politico article of thirteen months ago. I also recall at the time constantly checking to see that it was on Politico and not some sort of spoof site – and when I saw that Simon was “Politico’s chief political columnist” I just had to clear my head with a generous gin and tonic to ensure I was still on my familiar planet and had not been transported to an alternative universe by a red shift.

It was fair, it was respectful, it actually accepted her words at face value and it presented a shrewd analysis of her political potential. It wasn’t adulatory and it wasn’t written from the heart because Simon is a hard nosed veteran of the political scene and is very much old school in that he tries to work out the narrative behind the headlines. But also, like the grizzled small town sheriff working a case alongside the eager beaver college FBI suits, he trusts his instincts – and his gut feeling told him something about Palin that still stands true today

Now, more than a year later, I have not changed my mind about Palin’s political potential.
…………
I am basing my belief now, as back then, on Palin’s ability to connect with the base of her party. Name a bigger name in the Republican Party today. Heck, name any name in the Republican Party today.

I also remembered the advice Simon had for her. Now if Palin ever sat down to read the “advice” that she was given from the time she first appeared on the national political scene she would still be shuffling through pieces of paper when Willow was finding her first grey hairs. Fortunately she ignored it all. Yet you must wonder if Simon had a crystal ball somewhere in his office….

Since unsolicited advice is a columnist’s stock in trade, I had seven suggestions for Palin, back last summer when she was still governor of Alaska: Dump Alaska, surround yourself with people smarter than you are, pick a handful of issues and stick to them, study up, don’t believe you can’t do it, don’t go changing and don’t worry about failure.
Whatever Palin has been doing since then seems to be working. And I have noticed a certain change in how the media are viewing her.

Roger Simon is the perfect antidote to the serpentine slitherings of Allahpundit at Hot Air who merely uses Palin to generate traffic and who sentences her to political oblivion every three weeks.

Sarah Palin has something more than intellect. She has the ability to understand, connect with and energize her party.
And considering her likely opposition — Romney, Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee or Haley Barbour — tell me she has no chance. Go ahead and tell me. It’s enough to make one snicker

Read the rest here. As Simon says politics is all about connection and he has grasped a key political fact about Sarah Palin. There are, already, a considerable number of Americans who would sleep more easily in their homes with the knowledge that this fascinating and rather mysterious woman was keeping watch over their land…

Remember this Facebook post from Governor Palin a few weeks ago?

Something has to be done urgently to stop the out of control Obama-Reid-Pelosi spending machine, and no government agency should be immune from budget scrutiny. We must make sure, however, that we do nothing to undermine the effectiveness of our military. If we lose wars, if we lose the ability to deter adversaries, if we lose the ability to provide security for ourselves and for our allies, we risk losing all that makes America great! That is a price we cannot afford to pay.

Military historian James Corum, writing in the UK Daily Telegraph, highlights the risks of trying to deter adversaries with military forces based on the model inherited from the massive cuts of the Clinton era.

He lays the initial blame on President George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

When the United States was forced into conflict after 9/11, President Bush made a huge strategic mistake – he accepted Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s policy of fighting wars without increasing the size of the armed forces. Bush’s close cabinet and advisors wanted to prove that the US could fight and win major foreign conflicts on the cheap.
This was unprecedented in American history. In every conflict since the colonial campaigns against the Indians, the Americans had increased the armed forces; defence came first because defeat was not an option

Rumsfeld’s attitude seemed justified in the early weeks of the Iraq campaign as Saddam’s forces crumbled in the face of superior US firepower and technology. But the subsequent insurgency exposed the flaws in Rumsfeld’s policy.

But fighting insurgents requires a lot of time and people on the ground. This was obvious after the first few weeks in Iraq when the failure to put enough troops into the country allowed it to dissolve into chaos and offered insurgents an environment to thrive in. Still, Bush and Rumsfeld were not going to admit a mistake – so the US forces were not even marginally increased until Rumsfeld was fired in late 2006

Even though the post Rumsfeld surge transformed the military picture the price of engaging in extensive deployments with Clinton sized forces is being paid by service personnel and their families.

For those of us working in the US military it was clear that by the surge in 2007 the US forces were in terrible shape. By 2007, the repeated deployments resulted in an estimated 30 per cent of the US Army with some degree of post traumatic stress disorder. Every indicator of morale showed problems. Divorce and suicide were way up. Officers leaving the service after repeated deployments meant that the promotion selection of those remaining rose to 100 per cent

Yet under President Obama there has been no attempt to reduce this strain

…..despite evidence of serious personnel problems throughout the armed forces, the Obama administration has continued the policy of defence on the cheap. In fact, President Obama has opted to further cut the armed forces even though the conflicts continue in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Navy and Air Force have already undergone significant cuts and there are plans to cut more personnel over the next two years.

Corum believes that no military force can survive long term on will power and courage alone and his assessment of the future is grim.

While Bush’s policies undermined the US forces, Barack Obama’s policies will break them. For the sake of the defence and stability of America and its allies, the Republicans need to fight these cuts and make national defence a major issue in the 2010 and 2012 elections.

Sarah Palin is the only leading conservative politician on the national stage who recognises that in a conflict between fiscal rectitude and the need for national security the cards must not be stacked against the military. This does not mean that the generals and admirals should be given carte blanche – history teaches us that they can be as profligate with the public purse on grandstanding projects as any Cook County machine politician especially in the key issue of procurement which can so easily get caught up with political pork. The money needs to be spent wisely – but there has to be enough money available to allow the military to operate at maximum efficiency.

At present there is not a shred of evidence that Obama and the Democrats are ready to face up to this challenge. Unfortunately, as Corum warns, it seems possible that the GOP establishment might well be as ostrich like as their opponents on this matter…

….and the enemy will smile……