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Fun with Daniel I am posting this clip from Daniel Hannan for no better reason than it has a rather high yum to yawn ratio.
Hannan offers us a spoonful of political wisdom:
“There is one charge against which I’d always defend members of this house, and that’s the widespread belief in many of our members states that MEPs are lazy, that we come here and sit around and do nothing. Frankly the world would be a much better place if that charge were true – if instead of constantly legislating, people would come here and clock in for their very generous attendance allowance and then go and work on their golf handicap, or read a novel, or do something other than meddling in the lives of everybody else.”
And a smidgin of political insult:
“I am being heckled by a sort of lefty yahoo over there who is gibbering and ranting like a stricken animal”
Finally a Monsieur Marias does well in the role of straight man:
I would like to ask the chair to censor this so-called colleague who is insulting the whole house.
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Excellent!
Thank you for sharing this Natalie.
Excellent! Mr. Hannan has hit a nail on its head.
I recently wrote: “I think most people already know, on some level, that laws no longer apply to the people who make them. They don’t like it, but they keep their heads down and muddle along, hoping for a quiet life.”
I think that the same is true of what we have, historically, been prepared to tolerate when it comes to how they perform their so-called jobs. We don’t much like giving them lots of money for doing fuck all and we like it even less when they use their positions to benefit themselves via corruption, but we’ll tolerate even that, as long as they stick to doing fuck all, most of the time.
The current crop (with notable exceptions on both sides of the pond) would appear to have failed to grasp that fact and seem hellbent on fucking everything up for everybody. Tolerance has its limits and this could turn ugly if we don’t find an alternative to the status quo.
So I’m going to dust off an idea from a while back. I’m going to pick a half dozen faithless incumbents and donate to their primary challengers. It doesn’t matter if they’re in my state, or even my country (where legally possible). I’ll start with Paul Nehlen’s challenge to the RINO Ryan, over here. Due to a quirk of law I can also lawfully contribute in the UK, though I’m not sure that the same tactics would work so well over there. Hell, I might even give to a Blue Dog Democrat challenger, if it might help expel one of their more egregious incumbent assholes.
The time is right, I think and it has been right for too long. It’s time to electorally lynch a few, pour encourager les autres. Rinse and repeat, where necessary. It may still be possible to keep a lid on this.
Just be sure that, when you help to expel the EIA, you don’t put in place someone whose vote is going to kill a good USSC nomination, or help a bad one. We can live with a lot of EIAness if it means getting the right SC. That’s really where power is concentrated now in our system.
It’s either a great pity or a last, desperate, hope that you are exactly correct, bobby b. Sometimes, I’m not sure which.
That said, while Dems vote rigidly as a bloc, the blue dogs are more likely to break with that. So I don’t see much risk in replacing a bloc Dem with a blue dog Dem.
I think it possible that you read “the”, where I wrote “their”.
I read it to mean, you’d help a BDD in order to defeat a Republican EIA.
Did you mean, instead, to help a BDD defeat another D in a primary? If so, yeah, I read it wrong.
I meant the latter. “Their” was the operative term.
I had originally written “Hell, I might even give to a Blue Dog Democrat, if it might help expel one of the more egregious incumbent assholes” but noticed the potential for confusion so added “challenger” and changed “the” to “their” in an attempt to avoid it.
Apparently I wasn’t as clear as I thought I was being.
In any case, this is a digression. The important part is the electoral lynchings. Something which can’t go on forever must eventually stop and I, for one, am not much looking forward to what will happen if it stops in a bad way.
The same Daniel Hannan who supports Turkey, whose leader wants Hezbollah, Hamas and the PLO to kill all the Jews in Israel.
Wonder how much Hannan gets from Erdogan a year.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/danielhannan/7913773/The-EU-will-regret-its-dishonest-humiliating-treatment-of-Turkey.html
Maybe he parties with Max Mosley:
https://jalopnik.com/373884/f1-boss-max-mosley-caught-with-five-hookers-in-nazi-orgy-video-scandal?null
C’mon, he wrote that in 2010.
And, looking at what he predicted and what happened, it appears that he nailed it. The EU mightily dissed Erdogan, and a notable portion of the wonderful human being that Erdogan is today stems, I think, from that.
At the same time, the Turkish Army’s obsessive-compulsive habit of interfering in the government will always be a worry. If a government can’t control the armed forces, is it really a government? This would have been the main impediment, to my way of thinking.
Hanan was on to something here. The EU used “Human Rights”, etc. like a scalpel to eviscerate the Ataturk settlement. Once that was gone and the Islamists had control, one never heard talk of “Human Rights” re Turkey again.
This was predictable and was predicted, a long time ago. Sometimes, it sucks to be right.
Under the Ataturk settlement, the only time the Turkish Army was permitted to interfere in government was when Islamists came to power. In that event their duty was to depose the government, hang anybody that needed hanging and call a new election.
With that done and a new government in place, they were to return to barracks. The Turkish Army was the guarantor of secular governance in Turkey. Between them, the EU and Erdogan eliminated that guarantee.
So if the people voted for Islamists, they were to be shown the error of their ways, and told to vote again. So who is really in control?
Not that I have that much invested in defending Turkish history and society, but maybe . . . the Rule of Law is in control in that situation?
Here in the US, 80% of the population could vote by referendum to take some specific act. But if five justices on our Supreme Court ruled that act to be a violation of our Constitution, it would not happen. Clearly that would be an undemocratic result, but it would comply with our law.
Presumably, (and here my knowledge of Kemal Ataturk’s history is deficient), in his sweeping secularization of Turkey, Ataturk was able to place into law provisions that required some sort of supermajority of votes in order to overturn his laws. (Just as our Constitution has a complex and supermajoritarian method for amending it should we so desire.) Even though the population might vote to take certain actions, they could not actually take those actions unless they also successfully set aside those supermajoritarian requirements.
As I said, my education on this aspect of Ataturk is sketchy at best, but this is my memory of that education.
That would be a straightforward conflict between the “rights of the people”, and the rights of actual people. And I’ll pick the rights of actual people every time.
To imply that Hannan is in any way anti-Israel, let alone antisemitic, is beyond ignorant.
Alisa,
I suspect the fact that Dan Hannan is a proper liberal is what offends our friend JG III enough that he is digging up what he thinks is dirt on him, despite the fact that the majority of commentators here are probably not blindly pro-Israel or anti-Muslim-majority country.
Watchman: actually, I suspect nothing of the sort. I do suspect that you know as much about JGIII as he does about Hannan.
I’m with Alisa (une 21, 2017 at 8:58 am) on grounds of the most basic political understanding, not just the evidence she shows. In Britain today, if you want to find anti-semitism, look at the left. For such milder forms as you can find on the right, look at those Tories who think the EU a super idea and our leaving it a tragedy.