Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Stop whimpering, we're in a battle
Mark Steyn: "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." I'm saving the end of the world for my final column, but T S Eliot's words seem at least as pertinent to the present war..."
"It will be decided not by the bangs – whether in Fallujah or Bali or elsewhere – but by the whimpers. And, although the bangs have got a little louder in recent weeks, it's the whimpers that have become deafening."
"Whimpers, whimpers everywhere. On American TV, the network sob-sisters tut sympathetically with the "Jersey Girls", four media-savvy 9/11 widows who've decided that metaphorically speaking George W Bush was at the controls of the planes that slammed into the World Trade Centre."
"Beltway reporters are a-twitter about the biennial doorstopper from The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, this time a huge book sourced up the wazoo portraying the President as a simpleton Christian avenger whose obsession with Iraq is a dark pathology as ingrained as paedophilia."
"The biggest whimpers of all come from the 9/11 Commission... Tony Blair should have offered to loan Lord Hutton. Instead, a mélange of hacks and has-beens mugs for the cameras round the clock, and any piece of government paper from the summer of 2001 containing the words "plane" and/or "Muslim" is taken as evidence of Bush's complicity."
"It's often said that the terrorists are only a "small minority" of Muslims. True. But, a small minority can do a lot of damage. Likewise, the whimperers are only a minority of the American people, but they're even more plugged in – in the media, in politics, in the academy."
Mark Steyn: "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." I'm saving the end of the world for my final column, but T S Eliot's words seem at least as pertinent to the present war..."
"It will be decided not by the bangs – whether in Fallujah or Bali or elsewhere – but by the whimpers. And, although the bangs have got a little louder in recent weeks, it's the whimpers that have become deafening."
"Whimpers, whimpers everywhere. On American TV, the network sob-sisters tut sympathetically with the "Jersey Girls", four media-savvy 9/11 widows who've decided that metaphorically speaking George W Bush was at the controls of the planes that slammed into the World Trade Centre."
"Beltway reporters are a-twitter about the biennial doorstopper from The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, this time a huge book sourced up the wazoo portraying the President as a simpleton Christian avenger whose obsession with Iraq is a dark pathology as ingrained as paedophilia."
"The biggest whimpers of all come from the 9/11 Commission... Tony Blair should have offered to loan Lord Hutton. Instead, a mélange of hacks and has-beens mugs for the cameras round the clock, and any piece of government paper from the summer of 2001 containing the words "plane" and/or "Muslim" is taken as evidence of Bush's complicity."
"It's often said that the terrorists are only a "small minority" of Muslims. True. But, a small minority can do a lot of damage. Likewise, the whimperers are only a minority of the American people, but they're even more plugged in – in the media, in politics, in the academy."
