Overplaying the bashing
Michael Vestey Well, the superbly perceptive Mark Steyn was right a fortnight ago in this magazine when he wrote that the media had overplayed the Bush-bashing. The BBC certainly did. I fell for it, thinking in the past fortnight or so that John Kerry was going to win the presidential election. So it was with some anxiety that I switched on Today on Radio Four last Wednesday expecting to hear that the
cadaverous Kerry was the victor. Instead, I heard an undoubtedly disappointed Jim Naughtie more or less handing it to George W. Bush, as the Ohio figures didn't add up in Kerry's favour. Wonderful! Now there's no prospect of a President Kerry bowing and scraping before Chirac and Schroeder.
Radio programmes, while on the face of it balanced, did have a pro-Kerry tone. Trotting out the polling results as fact — it's 'neck and neck' or it's 'too close to call', the cliche I dislike most — they gave the impression that Kerry really was in the lead. Then we were told that there were great queues at polling stations, which indeed the television pictures confirmed, and that this was evidence of Democrat voters coming out to stop Bush. In fact, many of them must have been Republicans determined to stop coffin-face. The generally left-wing media couldn't grasp this unpalatable fact. At least it wasn't a dull election, like the one I covered for The Spectator in 1996 when Clinton easily beat the hapless Bob Dole, an honourable and decent man but hopeless when set against Clinton's slick, youthful image. Perhaps Dole needed a Monica.
Anyway, as I began to cheer up that Wednesday. I thought I'd hear what they were saying on Victoria Derbyshire's daily programme on Five Live, which was taking
calls for the first hour on reactions to the result. A number of callers were praising Bush, which surprised me as we've been led to believe by the BBC and others that he's the Great Satan. We know there is anti-Americanism in Britain, more than ever, and that Bush is being blamed for this. Although it's always been there, mostly on the Left, of course, it's certainly increased in recent years. One fool rang to say that America hadn't captured one single leading terrorist (it has, or other countries have) and that the invasion of Iraq had created a bigger terrorist problem. When Derbyshire pointed out that America had not been attacked at home since 9/11, the caller asked how she knew that al-Qa'eda had any plans to attack America. 'You don't know that alCla'eda's tactic was to attack America again,' said the poor booby. Oh dear, won't the deluded anti-Americans ever learn? Probably not; at least not until they're blown up on the Tube, by which time it will he too late.
Another canard fostered by the BBC and others is that the Bush vote was entirely the religious Right. The Jeremy Vine show on Radio Two discussed this aspect of America last Thursday, with Carol Sarler, a columnist for the Express, and the wise Mary Kenny, described as a social commentator, Even though I'm not religious, I was startled to hear Vine ask if there was room for Christian values in Britain's politics, a question I didn't expect to hear put in my lifetime. By Christian values 1 assumed he meant heterosexual marriage, the family, lack of criminality, greed and so on, which you don't have to be a Christian to believe in. Unfortunately, the left-wing Saner seems to be against anything that smacks of 'family values'. She sounded as if she hated the idea of the family. She attacked a woman who was trying to prevent children under 16 having an abortion without their parents' knowledge. As a parent myself, [think it appalling that parents shouldn't be told.
When I was in Italy recently, I watched Sarler on Sky News talking about Prince Harry's fracas with the paparazzi outside a London nightclub. She was ranting so
absurdly about what she perceived as Harry's shortcomings, which she couldn't possibly have known about, that I thought she must be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Her voice on the airwaves is so bullying and intolerant that I can scarcely bear to listen to it. She sounds mad, though I dare say she is perfectly sane. She and the Express obviously deserve each other. She thought that the Bush voters were 60 million repressed, bitter people who 'think they don't get enough'. She even rebuked Vine for using the word 'moral' as in abortion, Aids and so on, insisting it should be used only about starvation in Africa. Vine meekly took it. I would have told her to go and piss in her hat, as we used to say in the less genteel parts of the BBC.
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