What was blair thinking? (MTV)
<a href="http://politics.guardian.co.uk/studentpolitics/story/0,1556,909167,00.html"; target="_blank">click</a>
But an exhausted-looking prime minister at times struggled to cope with MTV's frequent ad breaks. Time and again he was cut off in mid-exchange.
A bunch of overfed, priveleged MTV viewers (and I mean "MTV viewer" as the only insult
) attack him and the one Iraqi in the place focuses on Saddam Hussein. How amazingly telling.
I swear to God I am ready to wrap all of these over-sensitive freaks who like being offended or scared FOR other people in the big AIDS quilt and ship them off to a remote island so they can feel bad for the coconuts they'll have to eat to survive. "WILSON!"
WHY DO YOU WANT TO KILL BABIES, MR. BLAIR?! WHY!?
But an exhausted-looking prime minister at times struggled to cope with MTV's frequent ad breaks. Time and again he was cut off in mid-exchange.
A bunch of overfed, priveleged MTV viewers (and I mean "MTV viewer" as the only insult
) attack him and the one Iraqi in the place focuses on Saddam Hussein. How amazingly telling.I swear to God I am ready to wrap all of these over-sensitive freaks who like being offended or scared FOR other people in the big AIDS quilt and ship them off to a remote island so they can feel bad for the coconuts they'll have to eat to survive. "WILSON!"
WHY DO YOU WANT TO KILL BABIES, MR. BLAIR?! WHY!?
Comments
I'd loooove to see this -er interview...
Reminds me of another famous one where the tables were turned:
THE BILL GRUNDY INTERVIEW
Often misquoted, this is an accurate transcription of the interview which went out live on 1 December 1976.
The original Sex Pistols line-up are seated - from left to right - Johnny Rotten, Paul Cook, Steve Jones and Glen Matlock. Bill Grundy sits on their left. Standing behind the Pistols are the punk hangers-on from the Bromley Contingent, Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Severin, Simon Barker and 'Simone'.
Grundy introduces the band to the cameras.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
GRUNDY (To camera) They are punk rockers. The new craze, they tell me. Their heroes? Not the nice, clean Rolling Stones... you see they are as drunk as I am... they are clean by comparison. They're a group called The Sex Pistols, and I am surrounded by all of them...
JONES (Reading the autocue) In action!
GRUNDY Just let us see The Sex Pistols in action. Come on kids...
[Film of The Sex Pistols in action is shown; then back to Grundy.]
GRUNDY I am told that that group (hits his knee with sheaf of papers) have received forty thousand pounds from a record company. Doesn't that seem, er, to be slightly opposed to their anti-materialistic view of life?
MATLOCK No, the more the merrier.
GRUNDY Really?
MATLOCK Oh yeah.
GRUNDY Well tell me more then.
JONES We've ****in' spent it, ain't we?
GRUNDY I don't know, have you?
MATLOCK Yeah, it's all gone.
GRUNDY Really?
JONES Down the boozer.
GRUNDY Really? Good Lord! Now I want to know one thing...
MATLOCK What?
GRUNDY Are you serious or are you just making me, trying to make me laugh?
MATLOCK No, it's all gone. Gone.
GRUNDY Really?
MATLOCK Yeah.
GRUNDY No, but I mean about what you're doing.
MATLOCK Oh yeah.
GRUNDY You are serious?
MATLOCK Mmm.
GRUNDY Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Brahms have all died...
ROTTEN They're all heroes of ours, ain't they?
GRUNDY Really... what? What were you saying, sir?
ROTTEN They're wonderful people.
GRUNDY Are they?
ROTTEN Oh yes! They really turn us on.
JONES But they're dead!
GRUNDY Well suppose they turn other people on?
ROTTEN (Under his breath) That's just their tough shit.
GRUNDY It's what?
ROTTEN Nothing. A rude word. Next question.
GRUNDY No, no, what was the rude word?
ROTTEN Shit.
GRUNDY Was it really? Good heavens, you frighten me to death.
ROTTEN Oh alright, Siegfried...
GRUNDY (Turning to those standing behind the band) What about you girls behind?
MATLOCK He's like yer dad, inni, this geezer?
GRUNDY Are you, er...
MATLOCK Or your granddad.
GRUNDY (To Sioux) Are you worried, or are you just enjoying yourself?
SIOUX Enjoying myself.
GRUNDY Are you?
SIOUX Yeah.
GRUNDY Ah, that's what I thought you were doing.
SIOUX I always wanted to meet you.
GRUNDY Did you really?
SIOUX Yeah.
GRUNDY We'll meet afterwards, shall we? (Sioux does a camp pout)
JONES You dirty sod. You dirty old man!
GRUNDY Well keep going, chief, keep going. Go on, you've got another five seconds. Say something outrageous.
JONES You dirty bastard!
GRUNDY Go on, again.
JONES You dirty ****er! (Laughter from the group)
GRUNDY What a clever boy!
JONES What a ****ing rotter.
GRUNDY Well, that's it for tonight. The other rocker Eamonn, and I'm saying nothing else about him, will be back tomorrow. I'll be seeing you soon, I hope I'm not seeing you [the band] again. From me, though, goodnight.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The cheesy signature tune plays and the credits roll. Rotten looks at his watch, Jones starts dancing to the music, and Grundy mutters an off-mic 'Oh shit!' to himself.
The story made the front pages of the following morning's newspapers, amidst howls of outrage, including the now infamous Daily Mirror headline - 'THE FILTH AND THE FURY!'. The Pistols had cemented their place in television folklore.
[ 03-07-2003: Message edited by: Hassan i Sabbah ]</p>
[Israeel zindabad!]
[ 03-07-2003: Message edited by: Immanuel Goldstein ]</p>
<strong>I swear to God I am ready to wrap all of these over-sensitive freaks who like being offended or scared FOR other people in the big AIDS quilt and ship them off to a remote island</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yeh! That goes for all those SAPS who went to jail for trying to end slavery and apartheid!
EMPATHY!
FWAAAAAAAAAA!
Who needs it?
Sometimes interests coalesce, ironically, the US may have wasted their chance for war months ago, now they have earned some of the flack they're getting. Blair gets wrapped in the same net only because England can't do didly squat on their own, though I suppose they could have sent the SAS into Iraq to take care of business while the US was playing hide and seek with Osama.
[ 03-07-2003: Message edited by: Matsu ]</p>
<strong>It sounds like the questions they asked were quite reasonable. Tony Blair is a democratically elected representative and as such should answerable to his constituents. If these are the concerns they have, he needs to be able to answer their questions.</strong><hr></blockquote>
You can't tell me the following is a reasonable question.
"With all due respect, Mr Blair, I could produce anthrax in my bathtub. I have anthrax in my spinach, in my stomach. So why don't you bomb Sweden?" asked an agitated Swedish student.
[ 03-07-2003: Message edited by: kneelbeforezod ]</p>
[ 03-07-2003: Message edited by: kneelbeforezod ]</p>
<strong>While there was obvious hyperbole in that question, the underlying query - why attack Iraq rather then another state that has the potential to produce chemical or nuclear weapons - is something that neither Bush nor Blair have managed to adequately respond to so far. The person who asked that question would have been better served if he had phrased it in such a way that it recieved an actual answer rather then a soundbite.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Actually they have but people are unwilling to listen.
Memo to Blair: You do not go on MTV to talk about anything of substance, people who watch MTV are stupid.
<strong>It sounds like the questions they asked were quite reasonable. Tony Blair is a democratically elected representative and as such should answerable to his constituents. If these are the concerns they have, he needs to be able to answer their questions.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yeh, it's a bastard. Here in England he's not doing what the country wants him to. Democracy my erse.
<strong>Yeh, it's a bastard. Here in England he's not doing what the country wants him to. Democracy my erse.</strong><hr></blockquote>
What specifically is he doing that is against the principles of Democracy?
If a democratically elected leader is in a position where he sees a more enlightened course than the popularly held one, it's his responsibility to enlighten the people he answers to: The people who elected him. That doesn't mean that he can't do something unpopular, but he'd best make an honest argument in favor of what he wants to do, and expect it to be picked apart if there's a good counterargument. As any scientist can tell you, the surest way to test the soundness of an idea is to publish it for open, untrammeled peer review. It's not perfect, but then nothing is.
As far as sanctions go: As a rule, I despise sanctions. In practice, general sanctions and embargoes affect the poor, the elderly and the weak first and foremost, and are therefore execrable. Furthermore, an impoverished population is more likely to be desperate and less likely to be educated, and therefore much more vulnerable to manipulation, propaganda and tyranny. The "smart" sanctions at least solve some of the more immediate problems, including one obvious one: If the Iraqi people are not getting medicine after the sanctions are revised, it's Hussein's fault, not ours. No matter what, we need the Iraqi people to be at least lukewarm to us, and sofar we've done just about everything we can to make sure that they aren't.
Would smart sanctions "solve" anything, in terms of getting rid of Hussein? In all honesty, I wouldn't expect them to, certainly not quickly. But "getting rid of Hussein" in and of itself could only be the very beginning of a huge undertaking, and it's not crucial to get rid of him before we start. Look at Iran: The same people are in charge, more or less, but the youth of Iran are increasingly hostile to them, and dismissive of them. All that will be required to "get rid of" the clerics who rule Iran in practice is to wait for them to die, at which point the population at large will already be primed for - and enlisted in - reform.
The argument that we have to get rid of Hussein is specious. First of all, why him? and how is this linked to terrorism? Our allies are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the two really hard-line states who are suspects #1 and #2 in terms of recruiting, training, and harboring terrorists, and who are actively hostile to the most progressive countries in the region. We have also allied with Kuwait, who are hostile to our founding principles almost point for point (what was that bit I read somewhere about giving aid and succor to the enemy...?). If we got rid of Saddam, who would replace him, and why would the Iraqis have any faith in the choice? Look at the last guy we put in charge of Iraq! Hussein is already the poster boy for American meddling in militant Islamic circles.
Lastly, as a product of the sanctions, and Hussein's own appalling record as a ruler, Iraq is not prepared for democracy on a ground level. As Jefferson observed, you have to have an educated populace to have a functioning democracy, and they have to be informed and interested enough to participate. There is a significant, if embattled, Iraqi middle class, but that's not enough. What we are proposing is a sort of Leninist/Stalinist imposition of a state upon an existing civilization in the hopes that it will become an organic part of the civilization by some undetermined means. That didn't work in Russia (not when the Socialists tried it, nor when we tried it after the wall came down), it's not working in Afghanistan, and it won't work in Iraq. (Iran is doing it the right way, but because of our meddling in the Middle East, the progressives in Iran hate and mistrust us. Yay.) At best we'll end up with a colony under American military rule, which will only agitate our enemi- er, allies - even more.
There seems to be a call in this thread for a clean, simple, unambiguously effective alternative to the war, as if the war were itself clean, simple, and unambiguously effective. While I don't doubt that we can swiftly unseat Hussein militarily, it will still be extremely difficult to turn Iraq into a functioning democracy - especially from the top down, and especially since our hands are so stained from decades of realpolitik that we do not appear to the people of the Middle East like the country described in our Declaration of Independence. I can't honestly predict what any action on our part will do, and that's part of the problem we've gotten ourselves into.
(North Korea's Declaration of Independence was consciously and closely modelled on ours, come to think of it...whoops).
[edit: I'm suspicious of the "We have to get rid of Hussein because he's an evil tyrant" argument largely because the current administration consists largely of the same people who've been installing and supporting tyrants for decades because they're considered stable and biddable, and there are rumblings like "[t]here should be limits to free speech" in response to political parody, and the various no-knock policies resurrected and refined from the Nixon era that make me wonder if our current Administration would know a democracy if they were put in charge of one by fiat.]
[ 03-07-2003: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>
Taking this argument to its logical conclusion...why have elections at all? If the general public are not well informed enough to decide whether or not they want their taxes to pay for bombs to be dropped on Iraq, how can they possibly judge the ability of a leader?
[ 03-07-2003: Message edited by: kneelbeforezod ]</p>
A progressive democracy is not a popularity contest.
[ 03-07-2003: Message edited by: BuonRotto ]</p>