What about the current wrestling over civil liberties then? Sexy or what? First Tony Blair and Henry Porter getting all Women In Love in the Observer yesterday and then Charles Clarke going threes-up with Simon Carr and Jenni Russell today.

I say “wrestling”. I’m being terribly cynical here but I’d bet my left plum that phalanxes of researchers and nuancers were conscripted to carefully craft Blair’s and Clarke’s responses. Charles Clarke’s fondness for what are known in the trade as “screamers“(!!!), however, does suggest an almost endearingly childlike regard to written communication on behalf of someone in the Home Office. I do hope it’s Charles. Picture him slipping notes to Gordon Brown in Cabinet meetings: “Do you like me!!? Yes [ ] No [ ]“. Or sending a memo to his Private Secretary, “I want these men drinking urine in an Algerian gulag before the month’s out!!!”

While gratifying to see two of the country’s most powerful taking the time to correct a perceived misinterpretation of their motives by such a small group (count them: Carr, Porter and Russell) of liberal journalists, it does make you wonder how and why they couldn’t find five minutes disabuse the media of another bigger, and ultimately disastrous, misconception and tell them, “hang on, lads, this 45 Minutes from Doom thing is complete bollocks”. Think of the lives that could have been saved with an exchange of emails with the editors of the Sun and the Evening Standard or a sneering lecture delivered after a large lunch.

Or have Tony and Charles only now decided to take on the media and the timing of their first go at it just happened to coincide with the civil liberties debate? They could do a spot of moonlighting for Medialens whose strapline reads, “correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media”.

We should await, with keen anticipation, their rebuttal of any black propaganda against Iran that might surface in our newspapers in the coming months. “Frankly it’s difficult to know where to start, given the mishmash of misunderstanding, gross exaggeration and things that are just plain wrong,” the Prime Minister will spit as he demolishes stories of Iran building nuclear weapons. “But I believe that a pernicious and even dangerous poison is now slipping into at least some parts of this media view of the world,” the Home Secretary will belch as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s proclamations are lampooned in the press as the rantings of a swarthy Hitler with little man syndrome.

Or would those stories be nothing-to-offer Zimbabwe compared to the civil liberty debate’s resource rich Iraq and therefore not worth trespassing on? Still, just because you can’t debunk all the myths doesn’t mean you shouldn’t debunk some of the myths.

See also: Tim, Longrider, Murky, qwghlm.

(And Blairwatch, Chris Lightfoot, Charlie, the Curious Hamster and Bookdrunk.)