Clive Davis

STARTLED BY START THE WEEK

Talking of the Beeb, there must have been some sort of production error at Start The Week. How else to explain the fact that Stephen Pollard's least-favourite programme  gave air-time to two - yes, two - non-PC nonconformists in the shape of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Alan Mendoza, ring-leader of the muscular liberals in The Henry Jackson Society? One of the other guests, New Yorker scribe Bill Buford, seemed perturbed by the worldview of "this Jackson guy". (Yes, Bill, HJ had a habit of consorting with those awful, baby-eating neocons...) Interesting discussion overall, though.

NEW GERMANS

Fans in Duesseldorf during the win against Portgual. Courtesy of Peter Feldhaus...

Over at the Atlantic Review, Joerg Wolf sets the record straight on the words of his country's national anthem. Misconceptions abound. He's irritated, too, by the use of lazy Nazi analogies. Sadly, the old stereotypes linger on.

RAREFIED

The Times's Gerard Baker finds he's one of the odd men out at the brainstorming sessions in Aspen:

The air's thin up there but the main reason I found myself gasping was not lack of oxygen but psychic shock at the way in which in these gabfests the entire canon of leftist orthodoxies is, for the most part, simply assumed as factual starting points for discussion, not arguments for debate.

Ross Douthat, who's also taking part, went along to a screening of Al Gore's documentary:

I ... found it almost entirely convincing, but then again I was already convinced that global warming is happening (as, I suspect, are most of the people who will see the movie). What I wanted, and what the film didn't offer, was more talk about what we can actually do about it. This is where the rubber meets the road (quite literally), and Gore only devoted about five minutes of a ninety-minute movie to the subject - and he didn't actually take on the arguments of those, like Robert Samuelson ... who argue that warming is real but that we don't yet know how to stop it.

Back to Baker. His pick of the events so far was the crystal ball talk by Juan Enriquez, author of The Untied States of America:

His thesis is that, all over the world nations that we assumed would last for ever have been breaking up... And he wonders why we should all believe the US will really be different.  It's not just growing Hispanic separatism he cites but the status of Native Americans and the sort of growing economic and social disparities that increasingly characterise the country.

He overstates the case, of course. But it's certainly a useful jolt to the natural tendency to assume that what has been always will be. And in one of those fabulous statistics you really wish you'd uncovered yourself he points out that no president in American history has been born and buried under the same flag.  The current stretch of almost 50 years without adding states is the longest in US history. Who's to say that the next change won't be fewer stars on the flag rather than more?

LIMBAUGH VS MOORE

Who's the noisiest of them all? A reader responds to Michael Moore's biographer, the tireless and even-handed Jesse Larner:

   Though I suspect Mr Larner is correct when he asserts that Rush Limbaugh has a larger number of uncritical followers than Michael Moore when it comes to the United States audience, I think he has forgotten about how Moore is revered outside of the United States. I live in Australia, for example. Here, no matter how many examples I cite of Moore's dishonesty, the response is always that he would be sued if he were dishonest. As few outside of the United States have ever heard of such Supreme Court decisions as "New York Times v Sullivan" that protect Moore, and since other nations' laws regarding defamation are far stricter, it is easy to see why they would draw this conclusion.

Perhaps I am nitpicking, since Mr Larner is to be commended for urging his peers on the Left to abandon such charlatans who claim to speak for them. I would say that I have conservative ideological beliefs, but will never call myself a conservative while that word evokes memories of the insults of Coulter and Limbaugh rather than the philosophy of Burke, Hayek and Rand. Hopefully, with the help of the Larners of this world, the Left and Right alike will shed their dead weight and debate ideas rather than compete with propaganda.

That "Why don't they sue?" argument drives me crazy too. I've heard it so often from my friends that I've given up trying to explain.

NOTEBOOK

The death of left- and centre liberalism has created a hole at the heart of American politics, and our political discourse is suffering for it, on both ends of the political spectrum. The Left suffers for the obvious reasons, but the Right suffers too: in the absence of any coherent popular and intellectual challenge, it has descended into a lazy and bullying triumphalism.

Jesse Larner, Forgive Us Our Spins: Michael Moore and the Future of the Left.

IT DEPENDS WHAT YOU MEAN BY CONSERVATISM...

Presumably, he's been misquoted. I hope so, anyway:

"There are no conservatives I know of who consider Andrew Sullivan a conservative," said Ramesh Ponnuru, of National Review.

THE BROADCASTING HOUSE MIND-SET

Tom Gross rounds up a clutch of items about the BBC and Israel, including a trenchant Prospect article by Mark Dooley and Celsius 7/7 author, Michael Gove:

The only way this bias that affects the BBC can be tackled is through genuine openness rather than inquiries run by people who share the same perspective. That means an honest public acknowledgement of what so many in the BBC will freely, privately, confess. A soft left worldview influences too much of what the corporation produces.

NEMESIS

My advance copy of Jesse Larner's updated bio of Michael Moore has just arrived. Fascinating to see that George Monbiot has contributed a blurb on the back cover: "Well written, witty and wise..."  Does this mean the Left is starting to wake up to the fact that its hero is a charlatan? Another right-on British pundit Janet Street-Porter began to see the light some time ago:

In the end, I conclude that Moore is a victim of his own success, with a lot more in common with Bush than he would care to admit. He's said to be planning a film about medical insurance in the States but, with his track record, shouldn't it carry a healthy warning?

JESSE REPLIES FROM NYC: Gosh, he was at his desk early this morning. Here's part of his e-mail:

A little unfair to call Moore the hero of the Left without any qualifiers, don't you think? Like calling Rush Limbaugh the hero of the Right, to use a tired parallel. Couldn't we say that Moore is the hero of a certain kind of left-wing politics, just as Limbaugh is the hero of a certain kind of right-wing politics? And you'll have to admit that Limbaugh's audience of uncritical followers is far larger than Moore's (20 million people a day listen to Limbaugh, there's no comparison.)

Personally, I'm much more interested in what Peter Beinart, Paul Berman, Michael Tomasky, Michael Ignatieff, Todd Gitlin, George Packer, Mike Davis or Christopher Hitchens haveto say. (Yes, I think Hitchens is still on the Left, although, of course, many on the Left loathe him now.)

Point taken about the "hero" bit. Still not sure I agree about the audience issue, though. (Jesse and I have argued about this before.) I'm not a Limbaugh fan (he's too strident for me) and as you know, I loathe Ann Coulter. Yet I really can't imagine either of them winning an Oscar, or being feted by much of medialand. As for their international reach, Moore wins, no contest. On the other hand, Jesse's right when he says in his book that conservatives give right-wing talk show hosts too easy a ride.

This discussion will be continued, no doubt....

A FOURTH OF JULY GIFT

Not that I'm entirely surprised, but a new survey of British attitudes makes very bleak reading:

Britons have never had such a low opinion of the leadership of the United States, a YouGov poll shows. As Americans prepare to celebrate the 230th anniversary of their independence tomorrow, the poll found that only 12 per cent of Britons trust them to act wisely on the global stage. This is half the number who had faith in the Vietnam-scarred White House of 1975.

Most Britons see America as a cruel, vulgar, arrogant society, riven by class and racism, crime-ridden, obsessed with money and led by an incompetent hypocrite.More than two-thirds who offered an opinion said America is essentially an imperial power seeking world domination. And 81 per cent of those who took a view said President George W Bush hypocritically championed democracy as a cover for the pursuit of American self-interests.

What's to blame? The Bush team's sloppy diplomacy must come near the top of the list. Yet as the Telegraph leader observes, that doesn't explain everything:

Americans find themselves damned either way. If they remain within their own borders, they are isolationist hicks who are shirking their responsibilities. If they intervene, they are rapacious imperialists. Indeed, many of their detractors manage to hold these two ideas in their heads simultaneously. Yet a moment's thought should reveal that they are both unfair.

NERDS IN ADLAND

One more gender-related question: why is it acceptable to mock men in commercials?

Virtual castration of the male is the topic of a bullish debate in Campaign, the advertising industry’s weekly bible...

Campaign... accuses the advertising industry of portraying men as "castrated dweebs" who appeal to neither men nor women... Alistair Green, planning director of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the UK advertising agency responsible for the Lynx nerds, said yesterday: "Ten years ago advertising was all about aspiration, and being male and strong. What has happpened over time is that consumers are demanding more relevance to them and something to latch on to. But there’s still a balance to be struck between relevance and aspiration."