What the Papers Say (or don't)

It’s a pretty impressive feat to write an 800 or so word article without actually saying anything, but Bruce Anderson has managed it in today’s Daily Telegraph.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/08/16/do1601.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/08/16/ixopinion
Still, I suppose we should be happy that Anderson hasn’t expressed an opinion, because when he does it’s normally an obnoxious, bloodthirsty one- like his enthusiasm for bombing whoever the USAF has in its sights at the time or his hopes for death (equine and human) in the Grand National:
“it is important that a horse should be killed most years and a jockey every ten years or so. The rest of us should not deplore the loss. We should salute the bravery“.

Meanwhile in the Times, our old friend Stephen Pollard castigates leftists for their hero-worship of Fidel Castro: ‘one of the longest-standing abusers of human rights on the planet'. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2314816,00.html
Let’s leave aside the hero-worship of Stephen’s favourite post-war Prime Minister for that charming, human-rights respecting democrat Auguste Pinochet, and instead raise a glass to the fact that throughout the whole of his article Stephen failed to mention the name ‘Slobodan Milosevic’ once. Could it be that he has finally acknowledged that a man who won three democratic elections in a multi-party system cannot be called a ‘dictator’. And that in the total absence of any credible evidence, he can’t be called a ‘butcher’ or ‘mass murderer’ either. If so, it’s welcome news.

Finally, I couldn’t help but smile at the Independent’s front page today, which seeks to castigate the government for ‘3023 new offences’ introduced since 1997. One of those new offences (and in my view, the least defensible) is the fascistic ban on smoking in public places which will come into effect in England one year from now. And it’s a law change which the ‘liberal’ Independent, enthusiastically supported. I bet they supported some of the others too.