Tim Blair, little green footballs, and maintaining a purity of line ...

Every so often we used to drop into Tim Blair, one of the busiest squawkers on the pond.

But truth to tell, Blair is perhaps the most tedious of the ratpack of Chairman Rupert's ragbag of ratpackers, compulsively, obsessively monomaniacal in his output, usually involving a sly set of links, packaged with gadfly innuendos and short form telegrammatic implications designed to maintain Blair's status with his followers, along with a firm denialism in relation to the environment, and whatever else trendies, hippies and greenies might have in their canvas shopping bags (as if there's anything wrong with plastic bags made from a decent oil spill).

Think there might be something that can be done to help improve the environment? Forget it. Blair's the go to guy for an explanation about how raping and pillaging the environment is perfectly good fun.

These days it's a depressing slog through the relentless persecutory Blair's luddite reductionist vision of the world, but very so often, there's a lift to the spirits, as when Blair revived his war with the blog little green footballs.

Having abandoned right wing monomania in a quest for rationality, lgf is a favourite target of Blairites, but they play a tough kind of football in America. You see, in the world of Blair, a rigorous addiction to one line of thought, and a denunciation of anyone who wavers or deviates from the line, is as firm and authoritarian as was once managed by readers of Mao's little red book.

Tim Blair, Ignorant Slut was a recent lgf rejoinder to one of Blair's observations about anti-Israel comments on the site, which in turn, left the TB "IS" scrabbling for a retort, until he hit on the fiendish notion of calling lgf's Charles Johnson "agitated".

Wow. Blair deploys the full panoply of outrage with a vocabulary that would turn the other Johnson, Dr Samuel, green with envy.

Oops, we shouldn't say green with envy. Green's a naughty word. Perhaps Brown with envy would do.

Johnson maintained his agitation with a follow up:

Ignorant slut Tim Blair replies, and says I’m “agitated.”

Actually, there’s nothing agitated in this post. Blair’s just a right wing clown doing tricks for his Murdoch owned paper, and I couldn’t be less “agitated” at his continuing smear attempts—the correct word is “scornful.”

Blair's theological hair-splitting reminded me of the good old undergraduate days when it was always someone's job to work out who was the most ideologically pure in the team, and as a result everybody competed to be the purest of the pure. A bit like soap power commercials. Shift that ideological dirt, wash it down the drain.

This wasn't just a phenomenon of the left, though the left provided some of the funniest examples of the pursuit of purity, but as Blair proves, it's also an ongoing quest of the right, and of course if you pursue purity long and hard enough, you end right up your very pure fundament.

If you want a comprehensive example of Blair's compulsive obsessive personality, look no further than one of his most recent and elongated versions of his war with Johnson, centred on Barack Obama - Against Obama before he was for him.

Blair lists chapter and verse of sundry Johnson heresies and changes of position, proving that if nothing else Blair would have made an adept prosecutor for the Jesuits during the Inquisition. The point being of course that if heretics deviate and think for themselves or change sides, they become part of the great unwashed, outsiders who deserve to be sent off to some gulag of the mind, but only after they've been soundly thrashed for stepping outside the one true anointed church of thought.

Meanwhile, Blair gets "agitated" about accusations he might have something in common with American conservative right wingers of the wrong stripe:

Whatever. You’ll be correcting that lie about my “friends” Buchanan and Paul when, mate?

Yes, it's important to watch out for associations and affiliations, lest you stray into the ways of lickspittle fellow travellers with the impure.

Never mind, Blair continues on his merry way with his celebration of the destruction of the environment, as with this kind of reporting about the gulf oil leak, back when it was just a bit of fun, The President Needs More Birds:

But so far, not much of it (oil) on birds. The first oiled bird – an ignorant northern gannet – enjoyed a brief media career, and was later joined by a petrochemical-enhanced pelican, yet the overall oiled-bird toll remains impressively low. According to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, only 21 birds have required oil-related treatment. The Fort Jackson Wildlife Rehabilitation Center says it has cleaned a further eight. As Paul Mulshine writes:
The birds don’t seem to be doing that bad. It turns out birds can fly. Who knew?

UPDATE. Ted Turner hears from God:
“I’m not a real religious person, but I’m somewhat religious. And I’m just wondering if God is telling us he doesn’t want us to drill offshore.”

Yep, Murdoch hacks can be dipsticks and make jokes about birds being able to fly and not doing so bad and the bird count being obsessively low, and ignorant garnets hogging the limelight, in the standard way of hacks. Who knew? Who'da thought?

But if the garnet was ignorant, where does that leave Blair? Is it agitated to think of him as an ignoramus?

Blair's follow-up report started with this breezy opener in Hollywood to the Rescue:

Now that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has graduated from minor bird-botherer to full-scale petrochemical party, the Obama administration finally takes steps ...

Hey, it's party time in the gulf! Sniff that petrochemical stew up your nose ...

Naturally it's Obama's Katrina, and it's all the fault of environmentalists that drilling has ventured so far offshore.

Yes, it's much wiser to drill closer to shore so that the spill can reach land so much more quickly.

But perhaps Blair should be careful what he wishes for. It was a massive oil spill on Santa Barbara beaches back in January 1969, six miles off the California coast, which took eleven days to cap, which then led to a flurry of environmental protection bills, and to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. (more details here).

Lordy, it always strikes me as kinda funny, seeing the way everybody in the free market push gets out their quills and waxes lyrical about how government never does things right, and business is always more efficient, and the best thing government can do is get out of the way and let business get on with the job.

Until an oil spill happens, and then suddenly BP's not up to the job, and BP should get out of the way, and let government get on with the job, except Obama isn't doing anything, it's his Katrina, because government's not up to the job, and anyhow, why did regulation fail, never mind that we don't need regulation, because business is up to the job, and so send in the military, except that's government, except when it's privatised, because government isn't up to the job, and that's how you get the cowboys of Blackwater, and so on in a never ending downward spiral of self-defeating logic and contradiction ...

And that's how George Bush got the gig ... to prove government couldn't work.

Not to worry, Blair can be relied on to parrot the standard US conservative line on most issues, and reading him, it's easy to imagine that he would like to be an antipodean Andrew Bolt.

Sadly, the lesser Bolt lacks the intellectual muscle. Think about that for a moment, roll it around on your tongue. Tim Blair lacks the intellectual muscle to elevate himself to the level of an Andrew Bolt. Oh the infamy, the tragedy.

What brought on these reflections? Blair's one line joke yesterday about the environmental tensions between the UK and the USA over the oil spill, and BP's role in it, and goalkeeper Green fumbling so that the United States could score and so draw its game with the British team in the world cup (Naturally, An environmental conflict ends in a Green error).

No doubt Blair and his followers think this is incredibly clever, and possibly also cute. You know, Green as a word is not just inherently evil, it's inherently funny, in much the same way as Joe in On Our Selection found it funny to pick the wings off flies.

It is however also remarkably indicative of advanced mutations in thinking, showing how everything can be reduced to a mush of black and white.

Meanwhile, we wait with baited breath (well yours might be bated breath, but we've been reading Tim Blair) for Blair to turn on deviants like David Frum and David Brooks. You see, advanced thinkers in the Republican Party in the United States are well advanced in their quest for purity, with a litmus test for RNC members being given deep thought, and hopefully a clever test can weed out recalcitrants, shirkers and lickspittle revisionists. (GOP Heading to Purity Test Battle, GOP leaders adopt litmus test of values for candidates).

Meanwhile, Blair has given up on little green footballs for the moment, and is today deep in round footballs, blogging Australia v. Germany and delivering the immortal line "Maybe I'm pessimistic, but Australia could be running out of time now", and delivering up a World Cup quiz. Stick to this kind of football Mr Blair, unlike environmental matters, it requires less science and little art.

And now, since thinking about ideological purity and TB IS - even for a teeny weeny bit - is exceptionally tiring, here's a couple of bated breaths routines and a cartoon. First Shakspere:

What should I say to you? Should I not say
'Hath a dog money? is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?' Or
Shall I bend low and in a bondman's key,
With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this;
'Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last;
You spurn'd me such a day; another time
You call'd me dog; and for these courtesies
I'll lend you thus much moneys'?

Then Geoffrey Taylor's 1933 poem Cruel, Clever Cat:

Sally, having swallowed cheese
Directs down holes the scented breeze
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.

And now the cartoon. Maintain the purity of the line!