"Flattering the Poppinjays/.Letting our Leaders get away with Murder!"

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Flattering the popinjays

Journalists are letting our leaders get away with murder

AL Kennedy
Tuesday June 14, 2005
The Guardian

Nostalgia's a grand thing. Hearing my former MP, Gorgeous George, berating those bewildered senators took me back. We both hail from Dundee and it was great to hear the old dialect again. Hardly a school day went by without me calling someone a "Trotskyite popinjay", and the cries of "You throw like a big lickspittle" were frequent.

Another Scottish firebrand, James Maxton, once lost his parliamentary privileges for calling Winston Churchill "a murderer". Which would constitute another rare sign of life from a world where arms deals, pre-emptive invasions, environmental rape and moral collapse are coddled in an atmosphere of courteous restraint. Churchill, for example, said Maxton was "the greatest gentleman in the House of Commons" - because Maxton was dead by then and nothing aids the status quo more than politesse.

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But back in the 70s it seemed that things were set to change. Woodward and Bernstein, Bill Moyers, Seymour Hersh, Sidney Schanberg - all were emerging as top-notch investigative reporters. Plus the thought of those sexy informants: mysterious Deep Throat and dashing Daniel Ellsberg. It seemed that steadfast reporting and public protest could change the world, unseat corrupt leaders, even end an unjust war. The popinjays were getting no respect.

Today, of course, we have Vietnam II, the BBC is in tatters, Deep Throat turns out to be a mad-eyed geezer with a book deal and Ellsberg is still appealing for whistleblowers when no one will print their revelations unless they involve pierced labia, or Castro having sex with a dog. While all other public figures cannot appear in any format without being at least partially naked, sexually reassigned and/or masturbating a farm animal, our politicians are cocooned by embedded sycophancy. Not that I'd want to see Blair stripped with his parts in a jar and laying hands on a helpless donkey, but equally I am very tired of bombshells such as the Downing Street memo bringing us no nearer a transatlantic war crimes tribunal.

Around the globe popinjays both roundly condemn and unflinchingly support terrorism, torture, ethnic cleansing, the deployment of WMDs, the possession of WMDs and the imposition of chaos upon areas to be announced. This mental effort would be immensely tiring without the kind support of the mainstream media. Mugging Galloway on Newsnight or hounding Clinton were much safer options than rocking the boat over the massive fraud in the last two presidential elections, or the much-discussed possibilities of fraud in our last election, which seemed to evaporate as soon as the polls closed.


More of this at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1505821,00.html

[Bravo411]

1. You're right...

Sadly nobody in the MSM wants to rock the boat, yet they also seem to be indifferent to the fact that it's sinking anyways.