Observer: Macca the victim of Zionist plot

Barbara Ellen got all worked up in yesterday's Observer about Paul McCartney's gig in Tel Aviv: 'What on earth was he up to....could only blather pompously about "helping the peace process"...Oh the agonising stupidity and arrogance of the man!'

Ellen obviously has some difficulty understanding why any musician should want to play in Israel. Then, she confesses, a 'dark thought' occurs to her:

Was Tel Aviv just more evidence that McCartney is the most pussy-whipped music icon ever? A former Beatle who lets his birds boss him around and tell him what to do.

Think about it. It was lovely Linda who turned Paul on to vegetarianism. Then there was all that rolling about with seals with Heather. Now he has a Jewish girlfriend, the glamorous Nancy Shevell, he's suddenly playing concerts in Israel and 'finding out for myself what the situation is'.

Just as the Guardian could only explain Barack Obama's support for Israel by portraying him as 'compelled' by the mysterious 'lobby', so Ellen is forced to conclude that McCartney is under the 'dark' influence of a Jewish femme fatale (the gender and racial stereotypes come thick and fast...).

It couldn't be, could it, that the former Beatle was merely exercising the right of a musician from one democratic country to perform in another friendly, democratic country? Or is Ellen aware of some cultural boycott of Israel that I haven't heard of? If so, does it also apply to countries in the region with much worse human rights records, such as Syria, Iran or Egypt, and would she have made such a fuss if McCartney had toured there? 

Update

The Contentious Centrist has linked to this post and elaborates on the dubious stereotypes underlying Ellen's remarks:

This whole swollen carbuncle of a story can only make sense to an antisemitic reader. As anyone with some common sense and moderate knowledge would have to see that Ellen's free associations, which she probably takes to be cute witticisms, tell us more about her own demons than they do about McCartney and Israel.

Palin panic?

Staying with the US election: 

After Sarah Palin's trainwreck of an interview with Katie Couric (hilariously sent up by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, though the real thing was beyond parody), the McCain campaign is reported to be in a panic about Thursday's vice-presidential debate. One theory has it that McCain's proposal to postpone last Friday's presidential debate was actually a ploy to make sure that the Palin-Biden encounter never happens (he cannily  suggested moving the first Obama-McCain meeting to the Thursday VP slot).

Given the damage that a poor performance by Palin could do to McCain's chances, plus the latter's propensity for theatrical gestures when things get desperate (postponing the first day of the Republican convention to fly down to hurricane-threatened New Orleans, announcing the choice of Palin to undermine the impact of Obama's acceptance speech, 'suspending' his campaign to ride to the rescue of the bailout plan), it's a fair bet that the old maverick will stage another distraction before Thursday's showdown.

While acknowledging that I'm only a humble transatlantic observer of the campaign, I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that the coming week will see one of the following strategies adopted by the McCain campaign:

1. Plant a smear story about Joe Biden, perhaps digging up some long-forgotten dirt from his past, in order to neuter him politically before the debate.

2. Do the same to Obama - maybe going public with some scandal that they've been keeping in reserve for just such a moment - to create a media storm and distract attention from the debate.

3. Announce that Sarah Palin, or one of her children, has been taken ill, necessitating a sudden return to Alaska, and a postponement of the debate.

4. If all else fails, go for the nuclear option and declare that (perhaps because of some version of No.3) Palin is withdrawing her candidacy.

Thanks to the growing chorus of disillusionment with Palin among conservatives who only recently hailed her as an inspired choice, No.4 no longer seems quite so unlikely - despite the enormous risks. As to who would step into Palin's shoes, here's a question: why did Rudy Giuliani accompany McCain to Oxford, Mississippi for the debate, and why did he and not Palin take on the traditional veep role of boosting the candidate's performance in the spin room and on the networks after the debate? It's just a thought - but if anything comes of it, remember that you read it here first.

Update:

I didn't think of this one. The (London) Sunday Times has picked up a rumour from inside the McCain camp that Bristol Palin's wedding could take place just before the November election, thus creating a distraction and garnering sympathy for her mother's candidacy. Alternatively - should we look forward to an announcement before this Thursday's debate that Bristol has gone into labour and needs her mother at her side? In this increasingly unpredictable election year, anything is possible.

Presidential debate inspired by 'West Wing'?

In the first US presidential debate on Friday evening, moderator Jim Lehrer struggled to get the two candidates to take advantage of the agreed format, which allowed them to talk to each other directly, rather than having to address all their answers to him.

In yet another example of life imitating art in this campaign, it turns out that the idea to adopt this free-flowing format may have been inspired by The West Wing. According to Lawrence O'Donnell, who was a writer and producer on the show, he tried to persuade Lehrer to chair the fictional debate between Santos and Vinick, but his contract wouldn't allow it. However, both Lehrer and the debates commission were intrigued by the unmediated format of the debate and studied the tapes carefully. 

Of course, in the West Wing version, the decision to throw aside the usual debating rules and address each other directly was taken spontaneously by the candidates, rather than determined in advance. What's more, in the fictional version both Santos and Vinick engaged in lively, respectful debate with each other. In the real life version, one candidate (Obama) respectfully acknowledged his opponent's achievements, while the other (McCain) stubbornly refused to use his rival's name or even to look at him. Obama may have inspired the characterisation of Santos, but despite some superficial similarities, John McCain is no Arnie Vinick.

For a full list of parallels between The West Wing and the current election, see also here, here, here and here.

The Secular Conscience

Via Butterflies and Wheels I've just discovered Austin Dacey's blog, The Secular Conscience (strapline: 'Conscience first, before God or government'), which I'll be adding to my blogroll. Dacey is a philosopher who works as a UN representative for the Center for Inquiry. 

The blog is currently reporting on Dacey's and the CfI's sterling efforts at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, against moves to outlaw defamation of religion. His book, The Secular Conscience, was published earlier this year.

David Miliband: man of the peepaw?

Voice coach Luan de Burgh wonders what's happened to David Miliband's voice:

At this year's Labour conference he sounds like Rory Bremner doing Tony Blair. Or, to put it technically, the heir to Blair has abandoned the "dark L". That's not some sinister Labour faction plotting against Gordon Brown but the sound we make when pronouncing words with an "L" towards the end, such as "people".

Listening to a clip from 2002, Miliband is very clear and articulate. Back then, the foreign secretary used all of the consonants. Now, in a speech at the conference and elsewhere, as well as dropping the dark L - so the "L" sound at the end of "people" becomes a "w" sound - he is also dropping "t" from the end of words.

Take "government". In 2002, Miliband pronounced it with three clear syllables and the little "n" - gov-ern-ment. In 2008, Miliband has joined those who replace the "t" on the end with a glotteral stop: it becomes something like "guv-mund".

I don't wish to brag, but you read about it here first. Back in June 2007 I wrote this about Miliband:

There's only one thing I find irritating about him, and that's his habit (copied from his mentor Tony Blair) of affecting an Estuarian tinge to his otherwise copybook RP/Oxbridge accent. This manifests itself most obviously in what we might call 'the nob's glottal stop.' Some years ago, The New Statesman ran a regular feature on 'the nob's pronoun': public figures saying things like 'He told my wife and I' - which were intended to sound extremely correct but were in fact deeply ungrammatical.

The nob's glottal stop has the opposite intention: of making middle-class speakers sound like 'ordinary' folk. So we get hyper-educated politicans like Blair and Miliband talking about the repor' they've just read - all righ'?

De Burgh thinks Miliband is trying too hard to sound like a man of the people (peepaw?) :

These changes are often subconscious but can also be chosen. People often adopt an accent that says, "I'm one of you." I might do it too if a plumber is giving me a quote so they don't assume I'm wealthy. But Miliband risks over-egging the pudding, as you can hear on radio phone-ins such as the Jeremy Vine Show in July, when he said: "We 'ave a role to play."

Of course, trying to sound like members of your audience is a game at which all politicans are adept. During the recent US primary campaign, it was noted that when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama traveled to southern states, their accents also tended to drift southward. But in Britain there's a particular class dimension which means that this kind of imitation risks coming across as condescension. As I wrote last year:

I think it irritates me because I find middle-class people pretending to be working-class affected and patronising, and perhaps because (coming from a working-class background) I spent my childhood being told not to speak like that, if I wanted to get on. If I had to try hard to speak proper, why shouldn't they?

Much as I like the man, it's difficult not to concur with Luan de Burgh's closing words of advice to Miliband: he should be himself - not another Tony Blair.

What would Bartlet do?

A fictional president gives Barack Obama some advice:

GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

You can read the whole Bartlet-Obama interview (via the pen of Aaron Sorkin) here.

A couple more eerie parallels between the Obama-McCain race and the fictional battle between Matt Santos and Arnie Vinick:

In the TV version, the maverick moderate Republican Vinick (sound familiar?) comes under pressure to name a populist rightwinger as his VP, to placate the conservative Christian base.

And the plans of both candidates are threatened, just before the election, by the incumbent president's decision to embark on an expensive foreign war. Vinick: 'There goes my tax cut'. Santos: 'There goes my education plan' (or words to that effect). You can imagine McCain and Obama having to make similar accommodations in the light of Bush's financial bailout.

In praise of...Michael Tomasky

I'm reading Hillary's Turn, Michael Tomasky's account of Mrs. C's campaign for the Senate in 2000. It's a real page-turner, on a par with Bob Woodward's classic The Choice about the 1996 Clinton-Dole race. Even if (like me) you're not a Hillary fan, Tomasky's book offers some fascinating insights into the senatorial election process and some interesting background on the history of New York politics. 

For those who followed the protracted Clinton-Obama struggle earlier this year, there are also some intriguing parallels. It's not just that many of the main players in Clinton's primary campaign - Penn, Wolfson, Ickes et al - cut their teeth in the Senate race (though Hillary was also helped in 2000 by David Axelrod, now Obama's campaign mastermind). Part of the fascination also lies in seeing how the recent campaign inherited many of the faults of the first one. Hillary's 2000 bid was dogged by the same in-fighting among campaign staff, the same problem of what to do about Bill (then, as now, more of a hindrance than a help to his wife's chances), and the same issue of how to get a rather stiff and earnest candidate to come across as warm and empathetic. But Tomasky's book also shows the growth of a candidate, and it's clear that the Hillary who ran for president in 2008 was a smarter and sassier politician than the ingenue who took her first nervous steps in New York in 2000.

One of the most surprising revelations of the book, in retrospect, is that the demographic group whom Hillary had most trouble winning over was white women - precisely the section of the population that in 2008 comprised her most devoted supporters. It's difficult to recall now just how suspicious both middle and working class women were of the then first lady back in the late '90s.

Reading the book has made me want to seek out other work by Tomasky. I was aware before of his articles in the New York Review of Books, and of his excellent coverage of the presidential election for the Guardian. I wasn't aware, though, that he has a reputation as a liberal interventionist. He's written about the problems of the American Left and contributed a chapter to The Fight is for Democracy, edited by George Packer, which I've just got hold of. All credit to the Guardian for appointing someone with Tomasky's views to the editorship of Guardian America, rather than some US proponent of the paper's Milne-Pilger-Steele orthodoxy.