I have arrived at a disturbing political conclusion.
I was skimming through the thing from the White House to Pelosi and others about impeachment https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6459905-White-House-Letter-to-Pelosi-Impeachment.html. It makes a lot of grandiose and frankly unlikely and in some cases unhinged statements, all about impeachment not being constitutional and so on.
Earlier I was reading the unattributed briefing from Number 10 https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/10/how-number-10-view-the-state-of-the-negotiations/ about how they would go around bullying European countries individually, even though, leaving aside the morality of that, those countries would not be individually negotiating for deals with the UK anyway.
In both cases, these were documents or statements that bear little relation to reality and it is unlikely that their authors can have been ignorant of that. But in both cases they read well with the political base they are aimed at. Indeed everything from johnson and Cummings has been aimed at creating a story that Sun readers and their ilk will understand even when the intended EU recipients of these communications cannot have been expected to be convinced by them.
Then I realised something: remember the old story about two guys running from a tiger? One of them stops to put his trainers on, the other says 'You can't expect to outrun the tiger just by putting trainers on' and the first one says, 'I don't have to outrun the tiger!'
I think the new politics is like that. Everything they do, everything they say, they have realised that at no point does it have to be effective in the real world, or to convince any intended recipient or work in any legal system.
They do not need to outrun the tiger. Welcome to the new politics of Nikeocracy.
I was skimming through the thing from the White House to Pelosi and others about impeachment https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6459905-White-House-Letter-to-Pelosi-Impeachment.html. It makes a lot of grandiose and frankly unlikely and in some cases unhinged statements, all about impeachment not being constitutional and so on.
Earlier I was reading the unattributed briefing from Number 10 https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/10/how-number-10-view-the-state-of-the-negotiations/ about how they would go around bullying European countries individually, even though, leaving aside the morality of that, those countries would not be individually negotiating for deals with the UK anyway.
In both cases, these were documents or statements that bear little relation to reality and it is unlikely that their authors can have been ignorant of that. But in both cases they read well with the political base they are aimed at. Indeed everything from johnson and Cummings has been aimed at creating a story that Sun readers and their ilk will understand even when the intended EU recipients of these communications cannot have been expected to be convinced by them.
Then I realised something: remember the old story about two guys running from a tiger? One of them stops to put his trainers on, the other says 'You can't expect to outrun the tiger just by putting trainers on' and the first one says, 'I don't have to outrun the tiger!'
I think the new politics is like that. Everything they do, everything they say, they have realised that at no point does it have to be effective in the real world, or to convince any intended recipient or work in any legal system.
They do not need to outrun the tiger. Welcome to the new politics of Nikeocracy.
