popinjays

So that's where that name comes from.

He hosed me with vulgar abuse, saying I was a terminal alcoholic, a 'Trotskyist popinjay'.

Christopher Hitchens on George Galloway at the senate hearing. From hokuula at yabass. Thanks to Will at dstpfw for his link to this weblog.

I've just noticed in their sidebar - Why we are called what we are. I liked Hitchens'  'some of which was unfair.'

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Comments at 'Touched by Bloodless Abstraction'. can take a while to appear. Here is my latest:

Matt, I had about given up my last comment being allowed through, let alone you replying. I don't agree with everything at Harry's: like you, I don't go along with the obsessive secularism. And you may have noticed I did have a 'word' of my own after all on John Berger (He seems to have just one phrase worth mentioning in his pieces these days: for another example, if you can bear to go into that place again, see the link at the end and my comments at the end.) 

But the examples from Orwell's CEJL seemed particularly apposite. Far from being sentimental nostalgia for a time of moral certainty, it is a reminder of the wrong choices that many of the Left intelligentsia made at that time, choices that could have been disastrously wrong if they had had more influence.

I have not dwelt on equivalencies, moral or otherwise, between Hitler and bin Laden, though I do think the points about appeasement are relevant today.

Your remark about 'being a parrot for Newt Gingrich' is unworthy: I don't know what basis you have for saying this.

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  Actually, it's appeared straightaway this time. 

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Comments here too (on Khanabad). HP's Monitoring Bush: doing the right thing on Uzbekistan has comments from Craig Murray himself. Another interesting site -  Mcb watch, from the list of signatories at UAT.