"The average MP, schooled in the knockabout tactics of the House of Commons, is far better equipped to score points and persuade undecided minds," writes the London Times's Gerard Baker, managing to skewer at once the "uniquely repellent" MP George Galloway, the "preening pomposity, the orotund turgidity of your typical US senator" and the cluelessness of the "startled American journalists who wouldn’t dare treat their betters this way." This is mouthwateringly delicious grilling fare, and you must read the whole thing, of course. A few excerpts to whet your appetite:
On the US Senate: The Senate describes itself, without apparent irony or hint of self-awareness, as the world’s greatest deliberative body. Wherever they travel, senators are treated with a sort of scented deference that only a republic could confer on its leaders and not risk revolution. Fawning staffers strew petals in their path; highways are made straight for them; rivers are forded lest they get their feet wet. One observer noted that senators take themselves so seriously that “they’d wear togas if they thought they could get away with it” . . . Going through life in an impregnable carapace of sycophancy is agreeable, no doubt, but as Marie Antoinette discovered, it does not tend to sharpen one’s skills in public argument.
On George Galloway: But forgive me if I don’t participate in the adulation. As I watched, it wasn’t a grudging respect for the perfectly tailored and coiffed tribune of the masses that filled me, but a wave of nausea. His testimony left me with a renewed understanding of just how uniquely repellent Mr Galloway is.
It wasn’t just that the earthy rhetoric was well fertilised by the usual half-truths (his claim that the Charity Commission had in effect cleared him was an especially eye-opening one). Nor was it his deployment of the change-the-subject strategy when confronted with difficult questions. It was the spectacle itself: the sheer despicable irony of the man’s smiling defiance.
His whole performance this week was that of the little, resilient, Frank Capra figure, unafraid to speak truth to power . . . Yet as he railed against the senators, I couldn’t get out of my head that spectacle of the same man smiling as he lauded Saddam Hussein.
Fortunately, Galloway is but a sideshow in the larger investigation, as Claudia Rosett -- whose competence and good faith give us reason to believe the truth will eventually out -- said earlier this week. Galloway's fifteen minutes of fame provided a now fast fading frisson of hope to the same-old, same-old usual suspects of the far left this week, but as the Times columnist concludes, the stars at center stage are the Iraqi people themselves.
I don't think that the US Congress has had a truly original speaker since Thomas B. Reed.
"The thing I like about you Theodore, is your original discovery of the Ten Commandments" Not truly oratory, but it's late.
Posted by: Mr.Kurtz | May 21, 2005 at 04:26 AM