Tim Blair and Bolt the comic dog are borrowing so much stuff from each other, it’s like two lovers turning up in each other’s clothes. One recent item they both loved:

The London Times, five hours ago:

Al Gore today compared the battle against climate change with the struggle against the Nazis.

And subsequently rewritten:

Al Gore invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill today by encouraging political leaders to follow the example of Britain’s wartime leader and unite their nations to fight climate change.

Of course The Times did that, Timandrew (is there a Brangelinesque duonym here? Tandrew? Andrim? Timbolt?). As its boss — and yours — proudly boasted a couple of years ago, after his green conversion, “green messages will be inserted into News Ltd news stories” — and getting Ozone Man out of a breach of Godwin’s law is exactly the sort of propagandistic swoosh he had in mind. Let’s face it, if you had any integrity you’d resign from an organisation so committed to green propaganda.

The recent unrest in Iran has been put to good use by at least one dishevelled half-bearded fanatic — Christopher Hitchens, emerging from his spider-hole to claim in Slate that the developing rebellion in Iran was sparked off by … the sight of voting in Iraq! So that odd million or so did not die in vain! Hitchens lectures those who make easy distinctions between the rural poor and urban classes, which are malleable “as any good Marxist knows…”.

Actually, as any half-bright goon knows, the Iranians had experience of voting … in Iran in the 1950s, before the UK and the US destroyed it, installing the Shah, and beginning the cycle that would lead to the first triumph of political Islamism in 1979. If anything, the Iraq war delayed political change in Iran, convincing many to vote for a hardliner like Ahmadinejad, even though they didn’t support his domestic policies.

If any external event nudged things in Iran it was surely Obama’s Cairo speech, which re-assured some Iranians that there was no longer a lunatic in the White House, whom they needed to match with their lunatic. Or a sanity clause, as any good Marxist knows …

The Right’s confusion over foreign unrest continues. Having set the bar with a demand that President Obama unthinkingly endorse those “breathtakingly brave” folks in Tehran, US flagship the National Review was less persuaded by larger anti-coup protests in Honduras. But that is nothing compared to their disdain for the Uighurs:

“Hard to Believe the Lovable Uighurs Could Be Involved in Terrorism . . . [Andy McCarthy] even though the ones we were holding at Gitmo were trained in al-Qaeda-affiliated camps.

The Wall Street Journal (as flagged in the NRO web briefing) reports on rioting in China by Uighur “students” that has left scores dead and hundreds wounded. The “students,” described elsewhere in the story as from a “predominantly Muslim ethnic group [which has] long chafed at restrictions on their civil liberties and religious practices imposed by a Chinese government fearful of political dissent,” expressed their dissent by torching cars and buses, as well as — according to accounts of some witnesses to state-controlled media — rampaging “with big knives stabbing people” on the street.

No reason for non-Muslims in Bermuda, Palau, or the US to worry, though. The lovable Uighurs are merely trying to address “economic and social discrimination.” Once they get social justice, I’m sure they’ll stop.

Great to have that state-run media tell it as it is. China is rapidly destroying the autonomy of Xin Jiang by settling Han Chinese, to make Uighurs a permanent minority. The Uighur language is banned, and 15,000 people have been detained without trial in the last two years. Han violence against Uighurs often goes unpunished. So why is the right so disdainful?

Simply because the first — and so far only — releasees from Guantanamo were eighteen Uighurs, universally judged to be no threat, now in Bermuda and Palau, and emblems of the Bush administration’s racist indifference to the waste of life represented by Gitmo. How can this be squared with “western values”? By portraying the Uighurs as a race of brigands, unworthy of sympathy. Chinese Serbs, as it were. Those Iranian kids are the good guys until we need them to bomb them, when …. etc.

In TV, the Peter Luck principle says that you should never allow yourself to be covered for by someone who makes it clear how much better the show would be if someone else were doing it. Bad news for Miranda Devine, that her usual spot was filled by a flawlessly funny and stylish piece by Annabelle Crabb on the right-wing boy crush on Julia Gillard — a reminder that broadsheet op-ed doesn’t have to be the humourless, joyless, Pravdesque diatribes that people like Devine, Gerard Henderson and Planet Janet specialise in. The “most read” stats, bear this out too, showing that Crabb not only made the top five – rare for an op-ed piece — but managed to knock a Jacko story out of the top three:

Top Five News Articles

  1. Michael Jackson farewelled in star-studded ceremony
  2. Jacksons argued over Paris speech: report
  3. The forbidden allure of Red Julia
  4. Jackson ‘riddled’ with needle marks: reports
  5. Supermarket giants checked out, found wanting

If anything demonstrated the delusional nature of the geniuses running newspapers, it’s been the SMH’s insistence on stuffing its op-ed pages with the pleasureless paranoid dross of the conservatoriat. Indeed, if you graphed circulation decline and conservatoriat op-ed presence by page area over the past ten years you would get a near perfect match. Devine, Henderson, Duffy, Sheehan, and the great ur-beast MacGuinness — all afflicted with obsessive-conservative disorder, a variant of Hillaire Belloc’s definition of “puritanism” as the “haunting fear that somewhere, someone is happy”.