Chain of fools
This is how politics works: you don’t give a message, you send it. That’s why politicians are always banging on about ’sending a message’.
Take Gordon Brown and his trip to Palestine and Israel. Yesterday while in Bethlehem at a press conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Brown criticised Israeli settlements. He was sending a message to the Israelis.
Today, when he has the opportunity to deliver that message in person and in public when he speaks to the Knesset, he’s going to send a message to Iran warning it against developing nuclear weapons. He sending the message to Tehran, do you see?
Who would he warn if he were to find himself in Iran at a press conference, I wonder? Let’s say the producers of Blue Peter over its declining standards. Send them the message. He could then go on Blue Peter and bring the whole thing full circle and warn Hamas about firing rockets into Israel. Easy.
(In real life this is called talking about people behind their backs. They generally don’t like it.)
You can see why he’s doing it though. Very few of us have the balls to be publicly honest to people’s faces. I bet if Gordon had met Jeffrey Dahmer he’d have merely complimented Jeffrey on his collection of skulls.
Posted on July 21st, 2008 at 7:51 am
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I think that you’re right in that, that particular political tactic is a reflection of our deep fear of actually confronting people with what they don’t want to here; that’s why the interwebs is sucha hot bed of opinion because you can shoot your mouth off without actually facing the opponent in battle.
I get the feeling that some of the more ‘loud mouthed’ bloggers, esp on the right-wing spectrum, are living out the fact that they wouldn’t say boo to a goose in the real world but on the net, they can bluster all they want.
Brown is a coward. He ducks the big decisions until he can say something in a nice, safe environment that he can control. Remember the Andrew Marr interview about the election that never was?
http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com
Letters From A Tory’s latest blog post… Purnell is a fraud trying to stop fraud
He isn’t only “sending a message”: he’s saying things that his immediate audience want to hear. The audience in Bethlehem want to hear a criticism of illegal Israeli settlement; the audience in the Knesset want to hear that the UK will try to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons. It would be much more useful (and logical) if Brown made a speech in the Knesset saying that the UK wanted the Middle East to be a nuclear-free zone (and that this included all countries in the region), but that may not be what the members of the Knesset want to hear.