Portaloo ....

Gets the wet fish treatment from Oliver Kamm and Dumb Jon after his Sunday Times 'Vote Kerry' piece.

As usual, Oliver is Olympian, measured, full of historical references, lovely style. If that guy went to a State school I'll eat my copy of 'Adventures of Aeneas'. Jon's style is more like the guy who discovers that both pint AND girl have been pinched in the pub.

Yet he hits some parts that Oliver doesn't reach. Here's Oliver on Portillo on Abu Ghraib and its meaning.

"Michael Portillo maintains: “For America to brush away its recent disgraces, the electorate will have to bin this Administration.”

Yet that is frivolous reasoning. The tortures and deaths in US custody require expiation, not just symbolically but practically, to the people of Iraq, in the form of due process and the rule of law. Those values, so traduced by American jailers, are exemplified in the arraignment before an Iraqi court of a despot whose regime was founded on torture and killing."

Absolutely. Correct. But Jon picks up on a point just as important and of more general application - the way in which the whole of the USA can apparently be tarred by what a couple of dozen of people in US uniform did at Abu Ghraib - yet a couple of dozen people slaughtering thousands in the name of Islam doesn't tell us anything about that religion. Some logical inconsistency in the thought processes of Portillo and many others. Apparently that kind of stereotyping is OK for them, but not for us.

"Look at the first few 'graphs, the faux-agony as Mikey finds himself forced - forced! - to criticise America. He doesn't want to, but now he's found out about the behaviour of a half-dozen trailer trash on a single day in November 2003, why, there's no choice. I'll give him that if he accepts that the events of a whole 19 Muslims on a certain day in 2001 say all we need to know about Islam. Oops no - that would be bigoted, whereas spinning the behaviour of six perverted 'tards into a broadbrush condemnation of the US is tres sophisticated."