Findus Fop wrote:
I like this guy:
Quote:
One more thing: if Corbyn were to contend a General Election, it's worth considering who he'd be up against. Cameron insists he won't contest a third election, with George Osborne his anointed successor. That could be a gift to Labour – it's not just that Osborne is scum, it's that he can't conceal it. No one seems too bothered for now, so long as he's just some Igor lurching round Cameron's lab, but when that face has been on every TV screen in Britain for months, radiating smug malevolence, simultaneously spiteful and weak... that's not the customary front-benchers' mask, with its semi-convincing, stencilled-on sincerity. That's the face of a snivelling, evil bastard. It's unmistakable. Giving him that little Roman emperor's haircut hasn't changed a thing; Osborne may still be thought of as competent, but he will never be popular.
Some well-reasoned concerns about Corbyn though:
Quote:
It assumes that Corbyn could nudge the Overton Window leftwards while in opposition (which is almost unprecedented), while under ceaseless, scurrilous – and sometimes well-founded – attack.
He does seem to have had dealings with some dodgy types by choice, and continued to speak well of them after the fact.
Part of me thinks the right-wing press are largely just waiting for him to become leader, and then they'll
really go for him.
Erk:
-----------
Just as no one really thinks that Corbyn has a Hamas poster blu-tacked to his bedroom wall, no one believes he thought of Osama bin Laden as a superstud. We know what he meant: that an assassination, rather than an arrest and trial, appeared barbaric, and would provide more fuel for those who see Bin Laden as a martyr. Now, you could say that's a bit naïve – this stuff is shadowy, and we don't know the half of it, but it's unlikely that when those Navy SEALs burst in Osama threw his hands up and said “OK, it's a fair cop” – but it's a reasonable view. Barack Obama, too, says he'd have preferred to put Bin Laden on trial, for the same very obvious reasons.
But any politician with ambition should know better than to be so unbelievably careless. A tragedy? What was he thinking? Surely, if there's one essential quality required for the office of Prime Minister, or Leader of the Opposition – whether Right or Left – it's judgment. And if there's one thing Corbyn lacks, it's judgment. This is someone who still believes that Slobodan Milosevic was misunderstood; someone who signed an Early Day Motion calling for research into homeopathy to be “placed on the national agenda as a credible scientific field of inquiry”; someone who's already made it plain that he'd take Britain out of NATO if he could – even though he probably couldn't – thereby burning bridges which he hasn't even come to yet. (Deserting all our allies and then preaching them a sermon might cause certain folk to clap their hands in glee, but it's best avoided, really.)
It doesn't get any better, either: Corbyn went on to draw an equivalence between the death of the architect of 9/11, and 9/11 itself – oh yes he did – and anyway: what was he even doing on Press TV, best known for parroting the government line on Western journalists tortured for “spying”, and broadcasting theories of the Holocaust as perfidious Zionist hoax? It's not the only time he's popped up on there, never so ungracious as to criticise a government which hangs gay men from the gibbets of cranes – a government which he believes has been “demonised” by the West.
One or two of these clangers could be written off as “gaffes”; three or four you could brush under the rug... perhaps. But we seem to be looking at a lifetime of this stuff. And those of us who care about such things, and are prepared to say so, just face snarky, eye-rolling ridicule from people whose instincts are so acute that six years back they were telling us that George Galloway was a principled opponent of tyranny. (Corbyn, incidentally, sent a congratulatory tweet on the occasion of Galloway's victory in the Bradford West by-election. Always good for the party leader to be on record celebrating the election defeat of a Labour MP. Inspires loyalty, that.)