Monday, May 23, 2005

The Art Of Politics

Personally, I quite like George Galloway – he strikes me as an honest Liberal, and you don’t see many of them, but witnessing the Left’s reaction to George Galloway’s performance in Washington just made me wish I had shares in Kleenex or Vision Express. So this is what the Left considers to be success ? Honestly – if Galloway had keyed Senator Levin’s car on the way out, it would have been no less coherent and no more obnoxious, than the rest of his performance.

Galloway is a true hero for the modern Left: morally compromised, self-obsessed and obnoxious, but most of all vacuous. What, after all, is the point of all that ranting ? Yes, Galloway hates the US, Britain, Western Civilisation, Conservatives, Jews et al but listen to him for any length of time and it becomes obvious that he doesn’t have an actual point.

Modern Liberalism is much like modern art with Liberal debate as the intellectual equivalent of making a crucifix out of human faeces. Sure, there are still some folks, like the saintly Frank Field, still resolutely painting pictures of horses and the like, but it is maroons like Galloway who are the authentic voice of the modern Left.

The real take-home message from Galloway’s Senate holiday is a reassuring one for Conservatives. The thing about modern art is that every time the public has the chance to pay good money for a portrait of the Queen made from semen, they buy another horse picture. Doubtless, the Metropolitan trendies are shocked – shocked! – at the ignorance of Joe Public, still relentlessly buying horse pictures - and after all these years of fashionistas screeching at them for being so philistine. So it is with politics, which is why even today the Labour Party has to outsource its policies to bureaucrats (see here for an example).

Let the Left’s media boosters slobber over Galloway’s courage and indefatigability The Left is spinning down into the kind of incestuous self-coddling elite that regards jetting off to the US to be rude to people as a useful substitute for policy. Shock value and offensiveness are taking the place of coherency. History shows the media couldn’t sell the public on the artistic merits of sliced up cows, and they won’t be able to sell them on the benefits of free holidays for child molesters.

No, this isn’t support for the stupid ‘one more push’ idea. There is plenty wrong with the Conservative Party, but the basic principles are sound. Yes, they’re plenty of idiots who’ll slobber over a portrait of the Pope made out of pubic hair, but the Great British Public just wants a nice picture of a horse.

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