Posts by Craig Ranapia
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And one for the "the irony, it burns" file from The Guarniad:
[Tatiana Gfoeller, Washington's ambassador to Kyrgyzstan] added: "He [Prince Andrew]reacted with almost neuralgic patriotism whenever any comparison between the US and UK came up. For example, one British businessman noted that despite the 'overwhelming might of the American economy compared to ours' the amount of American and British investment in Kyrgyzstan was similar. Snapped the duke: 'No surprise there. The Americans don't understand geography. Never have. In the UK, we have the best geography teachers in the world!'"
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especially when I see The Guardian frantically teasing me with the forthcoming story of the member of the royal family said to have acted “inappropriately”.
Especially from a newspaper that, based on previous form, would take a very dim and aggressive attitude towards a competitor trying to dish the same treatment out to its own reporters.
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OK, could someone explain to me the public interest in this:
One cable reveals how the London embassy passed on intelligence about a British Labour minister, apparently picked up from civil servant contacts, saying he “reportedly remains a bit of a hound dog where women are concerned”.
The minister, whose name the Guardian is withholding, was “forced to apologize …to a female…who accused him of sexual harassment…. and has had marital troubles in the last few years”.
The confidential dispatch continued: “Contacts who know him well report he has manic depressive tendencies – ‘he’s very up one minute, very down the next’, and at least one…colleague has described xxx as a “‘bully’"
That’s not exposing war crimes and human rights abuses, but tabloid gossip released under a thick pall of media sanctimony. Now to be fair, diplomacy may well be gossip with better table manners but I don't really see the public interest argument here in releasing the cable.
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I suspect we’d find from those that Russia has behaved in a highly criminal fashion.
And for all the Teabag-iban hysterics, I'd love to see how long the likes of Glenn Beck & Rush Limbaugh would last in Moscow. Then again, it doesn't look like Prime Minister Putin has anything to worry about after all.
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Maybe the concept is that non-criminal governments *are* entitled to secrecy, but the US is criminal and has lost that protection.
I'm sure Messers Hoover, McCarthy and their illiberal spawn would heartily agree -- the Constitution only applies to those you deem worthy of it, right? Ditto for civil rights and sheer common decency.
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This is one of the things that bugs me. WikiLeaks was doing sterling work publishing secrets from around the world. And now all of that has stopped because of their vendetta with the US.
Perhaps someone should start Wikileaking Assange's e-mails and phone traffic? You know, sauce for the cyber-goose is sauce for the speaking truth to power gander -- what's YOUR agenda, Julie?
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Would we hamstring our own government by making public every word that diplomats shared about another state?
Certainly not – and it takes no imagination to picture situations where genuinely free and frank assessments of personalities and situations really matter. It would be a rather perverse outcome if all Wikileaks really accomplished is make sure foreign affairs are conducted in such a thick euphemistic fog nobody really knows nothing.
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Has to be Sarah Palin’s ‘refudiate’
The problem is that if you started on Palin's eye-watering GBH against the fabric of reality, you'd never stop.
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And how could we forget "real New Zealander" -- which came out of the mouths of people whose bitter estrangement from reality made the doom of the Atreidae look like a particularly dull episode of Father Knows Best.
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Kiki and Herb are the missing link between Bonnie Tyler and William Butler Yeats:
And since there's no such thing as excessive Friday fabulosity, Justin Bond and the Hungry March Band share a great truth of the universe. 'We All Get It In The End' --
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