Out, damned spot! out, I say!

Gordon Brown heard on mic calling a voter a 'bigot' | The Sun |News|Election 2010

BLUNDERING Gordon Brown has been caught on microphone calling a voter a "bigot".

The Prime Minister was heard describing an exchange he had just had with lifelong Labour supporter Gillian Duffy, 65 — on the campaign trail in Rochdale, Lancs, today — as a "disaster".

He made the comments as he got into his car after speaking to Mrs Duffy — not realising that he still had the Sky News mic pinned to his shirt.

He told an aide: "That was a disaster - they should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? It's just ridiculous."

Asked what she had said, he replied: "Everything, she was just a bigoted woman."

The PM was approached by the grandmother in the street after visiting a community payback scheme in Rochdale.

She tackled him on a series of issues including the national debt, taxes, student financing and immigration.

Mrs Duffy, a widow, said she was "very disappointed" with Mr Brown's remarks.

After hearing what the Prime Minister had said about her, she said it was "very upsetting".

She added: "He's an educated person, why has he come out with words like that?

Well Mrs. Duffy, this reminds me of something one of the more learned people Canada has ever produced, Northrop Frye, once wrote: education doesn't make bad people good; it makes them more dangerous.

In the world view of the most dangerous people in the West, a woman politely raising concerns about immigration becomes a disaster and a bigot. Pretty much sums up the Gnostic's war against the common people and the nation which can never live up to his world-transforming fantasies. However, it seems that Gordon Brown is now learning what all Gnostics are fated to experience: humiliation at the hands of the unaccomodating reality of ordinary people

Mrs. Duffy has declared she won't vote in this election. Her longtime Labourite faith has been dashed. Too much reality all around. And as Duffy notes the would-be elect are not even trying to transform the most unbending object:

he's not doing anything about the national debt and it's going to be tax, tax, tax for another 20 years to get out of this mess - and he's calling me a bigot.

(Mrs. Duffy on hearing what Gordon Brown thinks of her - from video here)
More Video and commentary.

RELATED (Roger L. Simon):

I have said something like this before, but at the risk of being a bore, and because of the times in which we live, I will repeat myself:

The real reason liberals accuse Tea Partiers of racism is that contemporary American-style liberalism is in rigor mortis. Liberals have nothing else to say or do. Accusations of racism are their last resort.

The European debt crisis — first Greece, then Portugal and now Spain (and Belgium, Ireland and Italy, evidently) — has shown the welfare state to be an unsustainable economic system. The US, UK and Japan, according to the same Financial Times report, are also on similar paths of impoverishment through entitlements.

Many of us have known this for a long time, just from simple math. Entitlements are in essence a Ponzi scheme. Now we have to face that and do something serious about it or our economy (the world economy) will fall apart.

Liberals, leftists or progressives — whatever they choose to call themselves — have a great deal of trouble accepting this. To do so they would have to question a host of positions they have not examined for years, if ever, not to mention have to engage in discussions that could threaten their livelihood and jeopardize their personal and family associations...

Keeping Faith In Great Britain: Thank You Dan Hannan

"The internet has changed politics - changed it utterly and forever", observes Dan Hannan, British backbench member of the European Parliament, as a result of his remarkable experiences over the past few days.

A 3-minute speech that he gave last week succinctly criticizing Prime Minister Gordon Brown to his face has accumulated over a million and a half views, despite receiving almost no coverage in the British media. UK and US blogs discovered the YouTube video of the speech, promoting it so successfully throughout the online world that MEP Hannan's rocketing popularity eventually attracted the attention of the US media. And only then, did the UK press start to pay attention, re-presenting his work and his career disparagingly ("does anyone care what he says?", sneers the BBC).

Maybe there'll always be an England, after all... from the sound of things, at least there's still a modern-day Churchill:



[Thanks to Stuart Sharpe for taking the time to create a transcript of The Speech Heard Around The World]

Prime Minister, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of this Parliament – that being to say one thing in this chamber, and a very different thing to your home electorate. You’ve spoken here about free trade, and amen to that; who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, and that you have subsidised - where you have not nationalised outright - swathes of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks.

Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this house if your actions matched your words. Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not going into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country.

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.

Now once again today you tried to spread the blame around, you spoke about an international recession; an international crisis. Well, it is true that we are all sailing together into the squall – but not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear up their rigging – in other words, to pay off debt – but you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line, under the accumulated weight of your debt. We are now running a deficit that touches almost 10% of GDP – an unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan, more than Hungary – countries where the IMF has already been called in.

Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising - like everyone else, I’ve long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things these things - it’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening the situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year, in the last twelve months, 125,000 private sector jobs have been lost – and yet you’ve created 30,000 public sector jobs. Prime Minister you cannot go on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorging of the unproductive bit.

You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re well place to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era Apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense.

Everyone knows that Britain is the worst placed to go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by 30% – and soon the voters, too, will get their chance to say so.

They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are a devalued Prime Minister, of a devalued Government.

The Perfect Gift

It's been a sad couple of months for US-UK diplomatic relations. Between the unnecessarily rude return of a valuable (and venerated) bust of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill donated to the White House by former Prime Minister Tony Blair as a gesture of friendship, to last week's "amateur reception" of current Prime Minister Gordon Brown, political satirists can no longer complain that there is nothing to parody about Barack Obama.

There was speculation that Obama's dissatisfaction with the Churchill bust was due to tough actions taken by Britain against the extremely violent Mau-Mau uprising in early-1950s Kenya, during Churchill's second and final tenure in office, and the suffering endured by Obama's Kenyan grandfather during that rebellion.

It's been a while, so it's understandable if we've all forgotten this, but President Bush's father, former President and former pilot George H. W. Bush, had his plane shot out of the sky by the Japanese during WWII; yet I don't recall him bearing a grudge against Japan for his near-death experience while he was in office. (Unless that televised act of vomiting all over their embarrassed Prime Minister was a staged retribution...) He put the war behind him. Presidents Nixon, Kennedy and Eisenhower were veterans of the Second World War, and seemed able to put aside their experiences with the Japanese and German people who had tried so hard to kill them and the men in their commands not so long before... yet Obama still bears a grudge against Churchill?

Barack Obama may be the most powerful man in the world, but increasingly he appears as also the most pathetic. For all that he has at his fingertips, this week's telling exchange of gifts between President Obama and Prime Minister Brown reveals Obama as poor indeed, a naked emperor exposed as lacking the greatest gift we can give to ourselves: the blessing of humility.

When it comes to giving a gift to a friend, you are supposed to think less of yourself, and more of your friend. Ideally the search is for something the friend would have dearly loved to have gotten for themselves, but might have held off doing, usually out of self-deferential humility ("I don't deserve this, you shouldn't have done it"), or for not having the time to devote to such self-satisfying searches themselves. The more you value the friendship, the more readily you can summon the imagination, and the patient perseverance, to perceive what would make "the perfect gift" to give that friend. Such gifts are an investment of time as well as treasure, so that when the friend's eyes meet yours, you both know the unspoken truth: with your gift you gave some of yourself, to me.

Gordon Brown seems to have had experience giving gifts, judging by the thought that must have gone into the selection of one particular item he presented to President Obama: an ornamental pen holder made from wood taken from the HMS Gannet, a British sloop which cruised the Mediterranean and Red Seas in the latter half of the 19th century as part of Britain's expensive commitment to rid the world of Islamist slave ships carrying black Africans into a life of bondage in the Middle East:

In the Red Sea, the Africans it saved would have come, among other places, from Kenya. ... It is quite possible that grandfather’s ancestors would, had it not been for the Royal Navy, have been carried away to slavery in Arabia.

What thoughtful gift does Obama offer, in return? 25 classic American movies on dvd. The Daily Mail prints an unofficial list:

1- Citizen Kane
2- The Godfather
3- Casablanca
4- Raging Bull
5- Singin' In The Rain
6- Gone With The Wind
7- Lawrence Of Arabia
8- Schindler's List
9- Vertigo
10- The Wizard Of Oz
11- City Lights
12- The Searchers
13- Star Wars
14- Psycho
15- 2001: A Space Odyssey
16- Sunset Boulevard
17- The Graduate
18- The General
19- On The Waterfront
20- It's A Wonderful Life
21- Chinatown
22- Some Like It Hot
23- The Grapes Of Wrath
24- ET
25- To Kill A Mockingbird

Presuming that he did bestir himself to pay attention to the films on this list, it seems that Obama knows as little about American movies as he does everything else: offering #7, Lawrence of Arabia, isn't even an American movie, it's British.

An article in the Telegraph offering background on Prime Minister Brown's visit gets to the root of the cause of the diplomatic black eye delivered to the Anglo-American bond of friendship; an appalling inexperience fuels Obama's lack of perspective and monumental ingratitude. It also explains why, unlike the other wartime Presidents before him, Obama may not be willing to see a nation's big picture, good and bad, its acts of atonement as well as its sins; that would require the gift of humility, to admit that none of us are perfect.

British officials [admit] that the White House and US State Department staff were utterly bemused by complaints that the Prime Minister should have been granted full-blown press conference and a formal dinner, as has been customary. They concede that Obama aides seemed unfamiliar with the expectations that surround a major visit by a British prime minister.

But Washington figures with access to Mr Obama's inner circle explained the slight by saying that those high up in the administration have had little time to deal with international matters, let alone the diplomatic niceties of the special relationship.

Allies of Mr Obama say his weary appearance in the Oval Office with Mr Brown illustrates the strain he is now under, and the president's surprise at the sheer volume of business that crosses his desk.

A well-connected Washington figure, who is close to members of Mr Obama's inner circle, expressed concern that Mr Obama had failed so far to "even fake an interest in foreign policy". A British official conceded that the furore surrounding the apparent snub to Mr Brown had come as a shock to the White House. ...

The American source said: "Obama is overwhelmed. There is a zero sum tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda.
...
The real views of many in Obama administration were laid bare by a State Department official involved in planning the Brown visit, who reacted with fury when questioned by The Sunday Telegraph about why the event was so low-key.

The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: "There's nothing special about Britain. You're just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn't expect special treatment."
...
The Sunday Telegraph understands that one of Mr Obama's most prominent African American backers, whose endorsement he spent two years cultivating, has told friends that he detects a weakness in Mr Obama's character.

"The one real serious flaw I see in Barack Obama is that he thinks he can manage all this," the well-known figure told a Washington official, who spoke to this newspaper. "He's underestimating the flood of things that will hit his desk." A Democratic strategist, who is friends with several senior White House aides, revealed that the president has regularly appeared worn out and drawn during evening work sessions with senior staff in the West Wing and has been forced to make decisions more quickly than he is comfortable.

Helpfully, in the spirit of friendship, the Telegraph article leaves some clues for the next head of state scheduled to visit the White House, as they puzzle over what might constitute the Perfect Gift for President Obama..:

"People say he looks tired more often than they're used to," the strategist said. "He's still calm, but there have been flashes of irritation when he thinks he's being pushed to make a decision sooner than he wants to make it. He looks like he needs a cigarette."