All hat and no cattle

Well, kiss me neck. So O didn’t listen to you about the WTC mosque. The Economist did a Lexington piece on the wrangle, the general line of which was that the US is proud of the fact that Muslims assimilate better into America than elsewhere and it should avoid the danger of creating a ‘them-and-us’ attitude that might lead to home grown terrs (you have already had a couple). It did a hatchet job on Gingrich thus:

The former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives may or may not have presidential pretensions, but he certainly has intellectual ones. That makes it impossible to excuse the mean spirit and scrambled logic of his assertion that “there should be no mosque near ground zero so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia”. Come again? Why hold the rights of Americans who happen to be Muslim hostage to the policy of a foreign country that happens also to be Muslim? To Mr Gingrich, it seems, an American Muslim is a Muslim first and an American second. Al-Qaeda would doubtless concur.

Mr Gingrich also objects to the centre’s name. Imam Feisal says he chose “Cordoba” in recollection of a time when the rest of Europe had sunk into the Dark Ages but Muslims, Jews and Christians created an oasis of art, culture and science. Mr Gingrich sees only a “deliberate insult”, a reminder of a period when Muslim conquerors ruled Spain. Like Mr bin Laden, Mr Gingrich is apparently still relitigating the victories and defeats of religious wars fought in Europe and the Middle East centuries ago. He should rejoin the modern world, before he does real harm.

I thought that O’s speech was equally lacking in logic. The general theme was the protection of the American right to freedom of religion. This ruckus has nothing to do with freedom of worship; it is about putting up a building, and there is no absolute freedom to do that. However, the First Amendment protects both religious freedom and bad taste. The entire proposal strikes me either as crassly insensitive, arrogant or seriously provocative – or all three. A report from the Big Bagel says that most New Yorkers are not particularly fazed by it all, especially as a mosque, it is said, already exists on the site and this is a rebuild (at $100 million a pretty big one). The Governor of NY State is said to have offered to find another site more remote from Ground Zero, but this was refused.

There was a recent proposal to erect the biggest mosque in Europe alongside the Olympic stadium in London. It would have accommodated thousands. There was an outcry; people took the scheme as a power-statement and an attempt to upstage the Olympics. Fortunately the proposal collapsed for funding reasons. I can well sympathise with Americans who object to this one. But Gingrich seems to have been indulging in the worst kind of rabble-rousing; he puts the US on all fours with Saudi, as if they had shared values. Not a smart argument.

O’s later ‘clarification’ - that he was only talking about the legal situation, not the merits of the case - was pretty weasly. More than ever he is coming across as all hat and no cattle, as you Texans say. He seems to have stirred up hostility on both sides, the Right accusing him of ‘pandering to radical Islam’ (Gingrich) and the Left of buggering-up their chances in November. The debate now seems to have reached rock-bottom, with Mayor Bloomberg calling anyone who disagrees with him ‘bigoted’ (have you noticed how lefties, greens, warmists, carbonatics (thank you ,Martin) and organicists always use abuse in place of debate?), red-necks against ‘liberals’, O against Palin; lots of heat, little light. The polls show 60% against the project. Stand by for more swallowing of tails.

(A footnote on the onwards march of Islam; when I first went to Malawi 50 years ago the Moslem religion was confined to the north. Twenty years ago it had crept down to the southern lake shore. There was a frenzied building programme, but every time a ‘moskew’ was built the Catholics built a church as close to it as possible. I met a young lad who told me that his name was Yussuf or Joseph, depending on which place he was attending at the time. He was paid for attending both. Ecumenical or what?).

There is a great deal of comment here, also, about O’s less than dazzling performance in the polls. One gets the impression that he is less popular than a fart in a space suit. . His latest disapproval rating is 50% - with Congress scarcely out of the starting gate with a disapproval rating of 72%. What is intriguing is that there does not appear to be a carpe diem moment amongst the Republicans. Who is the coming man – or woman? If you tell me Palin I shall check-in to the home for the old and bewildered.

Rather more worrying is the state of the US economy. If America is the world engine of growth, then it looks like ‘cash for clunkers’ time. You have falling house values, falling manufacturing output, rising inventories, increasing long-term unemployment, but no discernible long-term plan to tackle the deficit. The previous highest deficit in the last ten years was 3.5%; now it’s 10% of GDP. ‘Alka’ Stelzer in the ST talks of ‘hope for the Good Ship Robust Recovery’. Really? It strikes me that the US is deep in sierra hotel 1 tango.

In a traditionally slow news month, the meeja have returned to the Strange Death of Dr Kelly, the WMD expert who ‘committed suicide’ after being outed as the source of leaks about the government’s porkies. Some medical experts have called for the case to be reopened because they cast doubts on the robustness of the evidence as to the cause of death. The conspiracy theorists are having a field day. The suspicious circumstances include the impossibility of Kelly bleeding to death through a transverse arterial cut on his wrist, doubt as to whether the pain killers he took also were sufficient to kill him, the lack of blood in any quantity at the scene of the death, the establishment of a police incident room nine hours before he was reported missing, the lack of an inquest, the key documents being kept secret for 70 years, and so on. He was a guy who was used to stress and high pressure – he was a weapons inspector for Gawd’s sake. Hardly the sort likely to top himself because a bunch of MPs were beastly to him.

One commentator says that it is inconceivable that the government would conspire in the assassination of one of its officials. Hmmm. Andrew Gilligan, who ran the original ‘no wmd’ story for BBC and got fired for his pains, believes that it was a cry for help that went wrong. The fire had already passed over Kelly so what was the motivation for suicide? Because the Government had threatened to sack him and take his pension away, theorises another.

This is actually quite an old story, the call for a re-examination of the case being made several months ago. The solution is to have a proper inquest.

The Pakistan disaster is not getting as much attention as anticipated. The Torygraph ran a comment piece on the mystery of the paucity of donations to the aid effort. It says that over a given amount of time UK contributions were only 10% of those for Haiti. The British are the second most generous givers to charity per head, after the US, so why the closed wallets now? The piece comments

A more plausible excuse for withholding your money is the incompetence of many aid operations, and the corruption of the governments with which they have to work. In Afghanistan, the failure to monitor how aid money is spent has led to huge sums disappearing into the pockets of the powerful, rather than being used to build the roads, schools and hospitals that it was meant to. The corruption is so widespread that aid workers call the place "Afghaniscam". Something similar is likely to happen to a proportion of whatever is donated to the flood victims. The terrible earthquake in Kashmir in 2005 prompted Britons to hand over more than £20 million. A lot of that money was misappropriated – as was much of the cash given by the World Bank to the Pakistani government to build flood defenses which could have mitigated the current crisis.


One possibility is donor fatigue. However, posters to the piece made frequent reference to the amount of money that Pakistan spends on arms, including nuclear weapons, the fear of money finding its way to the Taliban, and some spiky remarks about the level of donations from wealthy Muslim countries (on which we have no information). Antagonism towards Pakistan might be a factor, but I suspect not a lot. The brutal truth is that there has been a dearth of shocking TV images; floods are not as telegenic as an earthquake. Donations depend on emotions, not on logic, otherwise many charities would have a tough time. The worst is yet to come, with cholera, measles, dysentery and malaria taking a bigger toll than the floods themselves. Here is the present tally:

The root of the problem is not money; it’s our old friend Institutional Capacity (or lack of it). The nature of disasters makes it very difficult to actually distribute aid, especially where the capacity and infrastructure has either been destroyed or because of corruption and institutional incompetence. And it doesn’t encourage donors when the government on the receiving end charges duty on imports of food aid and materials.


An amusing little story dredged up by Quest. An enterprising Indian businessman (is there any other sort?) has revived the East India Company that was formed in 1600 under Liz 1 and ceased trading in 1878. At its zenith it controlled 50% of the entire world trade. It also governed India and a big chunk of SE Asia until the Raj took over. The new owner acquired all the intellectual property of the company; this has lain dormant since it ceased trading. The business plan is to trade in a number of the goods that the EIC specialised in, such as highest quality tea. The old company logo is now appearing on the merchandise. Of course what he is really selling is nostalgia – amongst Indians at that. Maybe the Raj was not so bad after all.

It must be true; I read it in the papers.

• Daft headline of the week: ‘Unfaithful men twice as likely to be caught cheating’. (DT)

• Another daft headline: ‘Rare plants more difficult to find’. (DT)

• ‘Not many hurt’ headline: ‘Two builders made redundant’. (Isle of Man Examiner)

• Daft reporting; ‘The RAF is to be cut to its lowest size for 100 years’ (It was formed in 1918). (Economist)

• Daft reporter; I dipped into Glenn Beck’s slot the other night. After 10 minutes I was losing the will to live. A complete a**hole. Is the entire American right-wing meeja commentariat always this buffoonish? I know that if mountains were made of bull-sh** there would be skiing in Texas, but he is beyond belief. Or was I too hasty? I do not intend to find out.

• Amazing headline; ‘Blair gives book cash to charity’. The Beeb reports that the Rev. Blair is to give all the proceeds of his memoirs to the Royal British Legion to build a sports facility for wounded soldiers. Well, as a new convert to Rome, he will be familiar with the ancient practice of purchasing indulgences. £5 million plus royalties should get him past the Pearly Gates, but he won’t know anybody there.