Day 2484: Thunderballs Up

Saturday:


Today, children, "Sesame Street" was brought to you by the letters "W" and "W" and by the number "3".

Allegedly, when President Billary-Hillary's team left the White House in January 2001, they HILARIOUSLY sabotaged all of the keyboards, taking away the letter "W"s. Clearly, the current bunch have a similar jape in mind that will leave incoming President Hillary-Billary in need of "W"s in ABUNDANCE!

This is because the Monkey-in-Chief is now so CRAZED that he is threatening World War part Three against Iran.

This was supported by the ACTUAL President, Darth Cheney.

And Lord Blairimort was in town too, to deliver a WARNING from HISTORY: he compared today's events to the March of Fascism in the 1930's. Remember how a FAR-RIGHT ideology swept a DERANGED LUNATIC into power, allowing him to OVERTURN DEMOCRACY and, using an ALLEGED threat to his nation's SECURITY allied to RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY, started to INVADE OTHER COUNTRIES.

It is all so obvious! Finally, Lord Blairimort understands… hang on, he's talking about the OTHER SIDE!

The SERIOUS development over Iran's nuclear programme seem to be that the balance of power INSIDE Iran (by which I mean who is FLAVOUR of the MONTH with supreme religious authority Ayatollah Khammeni) has tipped further towards President Armageddon-jab, resulting in the resignation of Mr Ali Laryngitis.

Not that Mr Laryngitis could be described as a "MODERATE", but at least he could be described as "SANE", and – maybe even more importantly – willing to negotiate. You may remember that it was his intervention that led to the release of captured British sailors at Easter time.

The Iranians aren't STUPID. But they are ISOLATED and surrounded by – as they see it – dangerous and quite-possibly-nuclear-armed rivals backed by Western Powers (India, Israel and now Iraq, and that's just sticking to the "I"s on the list!) You can bet that the RELIGIOUS differences do not help either. This makes them – for all their POSTURING – frightened. And frightened people do silly and dangerous things. (e.g. the US Senate voting for the PATRIOT act!)

It is PROBABLY true that Iran is supporting TERRORISTS to try and drive America (oh, and Britain, as though we actually count) out of Iraq – just like America backed the Mujahideen in their fight to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan. And it is ALSO probably true that Iran would like to obtain "The Bomb" – on its own, the differential treatment meted out to Iraq and North Korea would make that look like an entirely sensible project!

Thanks to our own actions, we look HYPOCRITICAL when we condemn behaviour in Iran that we ourselves are either party to it, or overlook when our allies do it. (Has ANYONE said that Israel just randomly BLOWING UP bits of Syria might be, just might be, a bit wrong? Not that we want Syria to have atom bombs any more than we want Iran to, and I am sure we are all VERY GRATEFUL to the Israeli Air force for putting a stop to it, and hope that their bombs haven't scattered radioactive material all over the Middle East, but you can – I hope – see that by implicitly CONDONING that sort of thing, our protests to Iran about them giving IUD's to insurgents might sound a little bit HOLLOW.)

The government of Iran is neither particularly NICE nor particularly SAFE. We need to work hard to PERSUADE them that another path will be better for them as well as for us. But calling them "Nazis" is just childish. And threatening them with FIERY NUCLEAR APOCALYPSE is just downright BONKERS!


And anyway, it turns out that the Americans don't even know where their OWN nuclear weapons are!

This is the sort of thing that gets you SUED by Mr Kevin McClory! In developments sounding SUSPICIOUSLY SIMILAR to the plot of the 1965 James Bond film, armed nuclear weapons were loaded onto an American bomber and flown across the country by the unsuspecting crew. On landing, the removal of the payload was supervised by a gentleman seen stroking a white cat…

Day 2286: The Best of News; the Worst of News

Thursday:


No sooner do we have the GOOD NEWS that the Iranians have released our sailors and marines, than we get the TERRIBLY BAD NEWS that four more of our soldiers have been exploded in Iraq.

Both of these stories in their contrasting relief and horror remind us that our armed forces are brave and loyal and doing the very best that they can. But that we should NOT have sent them out there in the first place and that so long as we make them stay in a dangerously unstable region then we are making the situation worse and not better.


For a week, the Iranians put our people onto the television one at a time to “confess” and “apologise”, milking it for all that they could, and once they had got all the propaganda they thought that they could get, they go for a surprise release to make themselves look even more like the good guys.

It is probably more complicated than that, of course. There are factions within Iranian politics that we do not properly understand. Although Mr Ahmadinejad is President and sort of in charge, the real authority comes from the RELIGIOUS powers, under supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Another key figure is the spokesperson for the Supreme National Security Council, Mr Ali Larijani, and he gave an interview to Channel Four news during the week. That was when he said that the British sailors were NOT going to be put on trial.

You might guess that once President Armageddonjab heard that a SHOW TRIAL was off the cards, he decided that his EASTER GIFT would be the next best way to get a final PR stunt out of the crisis, before it started to look to the rest of the world like Iran was just holding the sailors as HOSTAGES.

I asked my daddies why Iran would think that they could get away with forcing the sailors and marines to tell fibs on television. After all, we were bound to find out what really went on as soon as they were released and allowed to tell of their ORDEAL.

(Funnily enough, the thing that I thought was most insulting – and I mean insulting to ME with my Western ideals; I was sure even then that the sailors themselves had worse things to worry about – was that when they put Leading Seaman Faye Turney on the telly, they took away her uniform and made her wear a headscarf. Just think if we have made an Iranian woman appear WITHOUT a headscarf! They were totally rubbishing our belief that Ms Turney is completely equal to the job of being a frontline sailor. And that was WRONG!)

My daddies pointed out to me that while we here in Britain were NEVER going to believe the Iranian version, it wasn’t US that the Iranian government was trying to convince.

Iran has now dismissed the sailors’ version, calling it “staged” and “theatrical propaganda”. (Which, oddly enough, reminds me of the Labour complaining about the police being “theatrical” when they arrested Ms Ruth Turner. I wonder, from whom have the Iranians been getting their propaganda lessons?)

So, now we have two sets of televised statements and how can people be expected to tell the difference between OUR propaganda and THEIR propaganda?

Thanks to Lord Blairimort in the House of Commons and Mister Alistair Henchman and the dodgy dossier and the downloaded dossier, people have every reason to believe that the British government tells LIES. Never mind that we have a free press that can dig the dirt and usually ends up finding out when the government fibs, our reputation for honesty has been trashed.

So, the people in the Middle East have been given a SHOW AND TELL that says: “look how good and how put upon we are here in Iran; we are your friends and the West is your enemy.”


There are also those COMPLETE COINCIDENCES that an Iranian diplomat held hostage in Iraq has suddenly been released, and that the Americans have suddenly allowed the Iranians to have consular access to several people that the US was holding in Iraq on allegations of helping terrorists.

Now, actually, since NOT letting our British consular officials have access to the captured sailors was one of the things that we thought Iran was VERY WRONG for doing, then it is only right that we should tell the Americans that they have to let Iran have consular access when things are the other way around. So, even if it had nothing to do with our sailors, then it is GOOD that this has happened.

As for the diplomat being released, that is probably a good thing too. Let us just hope that it was NOT because the British government paid a ransom on the Iranians’ behalf.

And the worst thing is that we are GIVING all of this PR to Iran as a GIFT, just by all the dumb things we have done ever since the Monkey-in-Chief persuaded Lord Blairimort that flattening Iraq with an army was the best way to “spread democracy”.

It IS all about hearts and minds – and this week, they’re all being won by the religious ideologues in Iran.