Paul,Good article on hypocrisy here by Nick Timothy (who seems a lot better after leaving No 10 than before...). People delight in attacking Trump and America, yet overlook equal or worse faults in others be they in the west or elsewhere.I don’t know if you saw the Emily Maitlis interview of an American journalist on news night a couple of nights ago when Maitlis was so sneers about trumps visit and implied that he shouldn’t have been allowed. The journalist responded by saying that he was here as a representative of the US to commemorate D day, when we errr actually were fighting Nazis.A lot rings true to me in this article over the uncritical double standards of many on the left of politics, and that includes many posters here.I agree with many that trump has some unfortunate aspects about him, but this groupthink hysteria is saddening to see, and in the end only increases polarisation...https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/06/05/lefts-trendy-anti-americanism-reeks-hypocrisy/It’s behind a paywall so here are some excerpt So:-“But the fashionable dislike of America is not only stupid, it’s hypocritical. Four years ago, when Xi Jinping came on a state visit, Jeremy Corbyn ignored China’s many human rights abuses and donned white tie for the banquet. There was no insulting blimp above London, no hateful placards and no milkshakes”“Germany is often held up as America’s antithesis and a beacon of light. Read Angela Merkel’s speech at Harvard last week, in which she attacked President Trump and warned about climate change, and you can see why.But consider the facts. Since 2000, America has reduced its carbon emissions by 16 per cent. Germany’s have fallen by just 10 per cent. It is not America that relies on coal for 39 per cent of its electricity generation, but Germany. Of Europe’s top 10 carbon emitters, seven are German power stations.”“The double standards abound. While many rail against “corporate America”, there was remarkably little blowback against Volkswagen when it was found to have rigged emissions testing for its diesel cars. While some Brits fight US culture wars as if they were American themselves, they ignore the fact that Merkel personally resisted same-sex marriage in Germany. They ignore the German law that purposefully restricts advertisements and public information about abortion services.”“And while everybody speculates feverishly about Trump’s links to Russia, one politician certainly in the pay of Moscow is the former German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder. In one of his last acts in office, in September 2005, Schröder approved the construction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. Within three months, he joined Nord Stream AG, the firm in charge of the project and a subsidiary of Gazprom, the state-owned Russian company. He also sits on the board of another state-owned Russian energy giant, rosneft”
Mike Warman ● 2715d