Daily Archive

Reuters:

The U.S. State Department on Thursday repudiated comments by one of its officials who suggested the U.S.-British “special relationship” was a myth, calling his comments “ill-informed … and just plain wrong.”

Kendall Myers, a research analyst with the department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, was quoted by the Daily Telegraph Web site as saying: “There never really has been a special relationship or at least not one we’ve noticed.”

“As a U.S. State Department employee, now I will say something even worse: It has been from the very beginning very one-sided,” the official added, according to the Web site.

Myers was reported to have made the remarks during a forum on Tuesday at the Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, where he is an adjunct professor and has taught for about 30 years…

Reuters has a great deal of trouble judging what constitutes “news”. For example, just the other day they told us gravely about “dozens” of anti-Pope protesters rallying in a large Muslim city. Now, above, Reuters actually thinks that their relaying comments from another ”news source” (the Telegraph) emanating in the first instance from an obscure State analyst and long time adjunct (that latter job is, as we know, errrr, particularly impressive) who used the words “As a State Department employee” when he didn’t have the authority to do so, is worth a headline story? 

Regardless, let’s play. Yes, no relationship is perfect, of course. For example, trying to analyse it hurridly themselves, the Telegraph:

…President Dwight Eisenhower had stood in the way of Britain over the 1956 Suez crisis, Mr Myers said, and there was still “strong resentment” among British elites because of this…

I emphasize Suez here because the British elite at the Torygraph appear particularly full of “strong resentment”, and clearly the paper enjoys Mr Myers having said what they yearn always to be confirmed from anyone in Washington: that Ike did what he did simply because he felt it necessary to stick it to London for no good reason other than to show Britain who the new boss was.  Indeed, it didn’t even have to be a State employee making such a point.  If so much as a Wizards player had told a sportswriter such, that too would probably have been deemed headline Telegraph news.

That Mr Myers is dead wrong apparently never entered the Telegraph’s collective head. And one could go on.  But overall, if Mr Myers has been an analyst and an adjunct and has not noticed that there has been a “special relationship” between Washington and London since 1941 — and considering Paris has been loudly complaining about it for six decades, ascertaining the relationship’s existence hardly seems to require probing, careful, “read between the lines” research — one sincerely hopes U.K.-U.S. hasn’t been Mr Myers’s area of special expertise.

Someone’s been googling Preya’s mother:

…I wonder about the mental health of these folks, who spend hours googling someone to find out what they’re doing with their life. Well, folks, the answer to that, as you should already know from reading my blog so thoroughly, is living, which she, and certainly I, would recommend you try for a change.

Now and then I see that people also google me.  Why they might, I don’t know either.  I’m likely no more interesting than the person doing the googling:  I am not a celebrity.

Anyway, speaking of celebrity, we actually found ourselves on the M3 early on Thursday behind a small truck displaying a “Jan Fan” sign.  Alas, the driver is now probably rather disappointed. According to the Manchester Evening News, November 30:

FORMER BBC newsreader Jan Leeming described I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! as a “life-enhancing experience” as she became the seventh person voted off the show…

Also in the same piece, this important “scientific poll” was reported:

I believe that’s generally accurate in this sense.  Dean and David (the latter surprisingly) were voted off after that “poll” was reported. But just before those vote offs, I had put down Cicero in the original Latin long enough to tell the wife that I suspect Myleene Klass will triumph in the final Friday . . . perhaps helped by a certain amount of support from the “male demographic”:

In response, the wife pointed out that she simply could NOT fathom why that latter might be the case. Oh, and by the way, if you are sneering now for some reason at this overall topic, bear in mind that this blog does occasionally venture outside what some generally consider “high politics”. Especially for its non-British readers, it is quite willing now and then to risk delving into other important British media/socio-culture issues.

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UPDATE: When will we ever learn that “the polls” don’t matter, that it’s “the election” that counts?  It came down to two tonight, Myleene and Matt, and the winner was . . . Matt!