By, er, popular demand (well, mine anyway): Hitchens on Galloway.

When I saw the pictures of Saddam in his pants I laughed, and I agree entirely with Powerline's take.

Of course the Beeb got the tingles over it, following any story of those abusive yanks like a dog with a bone. They truly are dangerous in their perverse priorities, ambulance chasers who try to precipitate accidents. Michelle Malkin has been chasing the chasers.

Update: Iraq the Model provides perspective.

Gerard Baker on Galloway seen from an Iraq perspective:

'It is the tragic but hopeful people of Iraq who have shown us how to defy power and misery, and who, if we stand firm against the Galloways of this world, will one day get the Respect they truly deserve.'

Natalie Solent quoted Baker, and added one salient observation.

Scott has what he terms 'final thoughts' about Galloway. I suspect the last word is a long way off, but his observations are valuable and lucid.

Meanwhile, speaking of lucidity, soon I am going to have to permanently link this site- whose well-known author carves up the fallacies of our welfare state like an expert surgeon. (Thanks to ATW for the link)

Ok. Galloway update.

I watched carefully, attaching myself to every Galloway twitch and visible emotion, making like a lie detector. I'd say Galloway absolutely winged it, and not terribly convincingly unless you are impressed by supercharged blarney. I don't think the Senate committee were as bad as some people think. I thought quietly about Lord Hutton, who could never match Galloway for rhetoric but would make mincemeat of him were he given six months to conduct an enquiry.

The Scotsman agreed with me that Gallingway was bullshitting to high heaven. His attempt at raising parallels between himself and Donald Rumsfeld was bizarre, illogical, and even stupid from his own point of view, which sees Rumsfeld as something close to one of Beezebub's flies.

Furthermore, his blatant soapbox approach merely convinced me he was trying to steamroller the real questions that would have teased out his guilt. Norm Coleman may have smirked like a schoolboy but I can see why and might have done the same in his shoes. I don't think the Senate committee was trying to dissect him on live tv- merely to probe a little and show they had allowed him a chance to cooperate sincerely. Galloway failed, as sincerity is a foreign country to him.

My view is that information about Galloway's guilt will continue to dribble out; no-one has the committment to skewer Gorgeous, but plenty of people are paid to investigate his kind of corruption and will continue to fill in the picture slowly. Harry's Place, points this investigation out as an example.

The real question is when the line is crossed and Galloway goes from curiosity to societal reject. I think it will come, in time.

Let me at 'im.

That's how I feel when I hear about Galloway's barnstorming yet contentless appearance before the US senate committee: It's a 'a paack of liiiess' etc etc.. I'd love to be the prosecuting counsel against Galloway (which usually requires some legal training but...well, I mean...), but I'll content myself for now by linking to this good summary of his appearance from that reliable online source The Scotsman.

Sad but true- the Beeb's slick bias.

Trying something newish here- that is, to comment on the Beeb's anti-Conservative bias, and even their pro-Tony bias. Of course the leftists have typically felt they needed to be at Tony's throat as long as he was chummy with W., and W. was chummy with Rummy, but then they had a wopping majority to reassure them that a mediatorial vote against Tony wasn't a vote against, well, Tony. I suppose that that actually explains why the 'stopper' left were so angry about the war- they thought that 'their' man was in charge, and then they found that he wasn't so much their man as they'd thought. Naturally Blair's independence from the far-left, nominal though it is in philosophical terms, has always been his passport to election to Government in the UK.

But there's a real sense of bygones being bygones in this Beeb blather from Nick Assinder about Tone's new term agenda. It's a hotchpotch of authoritarianism and social tinkering which conceals a continual leftward drift in public policy- in other words business as usual in the 'Third Way' and the sort of thing that Beebies can readily get behind.

So, Blair is 'is out to make this package count' and continuing as, allegedly, he began- 'at full throttle.' . The whiff of bull is unmistakeable. Blair's approach is 'undoubtedly ambitious, controversial and wide-ranging' . He sweeps, he tackles, he reforms, he bans- like some overgrown Harry Potter he leaves those unscrupulous Slytherin' rascals floundering in his wake- 'The Tories have previously been split on the proposal but, if they scent the prime minister's blood, are likely to seize any opportunity to help defeat him.'.

To round off the impression that the Beeb is reconciling itself to Tone again and trying to get behind The Progam, this snippet of sartorial nonsense is a small case in point.

There is only one man, to my mind, who can be said to have pioneered the use of appearance in latter day politics in a most artful way to enhance his reputation, and that man is Tony Blair.

Yet it's the nasty party whose 'naked ambition'- yes, it's a crap opportunist pun- has led to a situation where 'A string of senior Conservatives have been putting their necks out on television talk shows to push their leadership credentials.'

Yes, they're back in line, and if we want some real criticism it'll be DIY from here on, so here's Irwin Stelzer on Blair's inglorious role in the world economy-

'More seriously, the Labour government's stated attempt to find a third way between America's free market capitalism and Europe's corporatism has been abandoned in favor of a lurch towards a high-tax, increasingly regulated economy that is already producing consumer angst, stock market jitters, and depressed businessmen.'

More seriously indeed.

Meanwhile, talking of collaboration between Arabs and Israelis...

Just whose side do they think they're on?

Alright, I'll admit the naivity implicit in my question, as I'll admit to a weakness for wanting to believe that people who share as much of my culture as do the journalists who fill the BBC, are somehow 'with me' and not against me.

But still, reading this article on the BBC website, with its introduction as follows, I couldn't help silently screaming the line which I used to start this post:

'I knew he was a collaborator, and he knew, I knew he was a collaborator, but the 50-year-old sheikh still danced around the issue.'

Yes. And the 'collaborator' in question was an Arab man who had helped the Israelis.

So, if the BBC journo, Butcher, knows the man as 'a collaborator', presumably he also knows who he thinks the enemy are. Implicitly, he reinforces the intifada, he objectifies Israel as a combatant in a war, and he endorses the demonisation which, as Melanie Phillips notes, gives rise to viciousness which even then the BBC chooses to romanticise.

Media Menace.

Of course you can't blame Newsweek entirely for what happened, but the press exploitation of the Islamic issue generally must lead to events like this. I expect the riots had been planned by terrorist remnants of the Taliban regime for a long time, and they were just waiting for an occasion. The BBC's megaphone journalism reporting horrified reactions to the 'desecration'- everyone from the Saudis on- was noticeable, and causeless. The mutual dependence of extremist Islamics and extremist left-wing journalists with their 'investigational' journalism is an awful kind of Frankenstein. Cabarfeidh and Powerline round up.