2/04/2005|||110747505889602681||||||

MISSING THE POINT, AGAIN

The visual field of the smart-thinking classes is now so seeped in red whenever the American President speaks that there is not the least possibility any longer that they will faithfully report what he has said. They simply use it as another opportunity to promote their own caricature of him.

Gerard Baker, in today's Times.

If you wanted an illustration of the chattering classes' myopia, you only had to listen to historian Michael Wood's analysis of the Iraq conflict on BBC1's politics show, This Week. Wood is one of the best talking heads on TV, and he seems a thoroughly good guy. All the more startling, then, to find that his take on Bush and the war was about as grown-up and sophisticated as an average chapter of Stupid White Men. As far as Wood was concerned, it was all one big superpower plot: the US had no intention of building democracy; oil provided the real motive. Michael Portillo very politely shot him down in flames during the studio discussion that followed. It was a revealing moment. Wood is typical of so many left-of-centre pundits. Rather than do anything as onerous as listening to what Bush has been saying for the past four years, they prefer simple-minded conspiracies. Depressing, really. By the way, Wood's new TV series is called In Search of Myths and Heroes. Very apt, I would say.

|||Clive|||http://clivedavis.blogspot.com/2005/02/missing-point-again-visual-field-of.html|||2/04/2005 04:43:00 pm|||||||||

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