Humphrys on Steyn - Steyn on Howard

Fron The Irish Left - Dail member Michael D. Higgins ('the leader of undergraduate, anti-American politics in the Irish parliament') has attacked a Steyn column in the Irish Times.

"Higgins' spluttering incoherence ("homophobia"?), his utter inability to address Steyn's arguments, and his thinly veiled call for censorship, shows the intellectual poverty of the Irish left. It's very amusing really, watching the innocent, poorly-read, Irish Times reading lefties try to deal with a full-on neo-con like Steyn. It is obvious they never even heard of Steyn before he dropped like a bomb into the complacent, insular waters of their Irish Times. They have probably never even heard of most of these writers either. To 1960s lefties like Higgins, the neo-conservatives are from another planet. The Irish left don't read them and don't understand them. They only read their own - which is why their opinions are so narrow and insular."

His open letter to Richard Dawkins is good too, although I disagree with him about religion, and think he (Humphrys) has an idealistic, almost religious faith in democracy.



Steyn on Michael Howard in today's Telegraph.

If I had to pick the single most revolting remark from this bogus Reichsfuror (Prince Harry's Nazi fancy dress), it would be this: "I think it might be appropriate for him to tell us himself just how contrite he now is."
That's Michael Howard, the leader of the supposed Conservative Party. What's conservative about demanding people submit to public self-abasement? Wasn't it the Commies who used to insist you recant on TV and then disappear into re-education camp? A conservative party ought to be a refuge from the sanctimonious nannytollahs of the age. But, from his shabby Kerryesque opportunism on the war down, Mr Howard has no discernible coherent political philosophy - except for his all-pervasive authoritarianism, into which his repellent call for a display of princely contrition fits all too neatly.