The amusing Norman Johnson

"The Guardian", Britain's major paper of the Left, has recently hired a guy with a most amusing shtick. I gather that he is an ex-Marxist and he still manages to sound like a raging Leftist while at the same time saying things that in Leftist circles can only be called "courageous". He could be seen as a conservative camouflaged as a Leftist. It is a most amusing act. The excerpt below, for instance, is actually a defence of the invasion of Iraq and an attack on censorship by the Left!. He has also recently written another article in which he says the most abusive things possible about Margaret Thatcher but which ends up concluding that she got it right on all the major issues! He sort of lulls the Left to sleep with Leftist-sounding rhetoric and then hits them when they are not looking. Certainly good for a laugh anyway. I also reproduce below the "punch" paragraph from his article about Margaret Thatcher:

"And do commentators whose default column is a reflexive squeal about Charles Clarke's attempt to set some limits to the misuse of history by terrorist apologists still fail to grasp that, in reality, it is they and their colleagues on the middle-class left who have evolved into this country's most implacably efficient censors, trampling on dissent with a ruthlessness that makes the most ossified enforcers of Sharia law look like the blithe young hippies of my uninhibited, pre-chlamydian youth? The really brilliant thing about this conspiracy of silence in the creeping caliphate of the left is: there is no conspiracy! Like Mao's supine masses, most of the media droolocracy are now so vacantly subservient that gags are redundant. They've read the Guardian letters page. They know a pro-war position won't just see you perjured by Islamofascist performers on late-night current affairs shows, but issued with one of the New Statesman's own-brand fatwas and victimised by sneering guests at private dinners.

No less than Mao, the appeaser-dominated media has abused its position to distort the minds of a whole generation. Last week I noticed that our recyling bin had, once again, been left in the street. Civilly, I asked the young binman to return it to its proper place, a service he is contractually obliged to provide. "Put it back yourself you lazy slug," he replied. To anyone who, like me, had followed the Hitchens-Galloway confrontation, his allusion was unmistakable. "This is about the war, isn't it?" I said, adding, as the door closed on his protestations: "You're a disgrace to your profession."

On that other historic disputation, it was striking that when two Britishers wanted to debate the war, they had to cross the pond. You think I exaggerate? Get real. When did you last come across a play, poem or novel which, if its message wasn't crassly anti-war, didn't ignore the subject entirely? Is it possible that no creative person, anywhere, believes there is in fact a case for a degree of indefinite chaos in Iraq, plus a heightened terrorist threat in this country, if that is the price of overthrowing its foul and degenerate dictator? If not, the emergence of a British samizdat is but a matter of time. For the lonely few prepared to speak out against the totalitarian excesses of Saddam, contemporary British experience can offer surreal echoes of his very abuses. But I'm happy if you're happy. Bring it on.

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The Thatcher comment:

But you'd have to be stupid, or perverse, to deny the evil old bag got a couple of things right. Anyone would, given 11 years. So, yes, the unions were sorted on her watch. And I say that as someone whose big toe has never been the same since Wapping. Ditto the cold war. There was respect for the transatlantic alliance. Caution on Europe. The economy, stupid. Council houses for sale. Shaking up the teachers. A national curriculum. League tables. Rail privatisation. De-fetishisation of the green belt. The foundations for PFI. Concern for the daytime-TV-watching classes. Full prisons. Contracting out. Rupert Murdoch.

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