North of the border

I was trawling the net over the weekend looking for reactions to Blair’s speech before Congress when I came across this piece by Gerald Warner in Scotland on Sunday.

I don’t know what I expected when I clicked on the link but what I got was a sketch of two American Congressmen talking about “Tony B Liar, President of the United Kingdom” in funny (?) accents. This is followed by Warner’s analysis, which includes references to “Dubya” and, wait for it, “dimpled chads”.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think foreigners with funny accents in newspaper columns can be hilarious. I laugh when Mark Steyn does it, but the point is you’ve got to be good to get away with it.

And the dimpled chad thing? Well, there may still be some demented Florida Democrats walking around mumbling to themselves about all kinds of chads but we’re closer to the next election than the last and Gerald Warner looks to be facing the wrong way.

Sometimes it seems to me that large parts of the British press don’t listen to a word their prime minister says; they hear the words all right, but refusing to attribute either sense or meaning to them, they simply ignore them and carry on with what they were going to write anyway.

Just like the papers back home.