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Sunday 27 May 2012

Daniel Hannan, unmasked?

I've only just caught up with the brouhaha over James Macintryre's broadside in the New Statesman. Having read Hannan's post twice, I still don't understand why Macintrye chose to use the R-word. In this case, Iain Dale is right: I don't buy Iain's distinction between political correspondents (good) and political commentators (bad), but that's another matter.

There's plenty of racism, overt and disguised, floating around in the conservative blogosphere, and it's depressing to see some respected journalists pandering to the bigots who spend their waking hours haunting comment sections and singing the praises of Enoch Powell. (I imagine that somewhere there's even a site devoted to the wit and wisdom of the late Tory grandee who's the subject of the post below.) Yet, as far as I can see, Hannan was making a reasonable observation about the opposition to Obama. Little Green Footballs has supplied photographic evidence of the racist sub-set among the people turning up at demos, but as Bonnie Greer has argued, paranoia has always been part of the emotional make-up of the GOP fringe.

Next Left's Sunder Katwala sums up:

So is it because he is black? Surely, sometimes, part of it is. But, perhaps somewhat more often, it is because he is liberal.

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