Got Paranoia? More Stone

 

Brooks Brothers Riot of November 22, 2000. Photo by Colin Braley/Reuters, via Wikipedia.

A gold nugget of fact I had no idea of in a segment on my favorite radio show that was mainly about the Dominion Election Systems settlement with Fox News, but it goes back to a big New York Times report of 2019 on the whole history of the Rupert Murdoch enterprise, by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, that puts an awful lot of things together on Rupert's early days in the US, after he'd bought the New York Post:

In 1980, he met Roy Cohn — the former adviser to Senator Joseph McCarthy and a Trump mentor — who introduced him to Gov. Ronald Reagan’s inner circle. It was a group that included Roger Stone Jr., another Trump confidant and the head of Reagan’s New York operations, who said in a later interview that he helped Murdoch weaponize his latest tabloid purchase, The New York Post, on Reagan’s behalf in the 1980 election. Reagan’s team credited Murdoch with delivering him the state that year — Murdoch gave Stone an Election Day printing plate from The Post over a celebratory meal at the 21 Club — and his administration subsequently facilitated Murdoch’s entry into the American television market, quickly approving his application for American citizenship so he could buy TV stations too.

Tony Blair, War Criminal

Drawing by Jon Stich, 2014: "I did this sketch of a vampire on the flight home from LA. It kind of looks more like a psychopathic Tony Blair though, which I’m okay with."

War criminal Tony Blair in his address today:

The decision to go to war in Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power in a coalition of over 40 countries led by the USA, was the hardest, most momentous, most agonising decision I took in 10 years as British prime minister.

For that decision today I accept full responsibility, without exception and without excuse.

And then proceeds to list his exceptions and excuses for what seems likely to be hours of self-justifying and lies. I heard him going on about how the Iraqi military just unexpectedly "melted away" in the face of the invasion, for instance, leaving the Iraqi public defenseless against an eruption of Sunni-Shi'a conflict, without somehow remembering old Proconsul Bremer's orders to disband the Iraqi army and "de-Baathify" the government (which literally created the Sunni "insurgency" when it deprived all those skilled and angry and in many cases extremely violent people of their livelihoods).

For all of this I express more sorrow, regret and apology than you may ever know or can believe.

No, we know exactly how much you express.

And earlier, in his prepared statement:

Cheap shots and do-wah-diddy

Via Cognitive Dissidence.

Voting fraud unexpectedly exists!

A Wisconsin insurance executive and Republican donor was charged with voting illegally more than a dozen times in four elections.

Milestones in shamelessness: Addendum

London protestor in Blair mask, maybe 2010? Photo by DPA, via Der Spiegel.

One more vampire called out by the current crisis in Iraq is former British prime minister Tony Blair, literally arguing that you can't blame the crisis on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, because the instability in Iraq is a direct consequence of the war in Syria:

In a defence of his actions in Iraq, Blair attacked as "extraordinary" any notion the country would be stable if Saddam Hussein had stayed in power.

"The civil war in Syria with its attendant disintegration is having its predictable and malign effect. Iraq is now in mortal danger. The whole of the Middle East is under threat."...

The idle 'prentice

The idle 'prentice executed at Tyburn. From William Hogarth's Industry and Idleness (1747).

The Times this morning, Landon Thomas, Jr., was all on about the young people of London who are never in their natural lives going to have jobs—

Perhaps the most debilitating consequence of the euro zone’s economic downturn and its debt-driven austerity crusade has been the soaring rate of youth unemployment. Spain’s jobless rate for people ages 16 to 24 is approaching 50 percent. Greece’s is 48 percent, and Portugal’s and Italy’s, 30 percent. Here in Britain, the rate is 22.3 percent, the highest since such data began being collected in 1992.

And indeed it's horrible, the sequence of stories of... Hang on a minute, when did Britain [jump]

Pace, pace

The war in Iraq passed away quietly last week, after a long wasting illness, surrounded by friends and family and fortified with the comforts of religion...

Actually it only ever had one friend worth having, and one relative. The friend was the great journalist Christopher Hitchens, who took to it early for reasons nobody could ever quite understand--a mocking whim or a genuine perverse passion--and remained loyal to it until the end, which came by some uncanny coincidence at the same time as his own (and no comforts of religion for him, but it seems worth saying RIP all the same); the relative was an older sister, a war in Afghanistan, more decorous and discreet--more legal, to put it bluntly--and more than a little resentful, it was said, at the younger one's careless, flashy, attention-grabbing ways.

Peace, peace, my God... suffering... a fatal crime... the curse! the curse!