Row, row, row the boat...

The Brown devaluation

Convention thinking?

For the last few days I have been reading and watching such as the BBC dutifully trot out, much as they did the 'bad form on a boat', the odd notion that there is a 'convention' that certain things are 'not done'.

Such as mentioning, by way of some balance to the 'nothing to see here, and if there was it's all O....k' mantras (issued by the government and parroted from press release by 'journalists' and 'editors' who are clearly too busy with budget cuts to worry about 'reporting' facts - host and guests on the Andrew Marr show still in blissful, if ironic agreement as to Mrs. Palin's grasp of things as evidenced by her 'thinking Africa was a country'. I suspect some guests the BBC could have invited...selected on at whim and less keen toe the party line might have pointed out to a news editor how this notion came about and was so enthusiastically embraced by those who think it's OK even if it didn't happen... 'as it's something she might have said') all sides of the argument, possibly including non-partisan notions from those involved who might understand economics and care about country before career.

I knew the politico-media establishment was an old-boys (and young Blair/Brown babes) inter-marrying club, and I now know it is about as corrupt as it's possible to get, but it astounds me that the level of in-breeding has led to such arrogance as to presume that their stupid attempts at fobbing the public with such blatant and irrelevant distractions to the evidence of our own eyes is going to work. It's either a fact or not. It's either what is or isn't. It is either right or wrong. It's either parliamentary process or it isn't. Not some school playground 'thing' that gets conjured up when one party says so... especially as it is most likely dropped like a hot potato when they are on the wrong end of the logic subsequently.

Maybe it's just like the last days of the Reich and those in denial are simply partying like it's 1945 in the Bunkers. Or they know something we don't about how getting the 'right' vote result can and will be engineered.

Maybe the plan is to add a few more million 'lesson-learning' Civil servants, quango-crats and BBC researchers/commissioning editors to the payroll to ensure that if obvious questions do get asked, and essential statements do get made, no one who needs to know outside the bubble actually gets to hear them raised. Or if they do, the author's credibility is first 'shaped' to put anything they do say in a special kind of 'context'.

It's one thing to be sold down the river. But it's insult to injury to be funding through tax or fee the acceleration to the rapids (instead of investing in lifebelts) by adding more opinion-heavy, over-influential dead-weights as ballast, to make the productive population's efforts at paddling against the tide even more difficult.

Daily Mail - For years he made fun of the absurd, gold-plated public sector jobs in the Guardian. As unemployment in the REAL world heads for 3m, Littlejohn's patience runs out

Newsnight -

Gaurdian - In a crisis calling for big ideas, Osborne is woefully lacking