Stupid Pundit Up The Nile

[Update at end of post]

There are few depths that former Thatcher aide and Telegraph Blogs contributor Nile “Chauncey” Gardiner will not plumb in his lame and predictable efforts to put the boot in on Barack Obama. Gardiner’s animus has one rationale, and one alone: a tribal and blinkered allegiance to the Republican Party, and whoever it puts up as candidates for elective office.

Behold the face of truly stupid punditry

Today’s excruciatingly weak attempt to kick the Prez, titled “Barack Obama recycles a German Socialist campaign slogan from the 1960s” takes a single word – “Forward” – and blows it up into a full blown horror story, all because the early 60s SPD in what was then West Germany used it in campaign literature. Gardiner also tries to include Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik strategy in the charge sheet.

Dealing with Ostpolitik first – something Gardiner tries to translate into an appeasement of dictatorships – this was nothing more than common sense. The policy, after all, was aimed primarily at other (East) Germans. Without Ostpolitik, there might have been no end to the Berlin Wall. And all practical politicians – including Gardiner’s former employer Mrs T – have done business with dictators.

Perhaps Nile has forgotten Augusto Pinochet. And all those Middle Eastern regimes that both the UK and USA were more than happy to do business with. And the likes of the deeply unpleasant Chiang Kai-shek, cultivated for so long after World War 2, and the singularly corrupt Governments in South Vietnam in whose defence so many US service personnel gave their lives.

That much is down to the selective amnesia of the idiotic Gardiner. But his fixation on the term “Forward” as some kind of leftist token is baffling – and hilariously wrong. In the UK, we can see this supposedly evil term forming part of the coat of arms of the city of Birmingham, for so long the power base of the Chamberlains, so far to the left that they joined the Tory Party. Like Mrs Thatcher, Nile.

Not a hotbed of socialism

The dreaded socialist disease then crossed the north Atlantic and embedded itself in the seal of the state of Wisconsin. Worse for Gardiner, even Governor Scott Walker, a Republican who has made an attack on collective bargaining rights for state workers a central part of his actions since election, has made no move to amend this infiltration, far less remove it.

And in the UK, as any self respecting rail enthusiast knows, that F-word was part of the coat of arms of the decidedly non-socialist Great Central Railway, and then of its successor the London and North Eastern, yes, the one that brought us Streamliners, speed records, the Flying Scotsman, and introduced PR and publicity to the industry. Proper leftists, they were (not). Nile Gardiner is clutching at straws.

That’s a sign of true and unwavering stupidity. No change there, then.

[UPDATE 17 May 0955 hours: One thing Nile Gardiner cannot be accused of is lack of effort. Today has brought yet another slice of witless punditry, this time trying to link the situation in Greece to that of the Obama Presidency, the latter being A Very Bad Thing, because, er, well, look - it just is, right?

To stand up his argument, Gardiner talks about debt, which, of course, is how his hero Ronald Reagan achieved "Morning in America".  He also asserts that Barack Obama has been influencing the EU, and cites in support of his stance on debt an article in the National Review.

Ah yes, the National Review. A - to put it mildly - conservative leaning publication, founded by William F Buckley Jr., of whom Gore Vidal said, when asked by reporters during the 1968 Presidential campaign "Where is your friend Mr Buckley?" that "He's over at the Wallace headquarters stitching hoods".

The situation in the USA is not even remotely comparable to that in Greece. But to Nile Gardiner, a true believer in his cause, no attack is too desperate, no comparison too ridiculous, and no citation too far out there to include as if it were gospel truth]