Why has Liberal Conspiracy dropped its quality threshold to offer us this startling piece of non-analysis?

just asking

What point are you trying to make exactly? As far as I can see, TimJ wasn’t being humourless until you started deliberately ignoring the humour and the point he was trying to make.

If you’re annoyed about the way some on the Right accuse the Left of being po-faced, it’s usually in relation to that subset of the Left who will, for example, read Harry Potter and then claim it’s sexist/racist/classist/whatever while most people are thinking “it’s just a kids’ story book!”. That doesn’t mean those analysing the story are necessarily wrong, it’s just that they’re perhaps seen as taking seriously something that’s actually quite lighthearted.

(etc.)

I know that I’d prefer to provoke, and even offend, rather than be pitied for sloppy thought and lame expression.

And the rest!

Trouble is, you po-faced righties keep walking straight into it – and you don’t like it one little bit when someone pulls it on you, do you?

Poor po-faced, humourless righties.

Anyway, I’m shocked, absolutely shocked that the right-wing press have not made a big deal about this. And we thought they were interested in EU affairs.

God, I love the internet. So much potential gleefully squandered by petty spats and deliberate missing the point. Much like the EU, really…

Nor am I sold on the idea that a good war record was necessarily a good training for being Prime Minister. After all, since the War, until Thatcher, Wilson was the only one without it. How useful was Eden’s war record in making his a successful premiership? Since we no longer have conscription, can there be such a thing as a qualified Prime Minister?

Do you?

OK: so you didn’t mention gratuitously that the Baroness was a woman. How else could we have guessed such a shocking fact? So, is she a chap? What other point were you hoping to make? Consider all the poor little electrons that were exhausted bringing that detail to public attention.

Tim J @ 3:112 pm:

Well, you rose to the bait. But, since successful trolling needs fundies, there’s no chance of that here? Yes?

Personally I recognise that Callaghan’s two decades in the Civil Service, his war service, and uniquely having held all of the other three Great Offices of State qualified him. I would also suggest that Ted Heath’s witness of the Nuremburg Rally, meeting the Nazi leadership, seeing Republican Barcelona, commanding an artillery battle in the advance into Germany (and supervising an execution party) coloured his judgement for the better.

Might one further consider the implications of “any Brit, but particularly a massively inexperienced one”.

Now, how would that play with, oh … say an incoming Prime Minister whose sole experience outside Westminster might amount to PR-puffery for a failing TV station? Or an ex-Selfridges shop-boy suddenly advanced to running the national exchequer?

For one who vaunts his own expertise in trolling, this is pretty thin stuff. Must try harder.

There was no such emphasis. Read the sentence again. The basic premise for your display of smartarsery is simply wrong. If anybody is looking a silly willy-waver here, it’s you.

“an incoming Prime Minister whose sole experience outside Westminster might amount to PR-puffery for a failing TV station”

Yep, the Cameron govt will be as pathetically subserviently Atlanticist as the Brown and Blair ones. At what point are you telling us something we don’t already know?

There’s obviously something wrong with Europeans.

Might one further consider the implications of “any Brit, but particularly a massively inexperienced one”.

Now, how would that play with, oh … say an incoming Prime Minister whose sole experience outside Westminster might amount to PR-puffery for a failing TV station? Or an ex-Selfridges shop-boy suddenly advanced to running the national exchequer?

But then, having read in the first paragraph of the head piece that the topic was Baroness Ashton, I was intrigued by the emphasis in the fourth paragraph that she might be a woman. Now: I was emphatic that such a usage could not, ever, conceivably, possibly be chauvinist or misogynist, so I went about my daily business. I drop by here later and find a couple of others taking umbrage that I did so imply. How could I make myself clearer? After all, we don’t want to give the impression that this is just a bunch of little boys playing with themselves, do we?

Thinking about this a second time, it strikes me that this is service to Washington rendered by Britain in its capacity as 51st state. Hillary was very effusive on the radio this morning, and you might interpret that as the pleasure of a Secretary of State who has as good as got a member of her own State Department staff into the post. With a Brit at the helm – any Brit, but particularly a massively inexperienced one – the US can effectively nip in the bud any tendency for the EU to develop a seriously independent foreign affairs & security policy line.

I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out that I was satirising Anglo-French relations in the cause of highlighting the only interesting potential outcome of appointing a Belgian boring even by domestic standards, and someone who is not even the most famous person in her own family to the two ‘most important’ positions in the EU.

If you want it shorn of all amusing, interesting and non-essential language:

The British have always sought to block the French from taking the financial commissioners position, because the British believe that a primary French objective is lessening Britain’s comparative advantage in the financial sector. Part of the deal in appointing the President and High Rep to non Franco-German candidates appears (according to the French press, Bloomberg and Sarkozy himself) to be that the French will now get this commissionership. If they use this to push through the regulations on hedge funds that they have been pushing for over a year then it will lead to a significant problem for the British Government.

Clear?