Guido Fawked – Loon Foxed

The tradition of political insults goes back centuries, and those involved in the rough game that is politics are forever on the look-out for new forms of the art. Some, however, are unequal to this task and instead fall back on borrowing from those they most admire, while hoping that their audience is not sufficiently sophisticated to rumble them for their lack of originality.

Bringing hope to clueless right-wingers everywhere

And it should surprise no-one who looks in regularly on Zelo Street to know that the latest group being called out for lack of originality is the rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog, who have fixed recently on regular usage of the term “loon”. At first sight, this looks like an original term which avoids the less than politically correct overtones of “loony”, but it certainly isn’t original, as I’ll show.

Neither, one has to say, is it by any means the kind of term one might associate with those bright young things who work in the service of the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines. But first, let’s look at the usage. This is typified by a post authored by the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole yesterday, where he tells “Hard-Left NUJ Loons Plan Leveson March on Wapping”.

Just to make sure you got that, the body of the post begins “Lefty loons”. Note also the use of the characterisation “Hard-Left”, which is where Cole gives the game away as to where he got it. And it isn’t only the Talking Bogbrush (tm) who is enamoured of this insult: new teaboy Alex “two sugars” Wickham is at it too, as he showed yesterday in a not very clever Twitter riposte.

“You are a loon” he declares, in a fruitless effort to end an exchange. So where did they get this new and not very happening term, together with the penchant for using terms like “Hard-Left”, or at least “Far-Left”? And the answer can be found at that place right-leaning ideologues revere: yes, the Fawkes folks cribbed it all from Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse).

More specifically, they got it from Fox’s top rated host Bill O’Reilly, aka Captain Combover. In this video, you can see Bill-O railing at “far-left loons” as he tries to frighten his all too gullible audience into believing that rioting is coming to the USA unless they vote as instructed by him and his fellow not particularly fair and balanced hosts, who are in turn instructed by Roger Ailes.

And that isn’t an isolated occurrence: you can see more examples of Bill-O pushing his “far-left loon” rubbish HERE and HERE. Yes, the likes of Master Cole, who likes to sneer at older folk, in reality reveres a vain 63 year old pundit to the extent of faithfully imitating his choice of characterisations. Thus the level of originality and depth of intellectual rigour at the Guido Fawkes blog.

Still, it gives the inmates something to keep them busy. Another fine mess.