I remember turning on CNN last year or the year before — more than once — and seeing Sully and Hitch discuss this or that (with no one else there except the CNNbot) about American politics. What the fuck? What would these limeys know about American politics? (In fairness, Sully’s take on how Obama operates is dead on, IMHO.)
I mention this because this weekend I met up with an English colleague of mine who a) thought Democrats should nominate Zell Miller or at least make him VP in 2000, b) thought Bush would be a better president than Gore during the 2000 election, and c) thought that Bush would lose by the widest margin in the history of American politics in 2004. Despite this (all of which he now admits was wrong), he continues to predict various silly things — that Republicans will find their “own Obama” in the next presidential election or two, for example. This is someone who is probably a bit to the left of me politically and is undeniably brilliant in many ways.
What’s a bit hard to describe is how eerily similar his analyses are to Hitch and/or Sully. There’s the inexplicable hatred of Hillary Clinton. There’s the fixation with whether or not various candidates are good people. There’s the complete inability to understand how the contemporary Republican party operates (i.e., that it’s run by lunatics who would fuck up any administration, regardless of what a “good man” John McCain is).
So, what gives with all of this? Why do we have so many English people over here commenting on our politics? Why do they understand it so poorly? And why do they think they understand it to begin with? My guess is that the common language creates the illusion of a similar system but that the reality is that there are almost no similarities between our system and theirs.
General Winfield Stuck
Only cause they are our closest relatives. What we don’t get here in our little water locked empire, is the fact that the rest of the world watches every move we make, and frets when it looks like we’re running off the rails. That”s mostly because our economic behemoth affects them all in a serious way. That and our superpower military can upset the worlds apple cart when a knucklehead presnit gets an itch to blow shit up.
They hate and adore us, and depend on us in many ways, but mostly, recently, they fear us and our imperial impulses and sometimes economic recklessness.
soonergrunt
There’s also the trope that won’t die–the idea that because someone has a british accent, or in particular a Cambridge accent that somehow they’re smarter than everyone else about whatever subject about which they happen to pontificate.
amorphous
Is there one of his posts/articles that sums this up succinctly? I read (ok, skim) Sully, so I think I get the gist of it, but that would help.
Also, GREAT FUCKING FIRST HALF, MIZZOU. EXCELLENT CHOICE FOR A HOMECOMING GAME.
jl
I know Brits, and have talked with many more, who are not like this at all.
I think the Brits even have a term for this kind of person: twit. The famous news program, Monte Python, has some important investigation into the twit phenomenon, and I suggest you check them out on youtube or the Monte Python site.
‘Twit’ is a British syndrome, mental disorder, call it what you will, but it can also be summarized as the ‘The Economist’ disease. This kind of glib, ‘always wrong but never in doubt’ type of thinking took over The Economist some time ago. I think it is incurable.
We have them in America too, though not sure what they shuold be called. I think some glibertarians are really the US version of the English twit.
J Bean
For about a week after the 2004 election, I was in a real state about Sully. I had seen him on Maher’s show and for a week I kept shaking my head and mumbling, “He just doesn’t understand”. He claimed that the Kerry campaign and Democrats in general had been disrepectful of the religious and that they had just needed to reach out to them. He seemed to think that our evangelicals are similar to nice Anglicans instead of knuckle dragging, mouth breathing, science denying, maniacs who would like nothing better than to beat Sully to a bleeding pulp and leave him to die draped over a snow covered fence.
It’s a cultural thing. They think they understand because they speak the language. They also think we are our stereotypes.
jl
Here you go, Monty Python Upper Class Twit Olympics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5ba1OKY7Xc
There are middle class and lower class twits as well.
DougJ
I know Brits, and have talked with many more, who are not like this at all.
Were they English, though? I find that when I talk to people from GB who are reasonable this way, they are usually Welsh or Scottish.
Brascal
This is really quite unique. I am a brazilian and we don’t import Portuguese pundits to dissect the nuances of our society. Pretty much any brazilian would find the idea humorous to the extreme.
Keep in mind that our break with Portugal was far more friendly and than the one between the Us and the UK.
DougJ
I am a brazilian and we don’t import Portuguese pundits to dissect the nuances of our society. Pretty much any brazilian would find the idea humorous to the extreme. Keep in mind that our break with Portugal was far more friendly and than the one between the Us and the UK.
This is a very interesting point.
dr. bloor
@jl:
I’ll take “Cable teevee pundits” for $400, Alex.
J in WA
I’ve spent a lot of time all over Europe, including stints living the expat life in Germany and Italy. In all that time, I was never able to figure out the English. It’s like their thought processes were just completely foreign to my American mind. And you’re right, DougJ, it’s just the English and not British folk in general: I’ve had some riotously good times with Scots.
Curiously, it’s been my experience time and again that the culture closest to that in the USA are the Germans. I might not always agree with them, but at least I get where their coming from most of the time.
J in WA
Oh god. “They’re,” not “their.” I just committed grammar horror.
Cat Lady
It’s their Parliamentarian model that trips them up. Their crazies get seats now and again and as a result they’re easily marginalized. Here it’s binary, and the crazies have to go all in to be represented.
jl
@DougJ: Well, all Anglo-Saxon cultures are completely mad, including the US. IMHO, the Welsh, Scots, English and Americans are all mad in their own special and precious ways.
Aussies and Kiwis are less prone to madness in my experience, maybe the long commute has culled out some of the insane.
I am German/Irish/French so am completely objective, utterly impartial, and hundred percent accurate in my judgment on this topic!
Except I am also part Scots, but they were the border people, and were culturally more primative by several thousand years than their neighbors, and I have decided that bit does not count for the purposes of this comment.
But, yes, I know, and have spoken with the English species who are not twits at all. You must have had the ill luck to move in English twit circles recently. Do you deal with the Brit governing class. That has been dominated by twits since Thatcher, and is only slowly changing.
I deal mostly with math and science and medical Brits, many from England.
eemom
I don’t know the answers to your good questions, but I do know that on Friday C-Span was broadcasting a “convention” of some collection of right wing lunatics who go by the name “Accuracy In Media” or some such…….and a lot of the speakers were from other English speaking countries.
There was in particular this one godawful freak from New Zealand, with an accent like the screech of nails on blackboard, who’s written a book that he promises will expose all of “Barrick Obamer’s” nefarious connections with the Chicago Communist Party and assorted other haters of America.
My first thought was, WTF?? Haven’t we got enough of these lunatics here already without IMPORTING them?
The better question though is why the fuck C-Span was broadcasting this bullshit. I guess the International Convention of Earthlings Who Were Abducted by UFO’s turned them down.
Jane2
Talk about anecdotal…you take the two..good old Sully and Hitch…so familiar to bloggers that they’re only referred to by their bloggy nicknames, add someone you know, and draw some broad conclusions that aren’t borne out by your huge sample of three.
Not so sure that many American pundits understand their country any better than non-American commentators…choose any night on any of the three cable news networks for example. I’d take a Hitchens opinion any day, agree with it or not.
blahblahblah
Oh, oh! Watch out, there’s an angry bear on the loose!
Jennifer
@J Bean: It’s partly a cultural thing, but it’s also partly that yes, our systems are that different.
Their system is not the winner-take-all system we have. One consequence is that parties in their system don’t really even have the opportunity to go as off-the-rails as our Republicans have – they can never amass enough power to do it. In a parliamentary system, the recent Republican majority wouldn’t have allowed the latitude in governance that it does in our system – the majority was too thin for that. Also under their system, it’s hard for a party with any power to go too fringe – the only way they have any power is acting in coalition, which in itself tends to moderate extremism.
As for how one of their governments “falls”, I can’t even begin to understand the basic mechanics of it even with all the reading I’ve done. The most I’ve been able to gather is that when enough of the MPs give a vote of “no confidence” in the current PM’s government, then they have to call election, and that it often has occured over dissatisfaction with the current government’s position on a big defining issue – Irish independence, conduct of war, etc etc. But it seems it can also occur because of an accumulation of dissatisfaction over more mundane issues. Under the British system, George Bush wouldn’t have survived past 2005 and perhaps not beyond 2003 or 04 – and that’s only if he had ever taken office. How they handle plurality votes etc I have no idea.
Carlo
Whatever else his faults, I’m fairly certain Sully (now) knows that the GOP is run by lunatics.
Also, Sully, Hitch and your colleague do not equal “so many English people”. In any case, I’m sure millions of people from Europe and the rest of the world simply enjoy having opinions about American politics, and the odds are a significant fraction will be dead wrong. (The same could be said about American opinions on American politics!)
Keith G
Because they talk purdy and that gives them a pass. Many Brit pundants are just god awlful. Its almost as if they do not even try to understand what’s actually going on.
Rory Stewart is an absolute exception, though he is an activist – academic.
Robin G.
Americans would do the same to Britain if they were remotely interested in anything outside the lower 48 (and Wasilla). Some do anyway.
Also, the “inexplicable hatred of Hillary Clinton”… well, misogyny can cross all political lines (though of course it’ll always find its warmest embrace in the bosom of the GOP). Obviously not all people who don’t like Hillary are misogynists, but in my personal experience, people of the type you’re describing — “a bit to the left of me politically and … undeniably brilliant in many ways” — who seem to have no rational explanation for their HRC-hate, tend to not be too wild about women in general. Like I said, in my personal experience.
Keith G
@jl:
Perhaps, but there also is some rather vitriolic racism down there as well.
Minionero
Doug, you are way off base on Sullivan. Have you read him in the past four or five years? Every day brings another declaration of how the GOP is morally and intellectually bankrupt and run by a gang of incompetent thugs.
Also, can you name anyone other than “Sully and Hitch” who are prominent English commentators on American politics?
In other words, what Carlo said.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
The answer is simple.
Because of the common language and ostensible common heritage, British commentators are fooled in thinking that the key motivating factors in British/American politics are the same and that the players are the same, just with different names/accents (Republicans=Tories, Thatcher=Reagan, etc).
This is profoundly untrue. Our history as a frontier, racially diverse country has imprinted unique characteristics on American liberalism and conservativism (southern strategy), and a unique kind of know-nothing populism on our politics.
Notice that commentators from other countries never seem to make the mistake of assuming the Republicans are “basically good guys” (particularly the French). This is because they aren’t fooled by a superficial cultural similarity.
DougJ
Also, Sully, Hitch and your colleague do not equal “so many English people”.
Tony Blankley, that woman who’s on the MTP every week whose name I can’t remember, Niall Ferguson, that’s just off the top of my head. It’s probably 10% of the punditocracy.
Mark S.
Eh, both Sully and Hitch have been here for decades and they cover politics for a living so I don’t buy the whole “They’re seeing things through an English lens.” I’d like to think if I lived in say, Australia, for twenty years and paid a lot of attention to politics over there, I wouldn’t be misinterpreting everything through an American lens.
jl
I forgot about the Canadaians, but as an native born US-ian, that is the done thing, to forget about them, except for Monty Python Mounted Polic sketches. So my commment stands as is.
Xecky Gilchrist
Why do they understand it so poorly?
Hell, it doesn’t make any sense to me, and I’ve lived in the U.S. all my life and been more or less politically active for over 20 years.
DougJ
Every day brings another declaration of how the GOP is morally and intellectually bankrupt and run by a gang of incompetent thugs
Took him long enough, don’t you think? And by the standards of this place, I’m a Sully apologist.
DougJ
Notice that commentators from other countries never seem to make the mistake of assuming the Republicans are “basically good guys” (particularly the French). This is because they aren’t fooled by a superficial cultural similarity.
Yes, exactly!
Comrade Kevin
If you want to hear ridiculous, laughable British commentary on the USA, you need to be able to see their domestic TV news programs.
Comrade Kevin
Mind you, most American commentary on the USA on the TV here is laughable as well.
jl
@DougJ: Well, OK if you are talking about the English that appear in the corporate mass media US punditocracy, then you are talking about the English pundictocracy as filtered by the US punditocracy -what do you expect? They would be irritating nuts who are usually wrong and never in doubt.
Any foreign group filtered by the US corporate mass media punditocracy will have the same qualifications that they use for themselves; complete lack of conscience and shame, and no self-awareness and only rudimentary ability at critical analysis and only when triggered by self interest, or obviously immediate requirements of self-preservation.
Comrade Mary
@jl: You may not see us at all, jl, but we see right through you guys.
(Oh, the subtleties of the English language …)
jl
BTW, I don’t think the Question Time show with the racist BNPer Griffin was dominated by twits.
Anyone can see the show here and judge for yourself.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/question_time/default.stm
Linkmeister
@jl:
Self-aggrandizement, you mean.
Tattoosydney
@DougJ:
Re:
We Australians don’t import Brits to comment about our politics either, and our break up with Great Britain was friendlier and more recent as well… I suspect it’s purely an American thing – Any Brit who felt he could come over here prognosticating and fawferawing like Sully does to you lot would quickly be put to rights by the number of full beer cans lobbed at his head.
AhabTRuler
I’m surprised no one has come up with the “two people separated by one language” quote yet.
jl
@Comrade Mary: You Canadian? Hmmmph!
We will never forgive the Canadians for not surrending immediately when our mighty forces invaded them (oops, kindly offered to liberate them) during the War of 1812.
The sheer ingratitude!
AhabTRuler
Dear god I love Australians!
General Winfield Stuck
That’s because there the French didn’t have Tory colonists bitching about all that independence prattle. They were taking there good sweet time sailing over to help us out. It’s the now British tories that get put on page one by our now wingnut ex tories. That bond was never completely broken it seems.
Xecky Gilchrist
@AhabTRuler: Dear god I love Australians!
Likewise. Any people forthright enough to call sausages “mystery bags” has something cool going on.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tattoosydney: Wouldn’t that be a waste of perfectly good beer? I suppose you could round up the dented cans and drink them later.
kth
The English journalists are just like the Beltway press, their experience of America confined mainly to New York and Washington. If it is possible, they have even less familiarity with just how batshit crazy it is in Dallas or Tulsa than a Washington-bound American reporter. As such, they tend to take conservative rhetoric at face value, and to be deaf to the racism and nativism which are the real nature of the conservative movement.
If one of these English would cover a Senate campaign in Oklahoma or Alabama, it would be quite an eye-opener for him.
jl
@Tattoosydney: I have to say, I like the way Australians handle certain situations. I assume you would shake the can and spray the dude first.
Maybe the US still has some kind of cultural inferiority complex. We give distinguished foreign pundits and sundry know-it-alls all sorts of credit they often do not deserve.
On other hand, I am sure there is a mighty filtering process in the US regarding which foreign savants are allowed to be broadcast to the masses. The whole spectrum of opinion and analysis from slightly left-off-center onwars is simply censored, IMHO.
How often do you see a scholar from Iran or any Middle Eastern country offer an opinion on one of the big network or cable shows? It is always some US or Brit who is deemed by some corporate hack to be an expert.
Anyway, good for the Australians and Brazilians. I think they show more common sense than we do here in the US.
Tattoosydney
@Jennifer:
Um. It kind of is… the party that wins a majority of seats in parliament (read: Congress) gets to run the government – Prime Minster and all of the seats in Cabinet.
The difference is that the House of Lords in the UK (being unelected) and the upper houses in Australia and Canada (elected but with a tendency to have minor parties represented – unlike the US) tend to act as houses of review, and put limits on the way the government exercises power.
Not really – there haven’t been any real coalition governments in the UK or Australia for a very long time. It’s more that the government needs the votes of minor parties on particular issues to get their legislation passed through the upper house (see above).
We have elections every couple of years the same as you – the difference is that the government gets to choose when the election is held, within certain limits. The party that gets the most seats at the election wins government. While the mechanism you have mentioned for early elections where the government has lost the confidence of the house exists, it hasn’t been used for a very long time as far as I am aware in either the UK or Australia.
Tattoosydney
@Omnes Omnibus:
’tis true. We’d actually be more likely to call them a “fucking pommy dickhead”, then go on with our drinking and ignore them.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tattoosydney: Sounds more like the Aussies I’ve known.
Tattoosydney
@jl:
We also both have a proud tradition of making bad soap operas and exporting them back to the mother country as revenge (Britain/Portugal).
jl
@Tattoosydney: I especially like the Australian modes of expression: carefully suited to each occasion as appropriate, but to the point and concise. We need more lingo like that on our TV talkshows here in the US.
Tom Q
Hitchens’ and Sullivan’s Hillary-hatred of course came from different angles. For Hitchens, the Clintons were betrayers because they went Third Way, rather than being full-out Old Labour-ites. And once Hitch starts hating someone’s politics, he quickly descends to viewing the person as Satan. Sullivan, on the other hand, initially liked the Clintons for being Third Way, but was disappointed that didn’t end up being slightly lighter Thatcherism.
Sullivan’s real problem, as several have alluded, is he presumed because Reagan and Thatcher were such international kissing cousins that they must reflect more or less the same ideological/cultural traditions. Thus, he started hanging out with the hanger-on Reaganites, most of whom despised the Clintons beyond life itself, and alot of that transferred itself to Sullivan.
It’s true that Sullivan now recognizes what a loony bin the GOP right is, but the evidence was plenty plain in the 90s when Dan Burton was shooting up watermelons and impeachments were staged over blow jobs. Not to mention, as far back as the Goldwater campaign, and the more successful Reagan run. (I know Reagan cultivated that benign smiley image once he was president, but in his climbing-up years he was as nasty as any rightie, and his supporters were the same nut-jobs doing all the screaming today) As others have said, Sullivan seems to have been either ignorant of or willfully blind to all of this for a long time. It’s nice that he finally sees it, but it doesn’t make him the best person to make judgments on our current path.
Elizabelle
Never mind the English. What about George Will?
Newest Hiatt-pleasin’ WaPost column: The Bachmann Burr
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..03193.html
“Some of her supposed excesses are, however, not merely defensible, they are admirable.”
Joseph McCarthy was probably nice to his cat. Or someone.
Brick Oven Bill
England is fucked because all the smart ones went to America, and all the street fighters were deported to Australia. Fortunately, some of the street fighters were not stupid.
Behold the Tea Bagger.
Jim C
@jl:
The Pythons covered the cluelessness well in their “Election Night Special” sketch:
Election Night Special
I’ve always thought the main impetus for using British pundits is all about the “cultured” accent – the rubes think they’re wise and smart, just listen to them talk!
Omnes Omnibus
It’s nowhere near as good as “Nevermind the Bullocks…”
Raincitygirl
Yeah, and then we kindly offered to liberate your White House from its fire insurance policy. How did that work out for you guys?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ety2FEHQgwM&feature=related
The Other Steve
Do you think maybe Sully and Hitch have a problem differentiating British politics from American?
Tattoosydney
@Brick Oven Bill:
We got all of the criminals, BoB – not just the streetfighters. We got thieves and sodomites and murderers and forgers and all sorts, plus the soldiers who were sent to guard them. Then we got thousands of gold diggers (including hundreds from the US) during our gold rush. Then we got millions of refugees from wars in Europe and Asia.
And somehow our society is still a hundred times less fucked up than yours…
The Moar You Know
Sullivan has lived here a long time. At this point it’s just willful ignorance; he thinks he’s a conservative, but chooses not to accept the reality that most American conservatives would happily blow his brains out if they thought they could get away with it. Of course, I’m not sure that I could accept that half of a given nation’s population would want to kill me if they could, either – it sure would make it impossible for me to continue living there.
Punchy
HAWKS WIN! HAWKS WIN! suck it, MSU! Most amazing win evah for my hawkeyes.
Punchy +8.
Ohhhhh……….yeah!
toujoursdan
@Keith G:
I lived in New Zealand for several years. They are much less racist than Americans are. You’d hear comments about “darkies” from time to time but there is much less real institutional discrimination than in the States. The Maoris got the best deal of any native people in any land overrun by white people. They are recovering some of the land stolen from them, Maori is an official language, there are two Maori TV stations (in a country that only has a dozen TV stations in total on satellite and cable) and there are guaranteed Maori seats in parliament.
And Australia and New Zealand are very different places with very different people. They are as far apart from each other as London is from Tunisia. Don’t confuse them. It offends people on both sides of the Tasman.
OriGuy
@Omnes Omnibus:
They’d probably use Fosters; the only other thing to do with it is exporting to North America. God forbid Australians drink that shite!
Comrade Kevin
Foster’s: It’s Australian for Budweiser!
Elizabelle
Omnes:
re bollocks: there’s a wiki for that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks
Including a variation relating to technology:
“Dog’s Bollocks Syndrome” can be used to describe an excessive use of technology or visual aid, such as in an enormous use of Flash animations on a website. It is derived from the question: “Why do dogs lick their bollocks?” (answer: “Because they can”). In a technological context, the question could be “Why has the web developer included a three-minute animated intro to this page?”, prompting the response: “Dog’s Bollocks Syndrome, mate. Because he can”.
(I know. Only marginally related to the topic. But started wondering, what IS a bollock … and God Save the Sex Pistols.)
jeffreyw
General Winfield Stuck, you still around? You gotta see this.
jeffreyw
wearable hummingbird feeder
jl
@Raincitygirl:
“Yeah, and then we kindly offered to liberate your White House from its fire insurance policy. How did that work out for you guys?”
That is the principal reason we do not invite Canadian pundits onto our prestige freedom and justice loving big media programs, unless they show big wuv to the GOP and wingnuts point of view.
If a Canadian pundit is willing to hate on his/her own country and warn us of the Dire Consequences of departing from GOP thought, then they are OK and wholesome.
Comrade Kevin
@jl:
For example, David Frum.
Brick Oven Bill
If I were gay TattooSydney, you would no longer know your last name.
Australia was most definitely founded on strength. Murray has it in him, Greg I don’t know, but the guy I would turn to in times of trouble would most definitely be Anthony.
I am completely serious that if these guys want to make a risky but very smart investment, Brick Oven Bill is the way to go.
Look me up. I have a web-site. A degree. A wanker.
PeakVT
One thing to note is that most of the British expat pundits are conservative. I think they come here because they realize they will never be comfortable in the much more “so-cial-ist” UK political system.
Omnes Omnibus
@Elizabelle: Testiculation is a term that has just made it into my vocab. thanks.
fraught
It’s the fragmented remnants of their centuries of colonialism and imperialism which still have not absented themselves from their genetic make up and which impel them to believe that they understand us and our systems better than we do and that they would be better at running our things than we would because, after all, they have ownership of the patent which invented us.
Their academic traditions, lights in an unlit world, still wired with dried out old rubber coated copper sheathed in weaved silk, convinced them that the geographic center of Western thought is just there, a bit north of London. Note how often sully posts about obscure British political to-dos to the amusement or interest of approximatly none of his followers, giggling with glee or tsking with dismay, all the while assuming that we are impressed at his facility to follow the doings of two empires at the exact same time. It’s why they are here, after all, to tut-tut in our ears that we are young. And they have the wisdom of the ages to impart to us.
Elizabelle
I am now thinking Glen “Bollocks” Beck.
He kind of fits the testiculation example, and is so sloppy at research he will just assume we’ve praised his manliness.
Comrade Kevin
@fraught: That’s some serious resentment, coupled with an inferiority complex.
Ed Marshall
@Comrade Kevin:
I always heard it as “Fosters: Australian for Americans will drink any fucking piss”.
Comrade Kevin
@Ed Marshall: and that is different from what I said, how, exactly?
Anya
@Minionero: Tina Brown, Neil Ferguson and the list of racists fox interviews every now and again. Just read Tina Brown’s ridiculous article about how Obama is turning Hilary into his Saudi wife – I kid you not or Neil Ferguson’s ludicrous article about how Obama reminds him of Felix the Cat (they’re both black and lucky). They all con people with their British accents. Also, I sometimes feel like they want America to carry on the imperial legacy of Briton (o.k. not Sully). I actually believe Hitchins actually said that he came to USA because Briton was weak and he was attracted to America’s strength.
Having said that, I think they are all citizen’s of this country (except Ferguson) and they deserve to have a voice, even if they were wrong.
Ed Marshall
@Comrade Kevin:
Functionally, none.
AlanDownunder
Deport Richard Quest while you’re at it.
The reason your news media features screwy pommies is merely that screwiness is a prerequisite for most any US media job.
Hitchens and Sullivan are no more spot off than your average indegenous US pundit.
The real problem is that the average foreign anglophone is more aware of what’s wrong with the US, and why, than is the average US voter.
Raincitygirl
It’s alright, Kevin. You guys can KEEP David Frum. And his wife. They’ve been living south of the border for so long now they’re practically Americans anyway. Besides, we don’t want them back. You can keep Mark Steyn too. Also Rachel Marsden.
Hann1bal
@jl: I presume that the exception that proves the rule would be Frumkins.
Omnes Omnibus
@Raincitygirl: Do.Not.Want.
Yutsano
@Raincitygirl: Fair enough, but just so you know we’re keeping Rachel Maddow too.
Comrade Kevin
@Yutsano: ? Rachel Maddow is from California.
jl
@AlanDownunder: Yes, exactly, that was my main point.
Anything and anybody you see on most US big corporate news machines, whether network or cable, are heavily filtered for acceptable thought, which is, by the standards of the rest of the civilized high per capita income world, always aimed at corporate-friendly social engineering.
When moderate liberal to moderately progressive people like Maddow, Olbermann and Ed (whoever he is, I have only seen a few clips) are pilloried as extreme leftists, ‘sick puppies’ and the equivalent of Glen Beck and Limbaugh, that should tell you right off that only a narrow range of reactionary to center-right viewpoints is permitted on most US news and opinion shows.
If cultural tastes change in the US, they might in the future be from China, Japan, India, NZ, Australia, Portugal, Tonga, Denmark, wherever, they would be required to say the same kind of thing or they would disappear quickly enough.
And BTW, George Will is for all practical purposes, a self-styled Englishman. He is heroically attempting to continue an older English traditon of public intellectual: conservative humbug thinking great thoughts and reflecting deeply, from his country estate.
Steeplejack
@DougJ:
And why do we have them punditizing on our TVs? Are we all hyp-mo-tized by a British accent? That’s what I think.
Metatron
Well here’s at least one Brit whose analysis of US politics is quite dissimilar to those of Hitchens or Sullivan. How about you dash me a little moon_bat welf _are and get me a platform from which to provide some balance? I have a politics BA, and I talk pretty.
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
Damn, soonergrunt in ahead of me. I really should a comment or two before contributing to an hours-old thread. But it was new to me.
jl
@AlanDownunder: Though, you emphasize the screwiness, I emphasize the underlying ideological conformity required.
AhabTRuler
In DC I can heave a brick and hit a dozen…
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
Can a brother get some motherfuckin’ edit up in here?! FYWP.
Comrade Kevin
I think you mean a politics BS.
jhh
I am by American, but am also naturalized Australian, and have lived in France, Japan, and Russia. I think I can guess why intelligent Brits like Andrew Sullivan have made such glorious misjudgements about US politics (his batting average is improving, by the way).
It does start with the tradition of British (and Commonwealth) parliamentary government, which has several prominent features:
1. Open debate with generally recognized rules about what constitutes fact and reality. The weekly Question Time in the UK and Commonwealth countries exposes the prime minister and his front benchers to direct questions in public venue, with the Speaker keeping order as to what constitutes proper questions and adequate responses. In Australia, a government minister who knowingly misleads Parliament is by tradition forced to resign. Such a system would have quickly disposed of most of the Bush Cabinet, and Cheney. The inarticulate Bush would almost certainly not survived the Parliamentary debates in the first place.
2. A Whitehall system of powerful, professional Permanent Secretaries who keep the state from going off the rails in the hands of willful and ignorant politician ministers. During election campaigns, the controls gov’t passes to caretakers who keep politicians from selling the gov’t to win elections. And by the way, there is a news blackout on polls the last weeks before elections in Australia.
People who grow up with such a system reasonably expect that political discourse will be conducted in good faith, that all sides will get a fair hearing, that participants will tell the truth as they see it, and that the professionals in government will guide and implement policy prudently and rationally.
And so, in the 1990s the then rather naive immigrant Andrew Sullivan was taken in by Betsy McCaughey, a smart woman from a poor background who got a PhD, but was nevertheless little more than a gold digger who married money and became a suburban GOPer housewife keen to protect the privileges of those whose status she aspired to. She wrote a fact-challenged work (probably for hire) that he published in the New Republic, which he thought was a good thing to stimulate open debate by reasonable people. Of course, since this is America, not Britain, it was amplified into an anti health reform campaign by the (then) nascent right wing media interests, and in retrospect Andrew looks to have been a Tory Twit taken in by classic American swindlers, it is right out of Huckleberry Finn.
In 2001, Andrew,by now eager to assimilate into his adopted country, similarly swallowed the Bushies’ lies about Iraq and terrorism hook, line and sinker, calling anyone who questioned them a fifth columnist, ie a traitor. A second Tory Twit moment.
Andrew is gay, and HIV+ to boot. But it took him years to understand that the right wingers whose policies he supported were not just indifferent to homosexual rights, they actively wanted people like him to hurry up and die for their sins.
What finally pulled the switch for him seems to have been the issue of gay marriage. The roar of the entire GOP braying that granting this basic right to gay people would “destroy the institution of marriage” seems to have been the proverbial blow to the side of the head. He also finally realized that the GOPers were in fact serious about denying people like him the right to live in the US (his visa was coming up for renewal).
Since then he has mostly pushed back against the wingnuts, who he finally understands are essentially the reincarnation of the French Jacobins and the Russian Bolsheviks—not interested in anything but amassing power. But the fact is, he was for over a decade a Useful Idiot in their hands.
There are plenty of others like him. Some, like Derbyshire, have the excuse of also being British Tory Twits. Others, like David Brooks and Jim Manzi , evince this labored Tory Twit intellectuality as they try to justify advancing the interests of the hereditary rich they aspire to be, which cause now in fact depends on the support of people who think Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are the future of the GOP. Some real cognitive dissonance there.
A few, like David Frum and the Buckleyw, actually were born into the hereditary conservative rich. And, interestingly, they were appalled by the transformation of the GOP into the party of crazy, Bible-thumping gold diggers.
As for Hitchens, more than anything, I think he is an attention seeker and Orwell Wannabe who writes well and prolifically, but veers off on drunken diversions, such as the storied masterminding of 9/11 by the Iraqis (“Wowie, Zarqawi” and so on). More recently, he has taken on waterboarding and religious quackery. The only constant is the personal style.
The rest of the GOP punditry are either mad (Andy McCarthy, Erick Erickson et al) or simply taking care of business (Ann Coulter, Jonah Goldberg, Ranesh Ponnoru, et al). To his credit, Sullivan is now calling them out for what they are.
jhh
I am by American, but am also naturalized Australian, and have lived in France, Japan, and Russia. I think I can guess why intelligent Brits like Andrew Sullivan have made such glorious misjudgements about US politics (his batting average is improving, by the way).
It does start with the tradition of British (and Commonwealth) parliamentary government, which has several prominent features:
1. Open debate with generally recognized rules about what constitutes fact and reality. The weekly Question Time in the UK and Commonwealth countries exposes the prime minister and his front benchers to direct questions in public venue, with the Speaker keeping order as to what constitutes proper questions and adequate responses. In Australia, a government minister who knowingly misleads Parliament is by tradition forced to resign. Such a system would have quickly disposed of most of the Bush Cabinet, and Cheney. The inarticulate Bush would almost certainly not survived the Parliamentary debates in the first place.
2. A Whitehall system of powerful, professional Permanent Secretaries who keep the state from going off the rails in the hands of willful and ignorant politician ministers. During election campaigns, the controls gov’t passes to caretakers who keep politicians from selling the gov’t to win elections. And by the way, there is a news blackout on polls the last weeks before elections in Australia.
People who grow up with such a system reasonably expect that political discourse will be conducted in good faith, that all sides will get a fair hearing, that participants will tell the truth as they see it, and that the professionals in government will guide and implement policy prudently and rationally.
And so, in the 1990s the then rather naive immigrant Andrew Sullivan was taken in by Betsy McCaughey, a smart woman from a poor background who got a PhD, but was nevertheless little more than a gold digger who married money and became a suburban GOPer housewife keen to protect the privileges of those whose status she aspired to. She wrote a fact-challenged work (probably for hire) that he published in the New Republic, which he thought was a good thing to stimulate open debate by reasonable people. Of course, since this is America, not Britain, it was amplified into an anti health reform campaign by the (then) nascent right wing media interests, and in retrospect Andrew looks to have been a Tory Twit taken in by classic American swindlers, it is right out of Huckleberry Finn.
In 2001, Andrew,by now eager to assimilate into his adopted country, similarly swallowed the Bushies’ lies about Iraq and terrorism hook, line and sinker, calling anyone who questioned them a fifth columnist, ie a traitor. A second Tory Twit moment.
Andrew is gay, and HIV+ to boot. But it took him years to understand that the right wingers whose policies he supported were not just indifferent to homosexual rights, they actively wanted people like him to hurry up and die for their sins.
What finally pulled the switch for him seems to have been the issue of gay marriage. The roar of the entire GOP braying that granting this basic right to gay people would “destroy the institution of marriage” seems to have been the proverbial blow to the side of the head. He also finally realized that the GOPers were in fact serious about denying people like him the right to live in the US (his visa was coming up for renewal).
Since then he has mostly pushed back against the wingnuts, who he finally understands are essentially the reincarnation of the French Jacobins and the Russian Bolsheviks—not interested in anything but amassing power. But the fact is, he was for over a decade a Useful Idiot in their hands.
There are plenty of others like him. Some, like Derbyshire, have the excuse of also being British Tory Twits. Others, like David Brooks and Jim Manzi , evince this labored Tory Twit intellectuality as they try to justify advancing the interests of the hereditary rich they aspire to be, which cause now in fact depends on the support of people who think Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are the future of the GOP. Some real cognitive dissonance there.
A few, like David Frum and the Buckleyw, actually were born into the hereditary conservative rich. And, interestingly, they were appalled by the transformation of the GOP into the party of crazy, Bible-thumping gold diggers.
As for Hitchens, more than anything, I think he is an attention seeker and Orwell Wannabe who writes well and prolifically, but veers off on drunken diversions, such as the storied masterminding of 9/11 by the Iraqis (“Wowie, Zarqawi” and so on). More recently, he has taken on waterboarding and religious quackery. The only constant is the personal style.
The rest of the GOP punditry are either mad (Andy McCarthy, Erick Erickson et al) or simply taking care of business (Ann Coulter, Jonah Goldberg, Ranesh Ponnoru, et al). To his credit, Sullivan is now calling them out for what they are.
Brachiator
I blame Alistair Cooke.
And Cricket.
Raincitygirl
Rachel Marsden and Rachel Maddow are most definitely NOT the same person. Ms. Marsden is an ethics-challenged Canadian now living in the US and making a living as a conservative “thinker”. And as far as many Canadians are concerned, we don’t want her back.
http://westernstandard.blogs.com/shotgun/files/marsden_story.pdf
We’d be happy to claim Ms. Maddow as one of our own, but alas, as has already been pointed out, she’s a born-and-bred American.
Nutella
@fraught:
You’re leaving out this important factor: The average English person knows and follows American politics much more closely than the average American follows theirs. Generally they know what’s going on here politically and we don’t know anything about what’s going on there.
That applies to many other countries as well. We’re the big blundering guy charging around the world making everybody nervous so they pay attention.
But Sullivan and Hitchens are twits. No doubt about it.
Litlebritdifrnt
@General Winfield Stuck:
I have not read any comments other than this one, but wot he said. BRB after having read all the others. (or ‘tothers as we say in my part of the world)
ericblair
@Raincitygirl: It’s alright, Kevin. You guys can KEEP David Frum. And his wife.
Anybody who spent time in Canada a couple of decades ago knew his mom as anchorwomen of the Journal, the CBC analysis program. She was very popular and respected; I dunno what turned her son into such a dick and how he got mixed up with the Bushies.
Oh yeah, Conrad fucking Black and his Coulter-esque shrew of a wife. Canada can keep ’em.
Mark S.
No one’s mentioned the Derb?
Metatron
@AhabTRuler:
I had hoped having dissimilar views to other Brit pundits would have been sufficient for DougJ.
Comrade Kevin
@ericblair:
Lord Black of Coleman Federal Correctional Complex? Perhaps, when he’s released, they could deport him to the UK, and hand him over to a bunch of Torygraph readers.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Carlo:
Sully also knows that he would not be discriminated against because he has aids were he in the UK, which is why he is actually contemplating moving home.
Litlebritdifrnt
@jhh:
And – wot he said too.
Tattoosydney
@toujoursdan:
Thanks for pointing that out.
Indeed. My best friend was a lovely white NZ girl – and yet Maori culture was ingrained in her somehow, something I suspect is quite common for Kiwis. She would use maori terms – “Kia ora” for hello being the most obvious one, and deeply respected the Maori.
Australia doesn’t have that identification with our indigenous people.
One suggestion for the difference is that the Maori were not a defeated people, but signed the Treaty of Waitangi as at least nominal equals or at worst as a defeated people, whereas Australia was legally terra nullius (“land belonging to no one”) and our aborigines (apparently) undeserving of even a treaty.
Yes.
Jacob Davies
Can’t speak for any other English-British twits, but after ten years in the US, being a permanent resident, on track for naturalization, married to an American, with an American child, having paid full US taxes on my income for ten years, and having followed American politics rather closely, I feel pretty well entitled to have an opinion on American politics.
You’re extrapolating from two British pundits, both of them upper-middle-class and right-leaning. That represents the British political spectrum about as well as putting Ben Nelson and Bill Frist on a plane and saying that they represent all of American politics. (And FYI: you should see the American idiots they put on TV in Britain. The class of people who seek to be on TV regularly is pretty much the same in every country.)
I know Sullivan is also pursuing citizenship. So, what distinguishes our particular class of immigrant to be ineligible to offer opinions on American politics? Look, I appreciate that “white dudes with British accents” aren’t exactly a class suffering greatly from prejudice, but that doesn’t make sweeping judgments about our qualifications to offer opinions any more accurate than it would be to say the same about Chinese, Indian, or Latin American immigrants.
Tattoosydney
@OriGuy:
Wait… you’re telling me people actually drink Fosters? No.
Heavens. Do they get paid to drink it?
Tattoosydney
@Brick Oven Bill:
I have no idea what that means. Perhaps it’s working already?
Froley
Hitchens became a citizen a couple of years ago. Shortly thereafter, he got his official “I Can Say Stupid Shit Because I’m an American” card.
Tattoosydney
@jhh:
All this.
Raincitygirl
I know! I remember watching Barbara Frum on TV when I was little, and she was pretty damn awesome. I suppose it’s possible she was wingnutty in her personal political beliefs, but if so, she kept it pretty quiet. I never gave much thought to her personal beliefs one way or the other, because she was a journalist, damnit. I don’t know how she managed to give birth to the likes of David Frum. It’s not like with Margaret Thatcher where she was so obviously bonkers that it wasn’t precisely surprising both her children turned out to be train wrecks in adulthood. One goes to jail for trying to foment a coup in Equatorial Guinea, and the other gets fired from the BBC for making racist comments on the air. Okay fine, in comparison with Mark Thatcher, maybe David Frum isn’t that bad after all. But when I was a kid watching Barbara Frum I never would’ve guessed her son would’ve taken up with the Bushies. It makes me all the more irritated with him, because I had a heck of a lot of respect for his mom.
Uh, no we can’t. See, ole Conrad gave up his Canadian citizenship years ago in order to become eligible for a British peerage. Canadian citizens can’t become lords without the permission of the Prime Minister, and our PM at the time cordially loathed Black. To be fair, it was a mutual loathing. And also to be fair, M. Chretien was a corrupt little bruiser (but I’d still take him over the likes of Conrad, if I had to choose between the two. Corruption aside, this is the guy who punched a protester in the face while his bodyguards stood there staring. And foiled a midnight intruder by taking him down with a soapstone carving while his security detail snoozed over doughnuts in the kitchen. He was entertaining!).
Anyway, moving along from M. Chretien’s colourful tenure, the point is that the only way Mr. Black could become Baron Black of Fleet was to give up his Canadian passport and become a British subject only. Which he did, complete with epic tantrums in the pages of the National Post about how Canada had driven him away by being MEAN to him, and we weren’t worthy of his citizenship. Some years later when he was on trial in the US for various white collar crimes, he tried to get his Canadian citizenship back. Alas, the government at the time laughed heartily at their ex-citizen’s request. The jailbird’s wife is unfortunately still employed by Maclean’s Magazine, and writes impassioned columns about Canadian politics and the unfairness of her husband being in Club Fed. I’m not sure why she still has the damn column. Her husband is no longer a Canadian media baron, so people don’t have to kiss up to her anymore.
Tattoosydney
@jhh:
Hitchens at least has the good grace to be funny every now and then.
Jane_in_Colorado
Hitchens and Sullivan are talented writers. That’s where they get their influence. Hitchens is basically a contrarian. His political commentary makes no sense. Hates religion, loves war. Not sure what peer group that puts him in. But his writing about writers is excellent.
I’ve been reading Sullivan off and on since his days at New Republic. He’s a bundle of contradictions. He’s a devout Catholic, but he’s gay. So he’s pretty sure the Church is wrong about that. But he goes along with the anti-abortion stance, for that doesn’t affect him. (It seems pretty self-serving to me, as in: there needs to be an exception to Catholic doctrine where it hurts gays, but not where it hurts women.) He likes to think he’s a conservative–God knows why, because most of them hate gays and some would gladly burn them at the stake–but ever since he wised up about Bush and his wars, he has trouble figuring out where he stands. He loves Obama for some reason–really loves him, it’s not just Hillary hate–and I think it confuses him. He seems to have a bad taste in his mouth about the British NHS, but Obama is pushing for healthcare reform, so Sully is all over the place about it. Published a lot of emails from his readers about their hideous experiences with American health insurance, but you can tell he really doesn’t want a public option.
These are two extremely odd men. It’s probably not a good idea to generalize about Brits based on them. They’re both expats. They love their idea of America… and want to bend it to their will.
And can I just say? Brick Oven Bill–don’t ever change. “Behold the Tea Bagger”? That made my evening.
Pal
Based on your English Colleague’s predictions, I think your colleague is really Howard Fineman.
Chas
Seriously Doug,
You take 2 people who are both emotional basketcases and make them emblematic of a nation?
Are Joe Klein, Maureen Dowd and K-Lo a fair representation of all American political writers have to offer?
As an Australian, who has barely stepped foot in America, i think I can answer your question about why i feel qualified to comment on American politics. (I know I’m not English, but i think the same points apply)
I watch the same TV that is available to you, I read the same newspapers that are available to you and I read the same websites that are available to you. And I do actually make an effort to absorb them all. This makes me more informed about America than 99% of Americans.
You underestimate America’s cultural hegemony overseas.
The only difference between your inputs and my inputs is that I don’t receive US political radio. And forgive me, but i don’t suspect that is a great loss.
And really – if you want to listen to a reasonable English point of view, skip Sully and Hitchens and go straight to Alex Massie.
Llelldorin
I’m not sure this is a “Briton” or “Englishman” problem so much as an Oxbridge problem. Oxford and Cambridge tend to produce graduates who are much like Harvard grads here in the states–very smart, but frequently far too glib and self-certain.
In the best of them, that’s a good thing–they get just enough self-assuredness to actually pursue interesting leads that they might otherwise write off too early. In far too many, though, it simply turns into the Salon syndrome, where glib defenses of outrageously stupid arguments are prized far more than careful, sane analysis.
sparky
@Jane_in_Colorado: yes. and the point about these people not getting out of their bubble explains Sullivan rather nicely. easy to ignore the US if all you are doing is commuting between Provincetown and Chelsea.
also, don’t forget Rupert’s influence. many people followed him over here, and naturally they were not inclined to disagree with their patron.
mai naem
Some of this is is the snob appeal of a Brit Oxbridge accent. Also too, because of the language you see more Brits on teevee instead of the French/Germans/Scandinavians etc. The misunderstand as has already been pointed out is because people think the Dems are old Labour and the Repubs are the Tories. In reality the Dems are more like the Tories and the Repubs are like some insane National Front kind of political party. Sully’s change of attitude is due to him being gay, HIV+ and not being able to immigrate here. Amazing how one’s attitudes change when something finally affects you personally. Shades of Ted Haggard.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
I have one word that ought to cure that: Vegemite
;)
Jane_in_Colorado
@sparky: But it’s so cute, they way they love us. :)
DougJ’s comment notwithstanding, the Brit commentators make no difference. Does anyone disagree?
J in WA
Just FYI for those of you ragging on DougJ, British does not equal English. They are very different peeps. He’s making a fine point here. Perhaps too fine.
Tattoosydney
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
You leave my Vegemite alone.
Comrade Kevin
@J in WA: He inadvertently drew out a bunch of smug people who don’t live in the US, but think that watching CNN International and reading the New York Times Online gives them a profound insight into the United States.
Interrobang
My English boyfriend isn’t like that at all. He loathes Bush and thinks the US needs an actual political left, and doesn’t much mind Hillary Clinton. Then again, he also thinks Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens are upper-class-twit type wankers, so there may be some class differences there, too.
I am personally of the opinion that Canada is the only sane British-influenced culture. But I live here, so I’m inclined to be biased that way. :)
By the way, JL, you probably thought you were joking about the US kindly offering to liberate Canada in 1812, but I’ve read a lot of the rhetoric that led up to the war, and, translating into 19th C. English, what they were saying was pretty much exactly what the Bush administration was saying prior to the invasion of Iraq. (Do you people ever change?!) What you said was funny, but not exactly factually inaccurate… :)
Anne Laurie
@jl:
Yah. The vast, vast majority of English and Canadian expats get ignored, because they’re not trying to irritate the rest of us. Sullivan, Hitchens, Derbyshire, Fergusson and their ilk are old-fashioned Class Warriors, monarchists who came to America dreaming of a golden land where they could let their bigotry flag fly proudly. Many of them, not surprisingly, first befouled our shores during the Reagan administration, when Nixon’s old CREEPster minions propped up a brain-damaged professional actor as the new improved much-more-palatable figurehead of the Conservative Movement. They’re mostly first-generation Oxbridgians, jumped-up sine nobs who’d never be forgiven or permitted to forget their “place” back in the Mother Country, happily taking advantage of America’s relative meritocracy and caste-innocence to claim patrician status. (Although in Hitchens’ case, he seems to have started his American career playing the proud working-class bhoyo — but he retreated to the ‘how-dare-you-filthy-wogs-criticize-MY-vastly-superior-status’ barricades the second two powerful Americans, namely that filthy rural negro-in-all-but-skin and his harridan of an insufficiently-submissive wife, failed to kowtow before Saint Christopher with the full three kneelings & nine knocking.) As for their Canadian kinfolk — Lord Black&ShriveledSoul, Mark ‘Rhymes with Whine, not with Stain’ Steyn, and the Frumpkins — they garner as much respect as any whiny little brother; the English expats ignore them, and even the most status-impressed Americans recognize them as cheap knockoffs of the real rococco objets de sans virtu. There is an old and dishonorable name for this class: they are the modern Remittance Men. Our chief consolation for their ongoing campaign against every ideal of American decency is that we have been a great disappointment to our new would-be-aristocrats, and we can piously hope to dismay them even further in the future.
J in WA
@Comrade Kevin: and also a bunch of americans who don’t understand borders. “American” doesn’t mean “Virginian,” nor does “British” mean “English.” My admittedly subjective experience backs up his post: english folk have a seriously weird view of american politics. And Sully comes up with some totally certifiable weirdness sometimes.
Comrade Kevin
@Anne Laurie:
Hitchens, a monarchist? Are you kidding me?
Comrade Kevin
@J in WA: Oh, I am quite aware of all that, my parents were from Northern Ireland.
Jacob Davies
“the snob appeal of a Brit Oxbridge accent”
Yes, this too. America is the last English-speaking place to still equate Received Pronunciation with unshakable authority. In Britain it certainly isn’t the case anymore, and you will hear regional accents on the news and in punditry.
I don’t know whether it’s because of the Hollywood convention that all educated British people speak the Queen’s English (not remotely true), but Americans take RP very seriously and very few British people appear on TV in the US in any capacity with regional accents, except as the butt of a joke (e.g. the Geico lizard).
John Oliver is the only notable counterexample I can think of. His vernacular London accent is not usually taken as disqualifying him from commenting on American politics. His appearance was quite a nice change from the norm.
Incidentally, maintaining a posh British accent in the US requires diligent attention and constant vigilance. Mine has decayed into some kind of horrible Californian-English hybrid through inattention. So when you see a British immigrant who’s been here a while and still speaks with a perfect RP accent, the assessment you should make is that their accent is something very important to them. For some I’m sure it’s a personal identity sort of thing, but for those who appear on TV you can pretty much take it as an affectation maintained in order to ensure employment. In other words, a novelty act, like those fucking bowties that conservatives are so fond of.
J in WA
@Comrade Kevin: then you know. :) On a related note, is anyone still debating this? I mean, English being kinda weird wrt american politics. I still think that they are, and that DougJ was right. Weirdest people I ever tried to get to know, those Londoners.
Chas
@Comrade Kevin
C’mon Kevin, don’t be smug.
You don’t think every American political TV channel/ newspaper and blog is available overseas? You just need to be willing to put in the resources, that’s all.
The fact that we are in a BalloonJuice comment thread says it all, really. How many people who only read NYTimes Online and watch CNN International would find themselves here?
I presume to know nothing about you. Why would you presume to know everything about me?
jl
@Interrobang: I realize what you say is true about the abortive US invasion of Canada. Jefferson got on board and said it would be ‘a mere matter of marching’ and Canada would welcome us a liberators. But, US butt got kicked.
jl
@jl: My bitter point on the deluded and failed US invasion of Canada in the War of 1812, was that for those who forget history live to see it repeated, or go ahead and lie to make the same mistakes in the same way, or whatever the saying is.
It is better to learn from history and at least advance to avoiding making the same mistakes a different way, in hopes of at least making different mistakes that might not turn out so badly.
Comrade Kevin
@Chas:
I only presume to know that you don’t, actually, know much about the United States.
The United States is an “important” country, so naturally people from other countries pay attention to what is happening here, up to a point.
Thinking you actually understand the place, however, from thousands of miles away, based on what you see on TV, or read on the Internet, is supremely arrogant, especially when you admit that you’ve barely set foot in the place.
MNPundit
@Tattoosydney: Your treatment of video games equalizes everything. It is a fucking travesty.
Also you are now fatter than us, which I cannot even imagine.
Polish the Guillotines
@Tattoosydney:
But in return, you gave the world AC/DC, which is Australia’s eternal redemption.
Anne Laurie
@Comrade Kevin:
Hitchens, self-proclaimed iconoclast, needs a monarch to piss on as much as his fellow Remittance Men need a monarch to worship. That’s why he “broke up” with the Clintons — they weren’t High Church enough for Hitch to publicly rebel against, and yet they wouldn’t play the ‘Us Pore Workin-Clarse Folk Aginst the Oh-pressors’ role that Christopher so thoughtfully spelled out for their use. That’s why he’s now insisting that Obama has some kind of double-super-sekrit “aristocratic” status, or status-hankerings… because if President Obama is just a very smart half-caste from a low-status family who worked hard to achieve his current social standing, how is Hitchens to prove that his new neocon associates are the only “true” small-d democratic spirits in American politics?
McGeorge Bundy
@Anne Laurie: That doesn’t make Hitchens a monarchist (which, frankly, is an absurd claim). It makes him an elitist jackass. Which he is, of course. Hitchens since his Oxford days has been criticized as a champagne socialist, which, again, he is. Although I like his literary criticism even if it’s second-rate.
tammanycall
Why aren’t the wingnuts up in arms about the furriners taking jobs from decent, hard-working Christian Americans?
Ash
I had never heard John Derbyshire speak, so when I watched some video of him trying to explain away his whole “We’d be better off if women couldn’t vote” bullshit, I mostly ended up just wanting him to be deported.
If you took all the Brits who “commentate” on American politics and actually put them back in Britain, I’m pretty sure they’d all be working at the Daily Fail.
Uriel
There is nothing on earth, below it, or above it that is more objectionable and offensive than Homo Brittanicus, or, to use the common vernacular, “those f’ing limeys.”
Just remember- this is the race that graced us all with Benny Hill, kidney pie and the exciting tie-fest that is soccer.
‘Nuff said.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Tattoosydney: “You leave my Vegemite alone.”
Don’t worry, I will. ;)
My wife has a friend in Australia and they like to exchange different eats/treats. She sent us a tube of Vegemite and I decided to try some on toast. Mind you, I read up on it and knew what to expect from the taste, or so I thought…lol!
Don’t worry, I’ll leave it alone. You win.
Uriel
@Uriel:
And if you question this, try this revelatory mental experiment:
Just try to conjure up the tune to Yakkidy-Sacks without imagining some buxom lady in a nurses outfit being chased around a park bench by a horribly doughy man in a paddington bear outfit riding a tricycle.
Can’t do it, can you?
God damn pasty, dentally challenged imperialists.
Tattoosydney
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
Did you smear or just dab? dabbing is the answer… smearing just leads to your head exploding.
Cylus
So, I’m English, have lived in America, don’t hate the Clintons, never supported the great Iraq adventure and read this blog daily.
I think it’s fairly safe to say that American cable news shows like to invite pundits that they know will say controversial things. It has nothing to do with being English (Hitchens), Israeli (Netanyahu) or godknowswhatastan (Orly Taitz). If you like to stir up shit and and piss people off you are booked. Now, if you had the ability to watch average British news programming you would notice a distinct lack of Hitchens (mainly because, well, we find him a bit nuts). In American punditry, nuts = good. To be clear, I’m not saying that our programming is better, it’s just very different and generally not as beholden to unbridled capitalist instincts. The problem you have isn’t icky English know nothings invading your TV, it’s your mentally stunted cable news programmers who will book anyone that will talk large amounts of crap.
bob h
I think we are too swayed by their posh accents.
Sully and Hitch are prime examples of the well-educated, smart Brits who come here, lose the plot, and never find it again.
Suicidal Zebra
American’s have no clue about British or American Politics. I have reached this conclusion from watching the many appearances of Frank Luntz on UK television.
@ J in WA
Quite true. Instead of trying to tar ~60 million people with one very large brush, he’s only attempting to tar ~40 million with a slightly smaller and thus infinitely more discerning one. But that’s okay, it’s the right of every ex-colonial to stereotype the English so long as that stereotype is to the detriment of the mother country.
TruthOfAngels
You’re right. We ought to have made rounders, netball and rugby for wusses into national sports. How could we have been so blind?
Cheryl from Maryland
Watch Humphrey, the permanent undersecretary in Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister to understand Sully and Hitch. The entitlement reeks from the screen.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@Tattoosydney:
I dabbed as was instructed but salty is salty and toast is not supposed to be salty or taste like you have spread vitamins on it!
I am still hoping that I can one day forget the horror. ;)
Everyone in the family tried it but nobody came back for seconds. We eventually pitched the tube but not before getting some friends of ours to try it. I have to admit that the sadistic side of me enjoyed watching them taste-test and pretty much knowing what the results would be.
I wasn’t disappointed…lol!
aimai
OK, 1 hundreds something comments in but are none of you old enough to remember masterpiece theater? This is all some kind of nightmarish hangover from that.
aimai
aimai
And, of course, this. With the proviso that we have to understand both Sully and Hitch as essentially Sir Humphrey if he was forced by circumstances to descend to trade and, in the form of a disappointed remittance man, to send back dispatches from the colonies and trade on his plummy accent to enthrall the rubes at a carney show.
Neither Sully nor Hitch turned out to be anyone special at home–despite (Hitch’s) advantages, certainly, other of his contemporaries ended up running the country, or highly positioned to do shit. Hitch wound up drinking and ranting his way to a slice of popular fame in exile.
aimai
soonergrunt
@Steeplejack: that’s always been a good enough reason for me!
Sacha
Have you seen Ian Leslie’s site?
Betsy
@Chas:
If we can’t make wild generalizations based on meager anecdotal evidence, what is the internet for?
matoko_chan
My friend from Cambridge (england) explained this to me once. The answer to all your questions is that the English are actually French, while Americans are Swedish.
Because the French and the English have overhead flushing, and the Americans and Swedes don’t.
It made a lot of sense at the time, but I think I was krunk.
;)
JoJo
“If we can’t make wild generalizations based on meager anecdotal evidence, what is the internet for?”
Sharing porn and bitching about movies!
Betsy
@JoJo:
Of course! How could I forget?
Bill H
How can you know that about Sully these days? His writing consists strictly of block quotes from other writers, with a one-liner of him saying something to the effect of, “What he said.”
Bill H
@JoJo:
And pictures of the cute thing the cat did yesterday.
spartacvs
@Uriel:
Tie-fest?
Chelsea 5 Blackburn 0
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/teams/c/chelsea/results/default.stm
fungus amungus
“Wait… you’re telling me people actually drink Fosters?”
Consistently two bucks an oil-can at your friendly neighborhood Safeway. It may be shite back home, but for this unemployed bottom-scraper, it sure as fuck beats Budweiser.
bago
Ah yes, the 60-something retiree using his social security to protest government spending. A perfectly wrapped package of ignorance and irony.
Will
Related: Why is Tony Blankley’s opinion sought out for anything? Why is this British moron a major figure in American political discourse?
Brachiator
@Jacob Davies:
I don’t think that most Americans know the difference between English accents. For most Americans, all British speech, except Cockney, is “posh.” And Cockney, thanks to Michael Caine (and Cary Grant) is “cute.”
And there are few things more unintentionally funny than to see Hollywood starlets appear on the CBS program, The Late Late Show, and comment on host Craig Ferguson’s English accent.
Ferguson is from Scotland.
Similarly excruciating is to hear some British actors attempt an “American” accent in some British-import TV shows. It’s almost as though they believe that all Americans talk with some late 19th century Teddy Roosevelt bluster.
LondonLee
I’ve only skimmed through the first half of the comments but it didn’t seem like you had many from any actual English people – like me – just a lot of sweeping generalizations and uniformed ‘insight’ exactly like you were slagging Hitch and Sully (and your clueless friend) for.
This is usually one of the smartest political blogs out there, but this one of the stupidest posts I’ve ever read.
Note to someone up top: There’s no such thing as a “Cambridge accent” – at least not in the sense I assume you thought you meant.
Kiril
Very late to the thread, but I seem to remember reading some British newspaper coverage to the election last year (Guardian?) and lulzing as I read a columnist say Barack Obama would be less controversial if he had married a white woman.
Chuck Butcher
I’ll let this post go with the observation that stupid seems to transcend national borders, linguistic barricades, and possibly inter-galactic reaches.
cokane
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120062413171299477.html
pretty good example of Hitchens wankery and ignorance of American politics. He can’t even write one sentence without getting it completely wrong:
C+
@LondonLee:
Um, it’s a DougJ post. What did you expect?
jean
They speak English. We speak American. We are caught in false equivalencies: we THINK we know what each other is saying, but, not so much. Language drift, perhaps more difficult to see because we share the same words, but VERY different experiences.
SeanH
The reason we’re so fascinated, and the reason we don’t understand USian politics very well, is the sheer amount of lunacy you’ve got.
This is the most controversial and hateful thing recently published in the UK, a homophobic article about the recent death of a gay celebrity. It caused a huge shitstorm here, with tens of thousands of complaints, and the paper and writer forced to apologise. I read worse things in the Washington Post every month or so, and only some bloggers object.
Or take Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party and insane racist. Here he is condemned by every major party – a recent controversy was whether he should be allowed onto the BBC to have his views exposed as bigoted trash or just shut completely out of the national discourse – and every newspaper and commentator vilifies him whenever possible. In the USA, Pat Buchanan says worse things all the time, and gets a hug from Fox News.
Thus, US politics would be a diverting sideshow – except the USA destroyed two countries in the last decade. So we have to at least try to understand you, for our own self-preservation. It’s like Kremlinology.
Boney Baloney
I discussed this with an illegal British alien over whiskey-and-sodas when the UK abandoned its positions in Iraq (finally — love means never having to say Fuck Off).
“In a hundred years, there WILL be an England; there may be a USA. In twenty years there WILL be a USA; there may be an Israel. There’ll never be a fucking Mandate again, though, thanks be to God. It’s your fucking problem now.”
“Sorry about the, you know, cornholing. That was offsides. You guys should have zapped a few of our –”
“Shhh. This is America, you don’t say anything out loud, or write it down, or think it. You’re right, of course. But keep it dark.”
At this point, America is interesting the way a kid trapped down a well is interesting. Russia is interesting the way a country eleven time zones wide, claiming newly melted bits of Arctic Circle as territory, is interesting. China is interesting the way the family of a disgraced remittance man is interesting. Everyone has to have a hobby, right?
Implied Observer
You might as well ask why Simon Cowell is popular on American Idol. It’s pretty much the same thing.