Alexander Boris and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

This Jonathan Pie is a little long, but it's choice British invective:

"If you cared about integrity why did you put him in in the first place?"

All I wanted to say about the thing is sort of in there. There's an irritating tendency here on the tubes to make it all about us, an object lesson, showing how bad America is because their Tories are more "honorable" than our Republicans:

Of course Boris Johnson’s own party turned on him and demanded his resignation. He led an armed insurrection against parliament and tried to hang his own Vice President. He left his party no choice but to demand he resign. His party’s honor was at stake. Amiright? 😃

— FakeJoeBiden (@fake_biden) July 7, 2022

No, you are wrong. 

Fighting Words

Rep. Preston Brooks, painted by Adam B. Walter (1820-1875), had the same look of self-righteous stupidity as Tucker Carlson, it's very remarkable. Via Wikipedia.

I wonder how your civility hounds feel when they see stuff like this, from Question Time in Westminster, when Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (MP for Hough) asks the prime minister about a 2018 Telegraph article in which Johnson, 1950s English TV comedian that he is at heart, complained about the existence of women in burkas on the grounds that it was "absolutely ridiculous that women should go around resembling letterboxes and bank robbers":

WATCH: Astonishing scenes as MPs applaud Labour MP @TanDhesi as he tears into PM, accusing Boris Johnson of “derogatory and racist” remarks about Muslim women, declaring “open season” on minorities pic.twitter.com/3VDoTiFWiK

— Paul Brand (@PaulBrandITV) September 4, 2019

I mean, it's clear these guys are not going out for a drink afterwards to plan the generous compromises in which everybody will get a bit of what they want in an atmosphere of mutual respect and affection. Does a David Brooks look at this room where Edmund Burke, the stern prophet of good manners and the aesthetics of the sublime, spent his career and wonder what happened to the Mother of Parliaments?

Annals of Derp: A point of parliamentary privilege

Illustration by Ken Priebe for his poem "The Parliament of Owls", a very nice lyrical treatment of collective animal nouns.

A little fake news from Jazz Shaw of the aptly named Hot Air website:

This is a story which would never take place in the United States, at least not yet and not with the official permission of the government. The European Union has obviously become increasingly alarmed over trends in popular sentiment rippling through their member countries. This started with Brexit, but has more recently cropped up with the candidacies of Marie Le Pen and Geert Wilders. Clearly such rabble rousing is not to be tolerated in the largely socialist paradise so something had to be done. The solution? The EU has passed new rules which will allow them to cut the broadcast of any “hate speech or offensive material” and then purge such speech from the official record. (Associated Press)

One of the reasons this sounds so alarming is the unclarity of the writing (and Le Pen's name is "Marine".) The official record of what, Mr. Jazz?

That's the key: It's the official record of debates in the European Parliament, the elected body that governs the EU, which, like other parliaments, has an absolute and unquestioned right to set the standards of acceptable speech inside the body and to suppress unacceptable language—including, obviously, the houses of Congress in the United States, where we're all familiar with the idea of representatives' remarks being "stricken from the record" or having their "words taken down".

Pyke's Pique

Updated 8/21/2015

Elefanisi Beach, Crete.

Bizarrely misconceived headline at ThinkProgress:

Greece’s Radical Leftist Prime Minister Resigns In Defeat

Government officials told reporters Thursday that Tsipras will turn in his official resignation papers this afternoon and call for a new parliamentary election on September 20th. Tsipras hung on for weeks longer than eccentric Finance Minister Yannis Varoufakis, who motorcycled off into the sunset immediately after a July referendum that appeared to put Greece on the verge of exiting the European Union.

In the weeks since that vote, cooler heads prevailed and struck a deal to keep Greece in the currency group... The deal is a catastrophic defeat for Tsipras’ administration, and observers believed it was likely he would lose his job one way or another from the time that he reluctantly called for lawmakers to approve the bailout.

I don't think the writer, Alan Pyke, has a very clear idea of how parliamentary systems work. And it's a howl of Eeyore Caucus despair: on the assumption that Tsipras making a deal must have betrayed the international left by refusing to exercise his Green Lantern powers (he's just as bad as Obama!) because didn't he promise us the Revolution? (No.)

The Persimmons of Memory

Kim Jong Il looking at persimmons; Kim Jong Il looking at a leaflet. From http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/.


The Dear Leader looked at things, as we know; looking at things was virtually his whole life as leader, his chief and almost only duty, the way he took care of his people. Indeed, you could say that his commitment to looking at things was what killed him in the end: according to state media he

died on a train due to a "great mental and physical strain" during a "high-intensity field inspection" Saturday

between looking-at-things stops, as it were. He had perhaps looked at last at all the things he could manage, and something snapped.