The Ministry Of Truth

T5 = titsup: who’dathunkit?

Nothing works, nobody knows what’s going on, and it cost a fucking fortune.

“A 21st Century gateway to Britain” indeed.

And who could possibly have foreseen that this would happen?

British Airways chief executive Willie Walsh today accepted full responsibility for the Heathrow Terminal 5 debacle, but insisted that he would not resign over the chaos that has delayed thousands of passengers at the flagship £4.3bn terminal.

Warning there would be further disruption this afternoon and into the weekend, Walsh said: “I am accepting responsibility that the buck stops with me.” But, asked if he was considering his own position, he said: “No, I am not.”

Why would he resign? He’s only accepting responsibility, after all, and people who do that don’t do that. Why don’t I understand how it works by now?

And still some people seem to think that this country will stage a successful Olympic Games in four years’ time…

Third world country, people. Third world country.

Don’t forget the lights when you leave.

8.55pm UPDATE

Driving back from work this evening I heard the listeners’ letters on Radio 4’s PM programme.

The first two letters made exactly the points I made in this post, using almost exactly the same words.

I’m turning into a Tory cunt, aren’t I?

Had I remembered that the movie Deja Vu brought together the unholy trinity of Tony Scott, Jerry Bruckheimer and Val Kilmer, it would not have made it onto my Lovefilm DVD rental list.

I say “remembered” because I suspect I read and heard reviews on its theatrical release in December 2006, made a mental note to avoid it at all costs and consequently didn’t cough up good money to see it.

I cannot recall witnessing such a grotesque waste of money for some time.  Shite, shite, shite, shite, shite, shite, shite.

Two hours of my life wasted.  Well, not entirely wasted - I drank a nice bottle of red and ate some Easter chocolate.

Inexplicably the Minister’s Wife wouldn’t let me eject the damned DVD after 30 minutes, as I suggested, but fulsomely agreed with me as the final credits rolled that the debacle we had just witnessed was indeed inexcusably bad on every level.  (If I’d known the aim of the evening was to expose ourselves to poor dialogue, predictable scripts, patchy acting and pedestrian directing I could have cut out the middle man, saved myself a couple of quid and just left ITV1 playing.)

Depending on which website one chooses to believe, the production budget for Deja Vu was either $75,000,000 or $80,000,000.

If Hollywood wants to produce and release such unadulterated fanny, why don’t they just point a digital camera at a random minge for two hours, project that onto a 40 foot high screen and donate the other $74,999,000 to charity?

Deja Vu grossed $181,000,000 in cinemas across the globe and another $40,000,000 in DVD sales in the US alone.  The Minister and his wife have five degrees between them, so what the fuck do we know?

While I’m spitting venom, it seems it may now be time to confess to my preposterous loathing of Diane Ernestine Earle Ross and everything she stands for.

Don’t get me wrong - I like a lot of music with which Diane Ross has been involved.  I Hear A Symphony, You Can’t Hurry Love, You Keep Me Hangin’ On, Love Child, Someday We’ll Be Together, Upside Down, Chain Reaction - these are seriously good pop records and there are at least another dozen Supremes/Ross tracks almost as good.

And yet, and yet.  Ross is at best a serviceable singer with limited range and a relatively weak voice - Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson were both technically much more proficient and could actually “do” emotion.  The only reason Diane Ross ended up front and centre as Diva Diana is because she was “do”-ing Berry Gordy.

The merest mention of Diane Ross on the TV or radio can send me into an involuntary Tourette’s-style rant that is both irrational and Pavlovian.

The reason for mentioning this is that one of my favourite websites, Popdose, this week published an article that helped me realise that I was not alone.

Berry Gordy is a powerful man. Not only did he found Motown Records, building a musical empire that allowed blacks to crossover into what had pretty much been a white-controlled music industry, but almost as amazing, he was able to convince a young Diana Ross that her crap doesn’t stink, and she has not deviated from that belief one iota over the past 45 or so years. In an industry of big egos, the one belonging to Miss Ross (remember, she must be addressed as such or you will be thrown out — and don’t you dare look her in the eyes!) is likely the biggest, and she has wielded it to not only obtain her huge success, but to build herself into a prick so immense that it would make porn stars gasp.

Now that, my friends, is what you call an opening paragraph.

While neither the best singer nor most attractive member of The Supremes, Ross did have one important thing up her sleeve, namely, Mr. Gordy’s penis. After unsuccessfully pursuing Smokey Robinson, Ross set her sights on (the married and 15 years older) Gordy. As the mistress of Motown’s founder, she was able to gain full power over the group, becoming its lead singer, getting its name changed to Diana Ross and the Supremes, and upstaging the other members, eventually leaving and employing the full power of the Motown promotional machine behind her solo career, while The Supremes were left to sputter out slowly over the course of the ’70s. Ross, meanwhile, ended up bearing Gordy’s child in 1971, but did not publicly acknowledge who the real father was for 22 years, until she released and was promoting her autobiography.

Bravo, Matthew Bolin!  I didn’t need anyone else to confirm what I’ve always thought (though I’ve always planned to be among the first to buy the long-since-written, honest-for-the-first-time Ross biographies that will emerge shortly after her death and she can’t sue anymore) but - on the grounds that there is safety in numbers and that it’s always nice to be proven right - genuinely, thank you.

Welcome to Minitrue 5.0, which was also Minitrue 1.0.  Trust your initial instincts - that’s what I always say.

Boris Johnson, Conservative candidate for the Mayoralty of London:

If we are going to expand cycling in London… we cyclists have got to obey the laws of the road.

Today’s Daily Mirror:

We’ve long known he hasn’t a clue which way to take his party, but it seems David Cameron can’t even point his bike in the right direction…

The Tory boss was spotted flouting the law by cycling the wrong way in a one-way street, through red lights and the wrong side of a bollard on his 30-minute trip to work.

Hapless Cameron was breaking the rules within minutes of leaving his Notting Hill home in West London for Westminster.

He sailed past a large red no entry sign even Mr Magoo would have noticed. Another clue was the huge arrows on the road pointing which way traffic should go.

Next to be ignored was a keep left beacon in the Mall. He veered off to the right…no change there then. Cam also hurtled over a toucan crossing, for cyclists and pedestrians, while the signal was red.

Outside the Commons, the 41-year-old spotted he was late, so to speed things up he went past a red light.

Whoopsie.

Oh, and if anybody says that the formatting of the site doesn’t work on their browsers, they can kiss my black ass: the site renders perfectly on Opera, the only browser that actually seems to understand CSS coding.

A Ghanaian woman who was removed from a Cardiff hospital where she was receiving cancer treatment and flown home after her visa expired has died.

Ama Sumani, 39, passed away in Accra, Ghana, hours after being told that friends and family had found doctors in the UK and South Africa to treat her.

They had also raised more than £70,000 from donations to pay for drugs which were not available in her home country.

Her friend Janet Simmons said: “She said she was too tired to fight.”

Ms Sumani, a widowed mother-of-two, died at around 1600 GMT on Wednesday in Korle-Bu hospital, in Accra, said Mrs Simmons.

She had been receiving kidney dialysis and treatment there after immigration officials removed Ms Sumani from the University Hospital of Wales in January.

But the drug she needed to prolong her life - thalidomide - is not available in Ghana.

Mrs Simmons, from Cardiff, who returned from spending a month in Ghana on Sunday, said they had just found a doctor in South Africa and another in the UK who would treat terminally-ill Ms Sumani with the drugs.

“We told her this morning but this afternoon she gave up,” she said.

A campaign to allow Ms Sumani to return to the UK for treatment and to raise funds to help her had been backed by people across the UK.

“The British people kept her alive all this time and we would like to thank them for their donations,” said Mrs Simmons.

The first notable use of ironic juxtaposition between a scene and its soundtrack was in the final scene of the James Cagney film Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931) wherein Cagney winds up his gramophone and selects an instrumental version of John Kellette’s Broadway classic I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, which then continues to play out during his unexpectedly violent death. The shock of the scene (and the subsequent notoriety of the film) was as much due to the jarring contrast with the traditional emotions associated with a showtune as it was to the brutality of the character’s execution (and consequent downbeat ending). Since then, the technique has been deployed with alacrity by many a director and with mixed results.

For one of the best examples of ironic juxtaposition, we have to turn to film makers who have made the confusion of genres and audience expectations into their own personal hallmark: the Coen Brothers. Their films might appear on their face to be firmly placed in clearly definable categories, whether it be film noir (Blood Simple (1984), Fargo (1996)) comedy (Raising Arizona (1987), The Big Lebowski (1998)) or period fresco (Barton Fink (1991), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)) but to lovers of their work, their voice is so unique (and so richly varied) as to be uncategorisable. None of the abovementioned films can be so easily nailed down. They play with audiences’ preconceptions of genres within all their films and continually mix and match different dramatic impulses to create a fully sensurramic experience for the viewer.

But this isn’t all playful nonsense or overt artistry. There is a deeply uncomfortable scene in the Coen’s latest, highly-decorated and engaged film No Country for Old Men (2007) wherein the psycopathic Anton Chigurh toys with an elderly gas station attendant and invites him to toss a coin for what the audience knows to be his life. The scene is satisfying because it provides the thrill of danger (the fear of death) with the quotidien humour of misunderstanding and the sadness intrinsic in the film’s title: the audience finds itself genuinely laughing, genuinely frightened and genuinely sad. The mix of emotions intended for the entire duration of the film is thus brought down to a micro-level.

But lest we forget ourselves, back to the SMIC. In the Coen’s uber-stylish Irish gangster film Miller’s Crossing (1990) Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) is a wanted man, and two men are despatched to dispose of him, but O’Bannon, who has just put on folk classic ‘Danny Boy’ and settled into bed with a cigar, is having none of it. A moment of pure pleasure and indulgence, quite apart from its virtuosic mise-en-scene, the sequence has suspense, slapstick humour, pathos and what amounts to ultraviolence, all underscored with the purest, sweetest of tunes. Enjoy.

A few random and entirely unconnected thoughts.

Top banana: Jonathan Coulton has sold out his London gig on Thursday night.

“If you don’t make to this one I’ll be back soon. Apparently there’s an audience over there. Who knew?“

The full judgment in the McCartney-Mills divorce is fascinating for the glimpse it gives into the lives of phenomenally wealthy people.  I have read it all unlike, I suspect, most of the “commentators” whoring themselves around the meeja today.  Mr Justice Bennett’s ruling is not only well reasoned and well written, he bent over backwards to be seen to be fair to both parties and achieved his aim with adroitness.

I don’t intend to rake over the ashes of this ghastly spectacle but I was impressed by the fact that though Bennett J pointed out some of Ms. Mills’ more lavish financial demands:

“She claims… £30,000 p.a. for equestrian activities (she no longer rides), £39,000 p.a. for wine (she does not drink alcohol)…”

even he felt it unnecessary to comment on one particular assertion:

“She says she helped him write songs.”

I’ve also caught up today with a couple of Joe Queenan’s recent The Vinyl Word columns for The Guardian, which are rarely less than excellent reads.  I loved one passage in his recent column about Otis Redding:

“Dock of the Bay, one of the only pop tunes of the 60s that has a significant whistling component, was co-written by Steve Cropper, one of the few living legends whose legend derives from something other than having been around for a long time.  Lead guitarist with the equally admired Booker T & The M-Gs, Cropper wrote Dock of the Bay with Redding, Knock on Wood with Eddie Floyd, and In the Midnight Hour with Wilson Pickett.  He is often identified as one of the greatest living guitarists, raising the question: if Steve Cropper is such a fabulous songwriter and one of the greatest living guitarists, how come Lenny Kravitz has all the money?”

Finally, how genuinely very sad it is to learn of Anthony Minghella’s sudden death at the terribly early age of 54.

I greatly liked David Puttnam’s tribute:

“He started as a writer, he was not a stylist as a director. He saw himself as a storyteller and his films were very well told, beautifully made and beautifully acted.”

One of the best writer-directors has gone and we just don’t have enough to lose a talent like Minghella’s so young.  My respects to his wife and children.

There are times when traditional hostilities should be put temporarily aside; this is such a time, as Peter Bradshaw’s conclusion deserves to be highlighted:

“With his passing, cultural life in this country has descended one or two IQ points.”

Spot on.

I am a little concerned.

This is the twelfth week of 2008.  Essentially, a quarter of 2008 has passed us by and the Minister’s record collection has not yet been enhanced.

The Minister last purchased a new album in December 2007.

While this would not necessarily be an unusual state of affairs for most people, the sheer volume of CDs cluttering up the Ministry means that I must have bought an average of around 100 albums each year for the past decade (and, in some years, far more than that).  While I’m not into John Peel territory I have, literally, thousands of CDs.

This year represents the thirtieth anniversary of me as a purchaser of pop music.  I genuinely can’t remember the first record I bought (and they were vinyl records in 1978) but every week I would sift the racks of cheap, ex-jukebox singles in Beeton’s newsagents for things that had been hits a month or two before.

I can’t claim to have been the coolest six-going-on-seven-year-old in the pre-Thatcherite East Midlands but I do remember buying Figaro, Matchstalk Men And Matchstalk Cats And Dogs, My Life (Billy Joel), Rivers Of Babylon/Brown Girl In The Ring, Y.M.C.A., Forever Autumn and - of course - the Grease soundtrack album, which I played incessantly all summer, and which led me to buy Olivia Newton-John’s A Little More Love at the end of the year.

(It’s crippling to admit this, incidentally.  I could have just lied through my teeth and claimed my shopping basket contained Ever Fallen In Love by The Buzzcocks, The Undertones’ Teenage Kicks, White Man In Hammersmith Palais by The Clash, Talking Heads’ Psycho Killer and Patti Smith’s Because The Night.  But I still stand by My Life, Y.M.C.A., Forever Autumn and Grease.  Quality control improved significantly in 1979: much to my mother’s horror I bought a Sex Pistols single - albeit a poor Eddie Cochran cover version with the by then very dead Sid on “vocals” - and, more acceptably, fell in love with Debbie Harry.)

There has been a bit of Ministerial downloading in 2008: new albums from Adele and The Feeling have already been dismissed (can you blame me?), the Duffy album is still under consideration (love the voice, not so sure about the material), as is the Goldfrapp album; but the only one certain to become a permanent addition to the Ministerial iPod is the Juno soundtrack.

(For the record - pun intentional - I tend to download things initially, listen to them a couple of times and then ditch the stuff I don’t like and buy the stuff I do.  While I don’t claim for one second that is anything other than unlawful under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, I would point out that it’s no different from what everyone did 40-50 years ago by availing themselves of listening booths in record stores before parting with their cash.)

I have a modicum of interest in hearing the Hercules and Love Affair album and as previously discussed I’ll give the R.E.M. album a whirl (in fact, an - ahem - “pre-release” of it is downloading as I type this post) but there’s nothing coming up that really excites me.

On top of that, I have voluntarily agreed to sort through the aforementioned CD-related clutter with a view to offloading about half of it.  Let’s face it, I haven’t actually played those Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Death Cab For Cutie CDs since the first week I purchased them and I could probably live without them.

A friend once said that his parents’ record collection ended in 1970.  That was the year in which he was born.  He realised that his parents probably had neither the money, the time or the energy to buy new music once he came along and they fell out of the habit.

Being without an heir, I don’t have the concern of Junior Ministers interfering with my music appreciation but a genuine thought occurs: at the age of 36, do I now basically have 90% of the music that will see me through the second half of my life?

I’m sure there will be things that come along from time to time that pique my curiosity.  And I hope some of the artists I already like will produce stuff in the future that I will also like.  And I expect that there’s already plenty of music recorded about which I am currently unaware and that I will stumble across in the future.

But seriously - is that it?  Have I been there and done that?  Am I - whisper this quietly - Radio 2’s target audience…?

One off the buzziest bees in the Minister’s bonnet at the moment - touched upon in my Jonathan Coulton post - is the whining of record labels and their mates in the meeja about how nobody is making any money anymore because of thieving scallywag downloaders and their love of free music.

Even the ordinarily redoubtable Miranda Sawyer missed the point about the public’s new found reluctance to pay for music in her article in February’s Observer Music Monthly.  However much record labels plead poverty, Sawyer’s own Observer article two weeks previously had quoted head of Polydor David Joseph pointing out:

“[I]n the UK last year… 140 million CDs were sold.”

If the average retail price of a CD is £8, that’s £1,120,000,000 in annual CD sales from our little island alone.  Add in sales revenue from the other 5.94 billion people on the planet and you’re almost talking about real money…

I have empathy with performers, songwriters and producers: they unequivocally deserve to be rewarded properly for their talents and, like everyone else, they should not have to tolerate the exploitation of their efforts.  Musicians’ Union research claims that the 90% of British professional musicians earn less than £15,000 a year.

Perhaps if the public - fleeced for decades by suits with fat expense accounts to feed (the very first CD I bought, on 17 October 1986, cost the 15-year-old Minister £14.99) - felt that the majority of their cash actually ended up in the pockets of the talent rather than the record label suits and the shareholders of multinational retailers, they might be more inclined to cough up.

People don’t want to pay more than a couple of quid for albums because most are padded out with sub-par filler of interest to nobody but completists.  The Album was born out of 60-year-old technology: one piece of 12-inch vinyl, holding a maximum of 23 minutes’ music on each side.

Despite successive technological innovations, the artificial construct that is the 45-minute album has prevailed because the music industry has been able to print money by re-packaging and re-selling the best back catalogues (God knows how many people - myself included - have bought Beatles albums time and again on vinyl, cassette and CD; still more - myself included - will buy them again as a re-mastered digital download) and occasionally chancing upon someone to make the cash registers ring for a couple of years.

While the planet occasionally throws up exceptional talents who can fill a succession of albums bursting at the seams with brilliance, the prosaic fact is that many of the greatest albums ever released contain filler tracks - and the overwhelming majority of albums fall far short of greatness.

The world is a richer place for Revolver’s 35 minutes, but can anybody claim with a straight face that The White Album (and yes, I know its title is The Beatles) would not be a better album if it had been pared back to one piece of vinyl?

How many of us now listen to entire albums from start to finish?  Given that digitisation has made it so easy for us to listen to what we want, when we want - and nothing more, unless we feel so inclined - how many of us sit through the entirety of Good Morning, Good Morning when A Day In The Life is waiting a click away?

If anything, the album’s continued dominance in recent years has exacerbated the downwards spiral of the album’s artistic worth.  Standard audio CDs can hold 80 minutes of music and artists and labels seem to think think they must cram every sector full of zeros and ones.  Albums now routinely run to 15 or more tracks when most artists can barely command their audience’s attention for more than three or four songs in succession.

Mary J. Blige may be one of those rare individuals who could sing the telephone directory and make it sound good, but her current album Growing Pains weighs in at 16 tracks and her last, The Breakthrough, contained an earache-inducing 18 - both are twice the length they should be.

Even genuinely classic albums can be turned into shiny Frisbees by the suits so wedded to their modus operandi: by all means re-master Rumours, Time Warner, but did the world really need the second disc of alternate versions that Fleetwood Mac rejected in 1977 for a reason?

As previously quoted in these pages, the recently deceased Atlantic Records producer Joel Dorn said:

“You make a record tomorrow that makes you feel like a Marvin Gaye record did 30 years ago, I don’t give a fuck how bad the economy is: people will buy that record.”

As with film studios, record labels grew complacent and bloated operating for decades on a scattergun approach that meant they inevitably happened across the occasional cash cow that would pay for their follies and excesses.  Until now they have not been forced to examine their business plan.  Now they have, and they’ve been found wanting.

Quality will always prevail over quantity.

There are not too many up sides to insomnia.

One of the few is the better class of radio content generally available in the middle of the night.

Between 2am and 3am on Tuesdays, Radio Five Live’s Up All Night programme features a technology magazine called Pods And Blogs.

Tuesday’s edition came from the SXSW (South by Southwest) “interactive festival” in Austin, Texas and featured an interview with Jonathan Coulton, one of the growing number of independent, unsigned musicians making a living from t’Internet despite - and take a deep breath before you read this, Mr. Record Company Suit - making most of his music available for cost-free and DRM-free download.

Coulton is a talented songwriter, a thoughtful person and deserves every success for demonstrating to the refusniks in the RIAA and its ilk that the digitization of music is not necessarily the end of the world or the end of income generation.

While he’s now largely charging $1 a song, Coulton gives away a lot of his music and it is legally copy- and distribute-able under a Creative Commons licence.  By inviting people to donate if they like his music, Coulton is proving that PEOPLE WILL PAY FOR MUSIC IF IT’S GOOD ENOUGH, something record labels simply cannot or will not grasp.

Kevin Kelly’s blog recently even set out a fucking business plan for these gimps.  Still they prefer to sue schoolchildren, though.

The show contained an excerpt from Coulton’s most popular song, Code Monkey, inspired by his previous job as a software engineer, which had the Minister almost choking with laughter at 2.30am.

Code Monkey get up, get coffee.
Code Monkey go to job,
Have boring meeting with boring manager Rob.
Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
But his output stink;
His code not functional or elegant -
What do Code Monkey think?
Code Monkey think maybe manager oughta write goddamn login page himself.
Code Monkey not say it out loud:
Code Monkey not crazy, just proud.

Here’s an acoustic rendition:

Enjoy Mr. Coulton, his website and his music.

And if you like it, pay for it.

He’s playing Dingwall’s in London a week tonight: tickets available here.

I am not instinctively a fan of the Clintons.  Bill is undoubtedly an excellent communicator but his judgment – political and ethical – too often appears questionable to consider him a great politician.  Nobody’s ever going to convince me that being gobbled off by a young woman and then “pleasuring” her with a cigar is anything other than inappropriate behaviour in the Oval Office.

The Minister’s Wife is rooting for the junior senator from New York when I can’t imagine a more foolish choice of candidate if the Democratic Party has anything other than a death wish in November’s US General Election.  Clinton is so abrasive that she cannot even command the majority support of her own party, let alone the country.  To pitch such a divisive figure into a fight against a relative moderate such as McCain is risible: 12 consecutive years of Republicanism is more than the world should have to bear.

That said, the Minister harbours significant doubts about the capabilities of the junior senator from Illinois, though they are largely on the grounds that anybody who actually wants to become President of the United States of America should be barred from standing.  Obama is certainly an excellent orator but – like the Neil Kinnocks and Charles Kennedys of this world – visibly wilts when he is cornered about details: he has yet to better Clinton in any of the seemingly endless series of debates that have taken place over the past six months.

Clinton’s success in the Ohio and Texas primaries yesterday was grounded in her campaign’s recent negative campaigning against Obama.  Without that, she lost 11 states on the bounce.  Once she adopted that tactic, she took three of the four states on offer yesterday.  Her message now seems to be: “he’s got no track record so you can’t trust him.”

I don’t like negative campaigning – like Posh Boy Dave’s approach to Opposition, it offers obstruction without proffering an alternative – but to quote Nancy Botwin: “Oh, glass-house-dwelling person…!”

Senator Clinton does have a track record.  She should be judged against that track record.  That track record is not desperately impressive.

Despite apparently being the cleverest little girl in her class, she failed the District of Columbia bar exam.  As a result she moved to Arkansas with her husband-to-be, became a tutor at the state University and then worked as a private practice attorney for a firm in Little Rock, specialising in intellectual property and family law (not the most obvious legal bedfellows).  She was appointed a partner in 1979.  Throughout, she remained an activist within the Democratic Party and became First Lady of Arkansas when Bill Clinton was elected Governor.

Some might say a conflict of interest arose where the State of Arkansas was a client of the law firm in which the First Lady of Arkansas was a partner – indeed, that charge became a major part of the Whitewater controversy that dogged Bill Clinton’s first term as President and saw Hillary become the first First Lady to be subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury.

Some might say that a partner of a law firm with major clients such as Wal-Mart and TCBY should know better than to become, simultaneously, a member of the board of directors of, er, Wal-Mart and TCBY.

I couldn’t possibly comment.

When her husband became President, he appointed her to chair a task force on healthcare reform.  Despite both chambers then having Democratic majorities, the task force’s recommendations failed to receive enough support within Congress even to qualify for a vote.  By her own admission, this failure was in part down to her own political naivety.

While a senior at Wellesley College in 1969, Hillary Rodham wrote a thesis entitled “There Is Only The Fight…”: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.  Student Hillary received an A grade for her thesis, the subject of which was the modus operandi of radical activist Saul Alinsky.  When Bill Clinton came to national prominence, the thesis became of interest to his political opponents.

In the first weeks of his Presidency, the White House requested Wellesley College not to publish or show the thesis to anyone.  Wellesley College complied with this request, passing a new rule in its constitution restricting access to the thesis of any sitting President or First Lady.  The very making of this request made the thesis all the more attractive: after all, why would the White House seek to suppress a document unless its content would be politically damaging?  After Clinton left the White House, the thesis came back into the public domain.  It proved a damp squib, containing nothing of political sensitivity.  Even her own political science professor at the time and a regular Clinton donor, Alan Schechter, was moved to comment:

The more you hide something, the more people will want it.  It was a stupid political decision.

In 2000, an Independent Counsel found that there was substantial evidence that Hillary Clinton was involved in the firing of White House Travel Office employees and that she had made “factually false” statements, though there was insufficient evidence to prosecute her.  A series of other investigations into her behaviour and potential conflicts of interest were held during her husband’s eight-year Presidency; while none of these made further criticisms, it is hard to conclude that she is anything other than a lightning rod for controversy.

Having become a Senator, she voted in 2002 for the invasion of Iraq; she was still so supportive of Dick, Don & Dubya’s Iraqi Adventure in early 2005 that she co-sponsored legislation to increase the size of the US Army by 80,000.  By year end, however, she began the long backtrack that culminated in the admission a few days ago that if she could withdraw that 2002 vote, she would do so.  By 2007 she was voting against Dubya’s “Surge” and for a bill directing him to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq (a bill he veoted).

Political expediency?  Who knows?  It wouldn’t be the only time.  After all, down the years, Clinton has consistently backed the North American Free Trade Agreement – something her husband passed into law during his Presidency.  Yet she’s spent the past three weeks disowning NAFTA, which many Ohioans apparently believe is responsible for the state’s higher-than-national-average unemployment levels, and criticising Obama for supporting it.

A couple of weeks ago, her campaign allegedly leaked a photograph of Obama wearing traditional Somali dress while on a visit to Somalia some years ago.  Quite why this should be something worthy of leaking, I don’t know.  Perhaps it’s because traditional Somali dress looks vaguely like traditional Arab dress – and all us Rednecks know that them there Arabs are The Enemy.  Perhaps the passing resemblance to Arab dress plants the idea in people’s minds that Obama’s a Muslim (and Muslims have now supplanted the Russians as the baddies in Hollywood movies), when in fact he’s a practising Christian.  Again, who knows?  But it’s a nasty insinuation either way.

And it’s taking the piss for her to criticise her opponent for being low on detail and high on rhetoric when she delivers speeches like she did in Ohio last night:

We all know that these are challenging times. We have two wars abroad. We have a recession looming here at home. Voters faced a critical question - who is tested and ready to be Commander-in-Chief on day one? And who knows how to turn our economy around?  Because we sure do need it.

…Americans don’t need more promises. They’ve heard plenty of speeches. They deserve solutions and they deserve them now.

…I think we’re ready for health care, not for just some people or most people, but for every American. I think we’re ready for an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top, but every single hard-working American who deserves a shot at the American dream. I think we’re ready to declare energy independence and create millions of green collar jobs. We’re ready to reach out to our allies and confront our shared challenges. We’re ready to end the war in Iraq and win the war in Afghanistan. And we’re past ready to serve our veterans with the same devotion that they served us.

Protecting America is the first and most urgent duty of the president. When there’s a crisis and that phone rings at 3:00a.m. in the White House, there’s no time for speeches or on-the-job training. You have to be ready to make a decision.

…Together, we’re going to make history. …This is America, and we do believe you can be anything you want to be, and we want our sons and our daughters to dream big. I have big dreams for America’s future. The question is not whether we can fulfill those dreams, it’s whether we will. And here’s our answer: yes, we will.

We will do what it takes, and we will once again make the kind of progress that America deserves. We’re going to protect our country and preserve our constitution. We’re going to lead with our values. We will reach out to those on the margins and in the shadows because that’s what we do in America. We break barriers, we open doors, we make sure every voice is heard. Together, we will turn promises into action, words into solutions, and hope into reality.

Tell me – where’s the policy there?

Senator Clinton has some admirable traits – she’s been a consistent activist for child welfare, education and universal healthcare – but she is one of the most flawed characters to run for the Presidency in recent years.  She polarises opinion.

The “experts” claim that, barring something weird happening, Senator Clinton will go into this summer’s Democratic Convention with fewer delegates and a smaller share of the popular vote than Senator Obama.  They say that the only way she could secure the party’s nomination would be through the weighted votes of “super delegates” inside the party.

While she’s given enough to the Democrats down the years to be entitled to call in some favours, to do so and – in the process – overturn the results of a six-month-long exercise in democracy (however arcane its rules) would lay her open to precisely the same charges of electoral fraud that accompanied Bush’s theft of the 2000 General Election.  Such a back room fix would represent no mandate at all and, I fear, backfire spectacularly on the Democrats.

In opting for McCain, the Republicans – by accident or design – are promoting a candidate with bipartisan appeal, who will make up for those Christian fundamentalists he loses by picking up conservative Democrats repulsed by some of the things Senator Clinton and her husband did when last in the White House.

Senator Obama, on the other hand, seems to be energising sectors of the American electorate ordinarily prone to democratic apathy – black men and young voters.  If Obama does prevail, he will pick up most (though not all) of Clinton’s votes; Clinton would not, however, pick up most of his – particularly now she’s running a smear campaign.

Obama is the only viable Democratic contender, however hard he is going to have to work to espouse some real policy rather than hifalutin rhetoric, however dirty he’s going to have to get his hands over the next month pointing out his immediate opponent’s many flaws, and however difficult he finds the detail.

Get on with it, Barack.  Get over it, Hillary.

Move on.