"You Just Can't Get The Staff These Days"

One Mike, claiming (no doubt truthfully) to write from inside the Palace of Westminister, has attracted the well-deserved ire of two regular contributors to the comments on this blog.

First, Old Labour Lag:

Poor Mike. No doubt he's some teaboy researcher who can afford to work here on next to no pay, possibly for his daddy.

How many times is it possible to lose someone? Here are a few examples:

"Max Shachtman, Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand"

Three times.

"David Frum, Mark Steyn, Conrad Black, Barbara Amiel"

Four times.

"its Trotskyism, its Straussianism, its Randianism, its Zionism (serious Evangelical scholars are not "Christian Zionists"), its hatred of WASPs and Ulster Scots, its neo-orthodoxy, its Americanist pseudo-Catholicism, and its roots in the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s"

At least eight times.

And the rest, of course.

But at least 15 times seems to be enough to be going on with. Poor Mike genuinely doesn't know what these words mean. He wouldn't even be able to pronounce several of them. Honestly, you just can't get the staff these days!

There the follows a significant narrowing of the field as to the identity of Old Labour Lag, whom I can assure that, yes, I certainly have "received the emails".

And then Old Durham Hack:

Leaving aside Polish bishops, American union-busting firms and so on, here are a few of the people and places metioned on this blog that Mike and his kind have certainly never heard of (with frightening possibilities or probablities in brackets):

Senator Jim Webb, Dr John Laughland, Saint-Just, Paul Gottfried, Immanuel Kant, Leon Trotsky, (V.I. Lenin), Matthias Brügmann, Hashim Thaci, Iain King, Whit Mason, (Flanders), (Northern Cyprus), Republika Srpska, Transnistria, Robert Cooper, Robert Kaplan, Cicero, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, Straight Left, (Rod Liddle), R.D. Laing, Jürgen Habermas, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Joschka Fischer, the Red Army Faction, Ulrike Meinhof, the Black Panther Party, Eldridge Cleaver, Tommie Smith, John Carlos, Lady Plowden, (Shirley Williams), Valerie Solanas, (Andy Warhol), Alexander Dubcek, de Tocqueville, (Brendan Barber), Dr John Logan, Stewart Acuff, the AFL-CIO, Unite, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Edmund Randolph, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Jesse James, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Penn, Beete Davises Jefferson Davies, D.W. Griffiths, (Tammy Wynette), Howard Hughes, Meriwether Lewis, Elihu Yale, Ted Williams, Warren Zevon , Murray “The Camel” Humphreys, James Earl Jones, (Colin Powell), the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, (Freud), the Bloomsbury set, Hermann Hesse, Peter Kellner, John Shelby Spong, President Tadic, Disraeli, Gladstone, Alexander the Great, Mahmud of Ghazni and the Ghaznavids, (Genghis Khan), Tamerlaine, (the Moghuls), Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

They know that they shouldn't be in the job, and wouldn't be if it were open to people without independent incomes.

They know that they have been educated beyond their intelligence on account of their privileged background.

And they know that they will only become MPs because Britain no longer has proper political parties, and wouldn't have had a chance in hell back in the days when proper parties still existed.

So they read something like this blog and lash out.

Yes, Mike, be afraid. Be very afraid.

I can do no better than to repeat as my own: they know that they shouldn't be in the job, and wouldn't be if it were open to people without independent incomes; they know that they have been educated beyond their intelligence on account of their privileged background; and they know that they will only become MPs because Britain no longer has proper political parties, and wouldn't have had a chance in hell back in the days when proper parties still existed.