That Joke Isn’t Funny Any More

Posted by Andrew Adams on October 28, 2008
Filed Under Media, Politics |

I have to say that Mutantblog is usually second to no-one in its admiration for Melanie Phillips. The fact that despite the sheer bonkersness of her opinions being matched only by the forthrightness with which she delivers them she manages to command such a high profile in the MSM - columns in the Mail and the Spectator, a regular on Moral Maze and Question Time etc. etc. is truly remarkable. And let’s face it, she is always entertaining - she is the right winger us lefties truly love to hate and if she didn’t exist we would have to invent her.

And of course there’s her blog on the Spectator website. For those of you who are fans of “Mad Mel” from her newspaper columns and TV appearances but haven’t yet stumbled on her blog the estimable Matthew Norman puts it perfectly

Imagine the rapture of the art-lover who goes to an imaginary gallery containing the life works of Van Gogh, and while standing in front of his Sunflowers is approached by a curator whispering: “I never told you this, but if you nip up that staircase and turn left, you’ll find the secret room with all the paintings Vincent thought too good for general consumption.”

Imagine this, and you get a sense of the treasure trove that is the website of Melanie Phillips.

Now like many of us Mel is avidly following the Americal presidential contest and I think it’s fair to say that a careful reading between the lines reveals she is not a fan of Obama. Pieces entitled “Fraud we can believe in” and, even better, “Stasi tactics from Camp Obama” give the general impression. Her recent effort “Is America really going to do this?” takes the biscuit though. In it she expresses her fear that

if he wins, US defences will be emasculated at a time of unprecedented international peril and the enemies of America and the free world will seize their opportunity to destroy the west.

She claims not only that

Obama will undermine [America and the free world] and aid their enemies.

but that

Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west’s fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted…For Obama, however, the real source of evil in the world is America. The evil represented by Iran and the Islamic jihadists is apparently all America’s fault.

She continues in the vein, getting more and more unhinged until she gets to the real nub of her argument

many of his connections suggest that that the man who may be elected President of a country upon which the Islamists have declared war is himself firmly in the Islamists’ camp.

She then goes on to approvingly quote Daniel Pipes

Obama’s multiple links to anti-Americans and subversives mean he would fail the standard security clearance process for Federal employees. Islamic aggression represents America’s strategic enemy; Obama’s many insalubrious connections raise grave doubts about his fitness to serve as America’s commander-in-chief.

And I’m afraid this is where even the most tolerant of us fans of Mel have to draw a line. This isn’t just “mad”, it’s full on one hundred percent certifiably bonkers, and downright nasty with it. Not to mention the sheer dishonesty of the way she represents Obama’s beliefs.

“Mad Mel”? As the Smiths said That Joke Isn’t Funny Any More.

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