Author Archives: Alan

Post your discoveries of BBC fake news on this open thread…..

The BBC is flooding the airwaves with pessimistic ‘analysis’ of the supposed Brexit fallout as it seeks to create a mood of despair and looming disaster #DuetoBrexit.

It’s not just what it reports, most of it false, but what it omits from its news bulletins that is designed to mislead the viewer and keep up the charade that Brexit is leading to armageddon of all  kinds be it economic, social or cultural.

We’ve already noted the series of programmes that are outright EU propaganda, ‘The New World’ and ‘Imagining the truth’, indeed today we had another serving of the propaganda forced down our throats as an ardently pro-globalisation fan was commissioned to tell us why globalisation must continue…with all that entails…such as open borders and free movement of labour.  He blatantly refused to accept the answers given to him and announced, in contradiction to what had been said, that all his guests thought globalisation was good, it might have a few problems but it was good.  He told us in his trail for the programme that he was seeking to stop the backlash against globalisation…no bias there then.

What else did the BBC bring us recently?  We know they hid the very good news about the manufacturing PMI figures in the darkest obscurity of the Business pages and kept the news off the airwaves when a slight drop in the same figures had previously resulted in headline news all day.  The promising Service PMI figures released a few days later were similarly relegated to the same obscurity…anyone heard that Services were performing well?

What did hit the frontpage?  Oh yes, as we’ve noted, the pro-EU Jamie Oliver’s Italian restaurants closing #duetoBrexit…even though that is complete tosh….the restaurants were roundly panned as overpriced and badly run in 2015.

What didn’t hit the BBC frontpage?  The Times’ front page announced that ‘Britain has world’s top economy after Brexit’.  You’d think the BBC would be trumpeting such a fantastic result from the rooftops as a sign of confidence in Britain…but no…it doesn’t even mention it on the website.  There is also the report that the Bank of England and the ‘expert’ economists failed miserably to forecast the outcome of the Brexit vote and on the Today programme it wheeled in EU fan Vicky Pryce to rubbish the story [08:19:45]…not as if she didn’t have an interest in doing so…her own reputation at stake…[naturally the BBC fails to make clear Pryce’s interest in denying the story]…

A ‘no’ vote in the EU referendum would be ‘disastrous’ for the UK economy, according to economist Vicky Pryce.

‘There is a lot of confusion in people’s minds as to what it [a no vote] will mean,’ she said. ‘We will know after two years what it will mean, which will be disastrous for the economy, and after that even more so.

The BBC’s pro-Remain stooge, Kamal Ahmed, reports the story of the Bank of England’s ‘Michael Fish’ moment…and does so in a clear attempt to downplay the significance of the beating that the bank takes, along with all those ‘experts’….now we know...’Making judgements on that is always going to be a tricky, imprecise business.’  And that’s it folks….. none of the lurid headlines about fake news, post-truth eras and fact-free zones that the BBC pumps out when referring to the Leave campaign.  Bizarre no?  Remain made highly sensationalist predictions as to what the result of a Brexit vote would be, none of which came true [the fall in the pound was actually a bonus not a disaster] and yet the BBC absolutely refuses, even when faced with clear evidence, to admit that the Remain campaign was based upon melodramatic, scaremongering, shock inducing lies about economic armageddon and even claims that we would have a world war due to Brexit.

The BBC has another stab at reporting the ‘Michael Fish’ story…and misses out, deliberately hides?, a crucial claim by the Cambridge University study that said the Treasury predictions were ‘flawed and partisan’.…the BBC instead peddles Remain myths that the Treasury forecasts were purely objective economics…

The failure to predict the financial crisis was a “Michael Fish” moment for economists, the Bank of England’s chief economist has said.

Andy Haldane compared financial forecasts to the famously inaccurate forecast by the BBC weatherman, ahead of the UK’s great storm of 1987.

The Bank denies claims it gave gloomy forecasts to support the Remain side.

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney told the Treasury Select Committee last year that the Bank’s advice before the EU referendum had been “analytically based and objectively given”, adding: “It is not a political opinion, it is an economic opinion

Also highly amused to hear on ‘Wake up to money’ [21 mins] the presenters desperately trying to squeeze out of a guest that Brexit has been a disaster for her business as she kept insisting that it had been actually quite good as exports pick up.  The BBC falls back on the old standby…that surely prices of her materials must have gone up?!!  Have heard several business people given the same treatment as they keep telling us how their businesses are thriving.  The BBC just doesn’t want to believe.

Remain are so desperate to keep Operation #Brexitdisastrousfailure in the headlines that they are sacrificing their leading lights… Sir Ivan Rogers has fallen on his sword and gone down making as much noise as possible, the BBC reporting with reverence his death rattle as wisdom to be passed on to future generations and now Jamie Oliver has made the ultimate sacrifice for the cause and closed his Italian restaurants in order to garner a few anti-Brexit headlines…which the BBC obligingly provides.

Jamie was a vociferous backer of the Remain campaign, but the BBC doesn’t tell us that as it reports…

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is closing six of his 42 UK Jamie’s Italian restaurants.

The company said that the market was “tough” and the uncertainties caused by Brexit had intensified the pressures.

The price of ingredients bought in Italy has gone up because of the fall in the value of the pound against the euro since the vote to leave the EU.

Chief executive Simon Blagden said: “As every restaurant owner knows, this is a tough market and, post-Brexit, the pressures and unknowns have made it even harder.”

So Brexit closed down poor old Jamie’s marvellously European restaurant chain?  Not so much.  It closed because it was crap…and prices of ingredients were already high due to their supposedly being so high quality…this from 2015, long before the dread Brexit vote….

Jamie’s one-star meals: Customers give Jamie Oliver’s Italian chain the lowest marks of any comparable restaurants as staff slam conditions 

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is dealing with a deluge of criticism over his Jamie’s Italian chain after scathing reviews from customers and staff alike.

The business has the lowest ratings on Google reviews compared to its main competitors with around one in four grading one of his restaurants at one-star since September. 

Customers have criticised the food and service online. 

One writer, known as Jane S, said Jamie should ‘get a grip’ over his Italian restaurant in Westfield in Shepherd’s Bush, London.

On TripAdvisor she said: ‘This is a chain restaurant and as such, my expectations were not great. However this did not even meet my limited expectations. 

‘I love Jamie Oliver recipes but the food we were presented with, in my opinion, did not represent his cuisine and that, I suppose is the crux of the problem, when you become such a big brand.’

In a Google review of a Jamie’s Italian in Portsmouth, Paul Cartmell wrote: ‘The worst food ever tasted in any eating place. Had the autumn risotto and it was like eating a bowl of salt, my father had steak and you could have re-soled a shoe with it and my mother had pasta and there was not enough to feed a four-year-old.

‘The only one who had a nice meal was my wife who had trout but you had to buy all the trimmings separate. We complained but the chef just turned his nose up. Never again.’ 

Other complaints include meals being overpriced, although the chain has said prices are higher because better quality ingredients are used. 

So essentially the BBC peddling a Remain campaigner’s propaganda which is patently untrue.  More BBC fake news.

It must be an enormously frustrating time for BBC journalists…the Scots didn’t vote for independence and split the UK making it easy meat for an EU Empire annexation, the British people voted to leave the EU and Donald Trump was elected in the US…and ‘racist white police’ in the US shooting ‘unarmed black youths’ turned out to be just as much ethnic minority officers…so another one of those BBC ‘facts’ revealed to be a lie.  BBC ‘bias’ is of course just another way of saying BBC ‘fake news’ because that is what it is, untrue and shaped to present a view of the world that is entirely, and dangerously, false.

Still, never mind, they control the airwaves and so they think they can still control history as they remorsely pump out pro-EU, pro-immigration, pro-Islamic propaganda 24 hours a day.

The new narratives are naturally about fabricating a myth that the voters for Trump and Brexit were fooled by lies and fake news and that those voters don’t actually care anymore whether they are told lies or not…they’ll carry on voting regardless, facts just don’t matter.  A convenient narrative designed to delegitimise Brexit and Trump’s election, a narrative that the BBC has been pushing hard for the last two weeks or so and no doubt will continue to do so until it has established the legend as ‘fact’.

Just look at Radio 4…two series that are blatantly pro-EU, pro-immigration and which both push the lie that we are in a ‘post-fact’ era[that in itself is the biggest lie]. One series is ‘The New World’ and the other is ‘Imagining the new truth’…hmm yes, a very telling title, very apt as the BBC really does imagine, invent, fabricate, the new truth.

In ‘Imagining the new truth’ we have artists and writers telling us their vision of the world post-Trump/Brexit.  Naturally it is a very left-wing view…almost extreme.  For example we had on Tuesday author Daniel Kehlman telling us that all the worries about immigration, about the Islamification of Europe, about terrorism, are a result of paranoia, of foolishness, a lack of education and understanding, and of course, Right-Wing propaganda…fake news.  He compared it all to the witch-hunts of the Middle Ages, completely irrational attacks on innocent people as a result of fear and loathing whipped up by…medieval fake news.  Yep no bombs, no sex attacks, no Trojan Horse plots, no wgae drops, no job losses, no homelessness, no queues at GPs, at A&E, at schools, and no ever-increasing chaos on ever-more crowded roads and public transport.

Then we have ‘The New World’…..each programme a carefully crafted exercise in deceit and manipulation as we are fed narratives shaped to push a message…you listen and listen, it’s all fairly anodyne and on the fence for a while, then wham, we get to the malicious and misleading point they have been slowly, slowly working towards, the dramatic exhortation that denounces certain thoughts, people and ideas and preachs the preferred orthodoxy.

We had one that concluded that Putin, the Chinese Commies, and Trump were all the same…’fascist strongmen’ who were going to bring the world to the point of destruction….instead we need men of ‘vison and restraint’…really?  Like Obama?  The man who allows Iran to arm itself with nukes, who let Russia annex the Crimea and invade the Ukraine, who let Assad and Russia dominate in the Middle East and who stood aside as Europe was swamped with immmigrants.   Trump was lectured that he had to come to some agreement with Putin and not face him aggressively…hmmm…er…isn’t that exactly what he said he wanted to do and for which he was roundly condemned by the BBC for being a Putin stooge?

Then we had one about ‘populism’, that word used by the BBC to condemn and dismiss anyone who votes for anyone who doesn’t have the same values as the BBC.  It started off inoffensively enough but soon got to the real message…the ‘populists’ are bigots and racists, uneducated, working class, white country hicks.

We all know that the Left’s favoured weapon when faced with having to defend their open borders immigration policy is to call anyone who disagrees a racist.  Actually, you know, the BBC tells us, they’re absolutely right…those people who oppose immigration are racists and bigots…the only problem is they don’t care about beng called racist and so the weapon is ineffective now.  Hmmm…no…people are massively offended by being labelled racist for wanting to control immigration and it is a weapon used to shut off debate by ‘shaming’ people…a weapon that it is acknowledged has been hugely effective in silencing people, the result of which has been politicians, journalists and police officers prevented from doing their jobs and hugely damaging changes to society along with unspeakable crimes committed and hidden due to political correctness.  Thousands of young girls were raped and abused because the likes of the BBC stood silent.  The BBC knew…one BBC journalist admitted he saw what was going on and ‘wondered why the police did nothing’…why did he do nothing?  The police got away with doing nothing because they weren’t held to account by the likes of that BBC journalist.

Then we had one on ‘demography’…ie immigration…again a slow burn…a long explanation of why, and how beneficial itis, Africans just had to come to Europe….you waited and waited, you knew it had to come eventually and then bingo!…it’s there….mass immigration …we’re lucky to have it….it’s been a tremendous boon, we have a ‘favourable demographic’ in the UK, a demographic dividend that is very good and will help us to grow, be more dynamic, prosperous and open…whilst Brexit means no more lovely immigrants, the economy will collapse and you will have to work until you drop and all on lower wages. Oh and the answer to an ageing population? Keep importing millions of young people….yep…that’ll work, no flaw in that plan at all.  And one last hit….Whites in America are very racist…they don’t want to pay taxes to educate brown skinned immigrants….hmmm…really?  Maybe it is actually they don’t want to pay taxes to pay for the health, schools and housing, and all the rest, for illegal immigrants not because of skin colour at all.   Would you pay all that for someone who jumped over your garden fence and demanded you did so because it was his, and his family’s, human right?

And then there was Jo Fidgen bringing us ‘Nothing but the truth’….  ho ho ho.

Are we really living in a post-truth world? It has been an extraordinary year for the concept of veracity. Brexit. Trump. Experts have taken a beating, facts have apparently taken second place to emotion and feeling. And what about truth? It seems like fewer and fewer people, whether voters or politicians, care what’s true anymore.

This programme had been trailed for a week or two telling us that it would examine if we are really living in a post-truth world….problem was the programme was not at all about examining that question but instead used the programme as a vehicle to attack all the usual suspects that the BBC has issues with.

So what were the issues that so alarmed the BBC…Trump and his ‘lies’, the Brexit ‘lie’ about £350 million and Gove’s attack on the ‘experts’….coz they have been proved so right haven’t they so far?

Fidgen announces that she, as a liberal, is ‘flipping terrified‘ of the apparent new world order…why?  And just what is this new world order?  Just how different is it really and in what way will Europe not be able to work together just because the UK doesn’t want to be completely under the EU yoke?

Then we had the next BBC bête noire…the Iraq War…that organ of mass deception.  lol.  Trouble is Blair didn’t lie, the Dossier wasn’t ‘sexed up’, it was as David Kelly, that world renowned weapons control expert, stated, merely a run down of what the UN had already reported…and he himself thought the war was necessary as he recognised the huge danger Saddam posed to the world.  Let’s not forget that Parliament voted for the war.  Oh yes…Bush also very definitely lied about WMD and our thought processes are coloured by our ideology…hmmm…so pro-EU apparatchik, Sir Ivan Rogers, was never going to be a good head of negotiations to leave the EU then?  Who knew eh?

We rationalise away the facts…say on Brexit and immigration…we don’t want to accept that Brexit will be a disaster and that immigration, and the EU, is great for us…really.  We’re such stupid fools.  Thank Allah we have the BBC to guide us through the darkness of our ignorance.

We heard that’ ‘as a Jew’, ‘populism’ is a disaster….it’s the 1930’s all over again.  No, no it’s not.  Not unless a certain ideology takes over then ‘as a Jew’ be scared, be very scared…hmm…they already are…just the BBC hasn’t noticed.

But why has liberalism fallen, why have facts become so irrelevant, why have feelings and emotions become the new ‘facts’?  The Internet.  The Internet has changed everything as it creates echo chambers that mean people no longer encounter dissenting and different view points and information and we also have a new phenomenon…psycholgical geography….I kid you  not.  Of course both of these concepts are complete bunk.

The Internet if anything has opened up thought and opinion, it has democratised information and broken the monopoly of government and the MSM.  Before we had the bubbles…if you read the Telegraph did you read the Guardian?  No.  But now you can, pay-walls allowing.  There is a vast amount of easily available news, thought and opinion out there from all walks of life and people read it all the time.  How can the BBC possibly claim that the Internet creates closed off echo chambers when it does the opposite….the BBC itself is the biggest echo chamber around where received opinion is the only thought allowed.

As for ‘geographical psychology’ as a new concept…again bunkum….it’s not a new phenomenon….people have always moved towards areas where like-people live…either through the necessity of work or due to the constraints put on them by immigration to a new land….the cost of housing and the fact that they want to live in a strange land with people whom they know and trust.  Silicon Valley and California, the West Coast, is a lefty, liberal, hippy hotbed…it has been for ever….just as the shipyards and mines created certain communities because that’s where all the workers with the same interests and lives were, had to be…and Brixton is Brixton because Black immigrants moved there decades ago…it’s not a stunning new phenomenon that this academic has just revealed but he suggests it is in order to create the idea that a whole new world has come about where fascist, populist, Trump-like politicians have polarised nations to their detriment.  Yeah…accept there have always been Republican and Democrat states just as there have always been ‘safe-seats’ in the UK.  Politics has always been polarised.  That’s politics stupid.  That’s life.

I’m not even going to venture down the road of tackling politicised ‘neuroticism’.  Needless to say it’s all a convenient line to create the idea that the world is changing for the worse.

So we’ve had Brexit, Gove and experts, immigration, the Iraq War, Trumpism, what else is there, what other BBC bête noire to digest?  Oh…how about climate change?  Ah yes…Trump doesn’t want to argue with the facts he just ignores them and goes for the emotion, climate change has been politicised and the overwhelming sicentific evidence trashed.

Anyway….The Trump and Brexit campaigns were based on lies not supported by the facts….and facts matter more than ever now [whose ‘facts’ though?] but what’s really worrying is the people’s lack of trust in the experts, in the politicians, in the journalists…it’s bad for democracy.

No…it’s bloody good for democracy that we don’t believe these liars and charlattans in the media, in politics and in the ranks of the so-called experts who themselves set aside that expertise in favour of their own prejudices, ideologies and views.

The Internet is a vital tool for that democracy…one that the BBC, that inbred echo chamber, works relentlessly to neuter and silence…it’s just too damned truthful.

So you’re a BBC news editor faced with a choice…the pro-EU mandarin, Ivan Rogers, has gone all Kamikazi, and you’re reporting the aftermath of his suicide attack on the Brexiteers.  Do you report his critics’ or his defenders’ words?  You being a BBC employee naturally know what’s in our best interest and shape the news to present Rogers as the telling-truth-to-power victim of the Brexit thought-police.  The reality?  A pro-EU civil servant went public with a hugely anti-Brexit message with the intent of putting pressure on the  government to comply with his own pro-EU views…and the BBC were there to help as they were given the exclusive scoop…wonder why.  Possibly because they are the most powerful, and pro-EU, media platform out there and one guaranteed to give Rogers a favourable platform from which to peddle his pro-EU spiel.  How right he was.

Today we had some interviews on the Today programme….on one we had Lord Marland backing Rogers and telling us how the civil service was incapable of negotiating Brexit and Sir Robert Cooper telling us there is a policy vacuum in government.

Then later we had Matts Persson, a Cameron EU advisor, on.  Interestingly he said that the headlines [the BBC of course the worse culprit ed.]  had been very unfair, that is, misleading, after Rogers’ resignation…They had reported Rogers’ claim that the government was ‘muddled’ and lacked the negotiating skills but both those claims were wrong….planning, as you might expect, was ‘far advanced’ and there was good expertise in the civil service.  Not only that but the negotiating position was very clear.

Not at all the message the BBC wanted to peddle and indeed they didn’t.  In the follwoing news bulletins which messages do you think the BBC news editor chose?  Not Persson’s but both Marland and Cooper’s negative take on Brexit.  Persson doesn’t get a mention at all anymore.

The BBC has also chosen not to report the essential point about Rogers’ not being fit to lead the Brexit negotiations…not only is he a dyed-in-the-wool pro-EU mandarin but he lacks the will to tackle EU reform.  He was the major stumbling block to negotiating the reforms Cameron claimed he wanted.  Rogers said we could not get much so don’t ask for much…a classically bad negotiating stance….so we ask for little and get, of course, even less.

So in effect Rogers empowered the Brexit vote by failing to secure major reforms that were promised.  Even more ironically his departure, the departure of a key, for the Remainers, pro-EU person at the Brexit negotiations, was the result of his doom and gloom being reported by the pro-EU BBC….a feat of which they were boasting as he announced his resignation….lol.

All that smacks of very bad judgement, both politically and tactically…he placed himself in the firing line, and the BBC, thinking they were helping to undermine Brexit, reported with glee his words that Brexit would take 10 years and may not even happen.  He completely misjudged how we should negotiate with Brussels on the reforms, proably coloured by his own pro-EU feelings…it is likely he didn’t actually want any reforms.  Not only that but he was also the one who advised May not to promise EU migrants in the UK that they could stay regardless…and for which May got enormous amount of flak, not least from the BBC.

The BBC of course doesn’t highlight those major flaws in his CV…look at this report in the immediate wake of  his resignation….no mention of his damaging role in the ‘reforms’ and no mention that he is very pro-EU…

UK’s ambassador to the EU Sir Ivan Rogers resigns

Strangely the BBC totally ignores what Tim Shipman said in his book about Rogers…remember Tim Shipman’s book?  The one that the BBC relentlessly once reported when they thought it had negative things to say about Brexit?  No so keen now to dip into the book for quotes…such as this…all pretty damning for him…

Tim Shipman reveals in his unrivalled referendum book All Out War, Cameron’s aides blame Rogers for blocking them from seeking a better deal on immigration and the ECJ:

‘We were too beholden to Tom Scholar and Ivan Rogers,’ one Cameron adviser said. ‘They were status quo. They were happy to take “No” for an answer, happy to believe things weren’t possible when they could be possible. I’ve lost count of the number of times Ivan threatened to resign.’ The politicos say Rogers was aggressive in dismissing their arguments, and went over their heads to Cameron: ‘He would send emails that were the stuff of legend, saying why didn’t we know anything? We were just politicos, we didn’t understand.’ Another aide said Rogers’ emails were ‘notorious’.

Rogers also clashed with the special advisers over their desire to include reforms of the European Court of Justice in the renegotiation. ‘Korski had a long-running battle with officials saying that we needed to do something, and he kept getting told that it was impossible to do something,’ a Number 10 source said. A range of proposals were put forward, ranging from new rules on the selection of judges to proposals for the EC] to get out of lower-level decisions. Their advocates believe the plan would have allowed Britain to get a serious review of the court on the agenda. It was rejected by officials over the summer.

The BBC does bring us Rogers’ resignation letter in full...with the BBC own selective musings and annotations inserted where they think we can benefit from their insight and perception.  Naturally the points selected are negative for Brexit and the BBC’s own interpretation ramps that up, sexing up the negative and essentially inventing meanings and intent to the words….and what you don’t get is any analysis from the BBC that actually challenges any of Rogers’ assertions….the BBC just accepts his claim that the government has no idea about Brexit and that there are no people skilled enough to negotiate it in the UK….as said above they in fact completely ignore anyone who suggests otherwise and doesn’t adopt the correct narrative….and whilst parsing every word that seemingly criticises the government the BBC doesn’t bother with his final words to his fellow civil servants…

I hope that you will continue to be interested in the views of others, even where you disagree with them, and in understanding why others act and think in the way that they do.

Why would he need to tell them that?  If they are impartial civil servants they would surely do their job regardless of whether they voted Remain or not….but seemingly Rogers thinks that might not be the case…which of course, ironically, is why he himself had to go….a point the BBC seems to avoid reminding us of preferring instead to ‘report’ the Remain camp’s ‘concern’ about Rogers resignation [which of course is very telling in itself].

The BBC isn’t trumpeting this for some reason…from Reuters…

UK manufacturing growth unexpectedly hits 2-1/2-year high – PMI

British manufacturing growth climbed to a two-and-a-half-year high last month, fuelled by new orders from both home and abroad and adding to signs the economy ended 2016 strongly, a survey showed on Tuesday.

The Markit/CIPS UK Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) rose to 56.1, the strongest reading since June 2014, from 53.6 in November. That exceeded all forecasts in a Reuters poll, which pointed to a decline to 53.1.

Naturally things could turn around later but that’s not the point..the point is how the BBC reports these things…when the PMI fell slightly the BBC was reporting it relentlessly all day with the narrative that Brexit is destroying the economy….screaming about a ‘dramatic deterioration in the economy‘ and that we were definitely heading for recession…as with the last good news figures, which oddly the BBC decided we had to be careful how we interpret as it was far too early to make a sensible judgement [on the good news that is…on the bad news we’re going into recession] the BBC has gone much less noisy..  Strange no?  Not heard a peep on the radio whereas you couldn’t miss it when the PMI fell below 50 and the story is hidden away on the business pages where hardly a soul will see it which is quite extraordinary considering just how relatively high the PMI figure is.

The BBC is definitely trying to hide good news here.

Still, maybe they are just taking advice from Europhile Jonathan Portes [08:35] who on hearing that the Change Britain pro-Brexit group has suggested 400,000 jobs will be created by leaving the EU customs union says these figures are entirely fictional…however….he claims that it is now quite wrong to put hard figures on things as that is meaningless….what we reallyneed to know is that a consensus of ‘experts’ has told us if we leave the EU we are going to Hell in a handcart..so there…oh yes…and he is entirely neutral as Nick Robinson tells us…..really?  The Spectator has its doubts…as you might….

It is wearisome work, but I hope the ‘leave’ campaign is carefully monitoring the BBC’s coverage of the referendum. On Monday, the first full weekday since Mr Cameron’s ‘legally binding’ deal, I listened to the Today programme for more than two hours. I heard six speakers for ‘remain’ and two (John Mills and Nigel Lawson) for ‘leave’. In this I am not including any of the BBC interviewers themselves, though my hunch, based solely on the way they ask questions, is that all of them, with the possible exception of John Humphrys, are for ‘remain’. The guests explicitly in favour of ‘remain’ were Carolyn Fairbairn, Sir Mike Rake, Stanley Johnson and Michael Fallon. Jonathan Portes, who is always presented by the BBC as a neutral expert, was actually pushing the EU cause.

So Portes is conveniently claiming hard figures are meaningless just when the Brexit group comes out with some hard figures he disagrees with…..but he adds that the ‘consensus’ is that we are doomed…based on what?   Hard figures of the failed experts like him who peddled a message of armageddon during the referendum.  But now hard figures are so yesterday when they upset the orthodox bandwagon…then again we are in a post-fact era aren’t we?

Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency said “I would lose all respect for a whole bunch of foreign intelligence agencies if they weren’t sitting back, paging through the emails.“

The Guardian is convinced Trump was elected with Russian help….

Russian hackers were able to access thousands of emails from a top-ranking Democrat after an aide typed the word “legitimate” instead of “illegitimate” by mistake, an investigation by the New York Times has found.

The revelation gives further credence to the CIA’s finding last week that the Kremlin deliberately intervened in the US presidential election to help Donald Trump.

Kremlin hackers access to about 60,000 emails in Podesta’s private Gmail account. According to US intelligence officials, Moscow then gave the email cache to WikiLeaks. The website released them in October, and the email scandal dominated the news cycle and was exploited by Trump.

That conveniently ignores that the real scandal was broken by the New York Times in 2015…as the BBC admits….

Mrs Clinton’s email system became a national story the first week of March 2015, when the New York Times ran a front-page article on the subject. The article said that the system “may have violated federal requirements” and was “alarming” to current and former government archive officials.

Note in that BBC report there is no mention of Wikileaks and the Russians and the Podesta hack but for the Guardian, and paradoxically the BBC itself, as well as Obama, it was the Podesta emails that dominated the news cycle and influenced the outcome of the election.  OK…but wasn’t Clinton’s own email scandal the real issue, the one that Trump said he would see her in prison for?  That if  anything was the vote winner….there was huge scandal around Clinton’s emails before Podesta’s were released so late in the day.  Clinton ignored many, many warnings that her emails were vulnerable to hacking by foreign intelligence services. It is clear that the US government knew long ago that the Russians were possibly attempting to hack Clinton’s emails and yet only now does it become an issue.  Why?   The BBC constantly defends Obama’s lack of response by saying he accused the Russians on October 7 2016….but that was years after such claims were made public in the media…so why only now when Clinton loses does Obama suddenly turn on the Russians and expel their diplomats?

The BBC back in 2015 suggested that the email scandal could turn the result of the US election….but now it’s the Podesta hack?….

Make no mistake, Tuesday’s New York Times report on Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email account during her time as US secretary of state could turn into a major development in the 2016 presidential race.

The BBC has been helpfully conflating the two issues and implying that all Wikileak’s email releases, and indeed all the emails that are under discussion, come from the Podesta hack…

The stakes could scarcely be higher: a foreign state stands accused of mounting a campaign of hacking and leaking to help get its preferred candidate into the White House.

And whatever the final conclusions of the multiple investigations into the alleged Russian hacking operation, many of Clinton’s allies believe the steady trickle of embarrassing emails, drip-fed by Wikileaks through the last crucial weeks of the campaign, may have been enough to deny her the presidency.

And again…

The contents of those hacks, passed to Wikileaks and posted online, were embarrassing to the Democrats and shook up the presidential campaign.

By not differentiating clearly which emails came from which source and which are the ones that really felled Clinton the BBC is helping Obama’s narrative that the Podesta emails influenced the election for Trump when the years of revelations and scandals coming from the Benghazi investigation are the real downer for Clinton.

Obama chooses to ignore the inconvenient facts and the BBC happily colludes as it obligingly reports Obama’s claims that Russia hacked Democratic Party emails and thus hijacked the US election to the benefit of Donald Trump as fact.  But just how much fact is there in that sensational and highly political claim?  Look hard and you’ll barely find a mention of Wikileaks and Russians in the run up to the election…here’s Sky’s timeline for the email scandal…no  mention at all of Wikileaks and Russians….it is all about the US government’s own release of emails.

:: November, 2014: The House Select Committee investigating the 2012 attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, requests emails from Mrs Clinton. Some 300 emails from the private account are delivered to the committee.

:: December, 2014: Mrs Clinton’s office delivers about 55,000 pages – some 30,490 emails – to the State Department. Another 31,830 emails from her tenure are deemed private and not delivered.

What the Obama narrative ignores is Clinton herself and her unattractiveness as a candidate, her failed, lacklustre campaign, the failed government and policies of Obama and the fact that the email scandal did not originate from Wikileaks and not from the Russians…it came from within the US government itself and numerous FOI requests from news organisations and civil rights groups seeking their release…Clinton  herself stated she wanted the emails released…is she a Russian spy?….

I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.        8:35 PM – 4 Mar 2015

Not to mention the FBI’s own investigation….Is Comey also a Russian spy?  America seems to be rife with them at the highest level…,.

FBI director James Comey stunned the world when he announced the agency was investigating new e-mails sent or received by Mrs Clinton.

Note that this latest investigation was not due to any ‘leaked’ emails but due to a prior FBI investigation…so again no Russians…

The New York Times has reported the messages were discovered after the FBI seized four electronic devices belonging to Mrs Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin and her husband Anthony Weiner. 

They were taken during an investigation into illicit text messages between the former Congressman and a 15-year-old girl.

Emails released due to FOI request by Vice News just before the election….not Russians…

Today, at 3:30, State Dept w/release 1250 pgs of HRC emails recovered by FBI in response to @vicenews #FOIA lawsuit against FBI/State   10:54 AM – 3 Nov 2016

Wikileaks stated Clinton’s own emails came as result of its FOI requests …

From Wikileaks in 2016:

Hillary Clinton Email Archive

On March 16, 2016 WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for over 30 thousand emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was Secretary of State. The 50,547 pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton. The emails were made available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the US State Department as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. The final PDFs were made available on February 29, 2016.

From Al Jazeera in March 2015:

Revealed: Clinton’s office was warned over private email use

The New York Times reported Monday night that Clinton used only private email accounts during her tenure — a move that prevented the National Archives and Records Administration from automatically archiving her correspondence for historical purposes when she left office. Instead, the newspaper reported, two months ago Clinton aides turned over some 55,000 pages of emails after they reviewed all the messages she sent and received during her four-year tenure.

The revelations have set off a firestorm for the potential 2016 presidential candidate among open-records advocates who question whether Clinton took this approach to circumvent the normal archiving process for a position of that level.

Issues of computer security have dogged public officials since the dawn of the Internet age. President Bill Clinton, for instance, saved his former CIA director, John Deutch, from prosecution by pardoning him for having classified materials on his laptops and relabeling them as unclassified.

From CBS News in September 2015:

Hackers linked to Russia tried to infiltrate Hillary Clinton’s emails

Hackers linked to Russia tried at least five times to pry into Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private email account while she was secretary of state, emails released Wednesday show.

The phishing attempts highlight the risk of Clinton’s unsecure email being pried open by foreign intelligence agencies.

During Clinton’s tenure, the State Department and other U.S. government agencies faced their own series of hacking attacks. U.S. counterterrorism officials have linked them to China and Russia. But the government has a large staff of information technology experts, whereas Clinton has yet to provide any information on who maintained her server and how well it was secured.

The emails released Wednesday also show a Clinton confidant urging her boss and others in June 2011 not to “telegraph” how often senior officials at the State Department relied on their private email accounts to do government business because it could inspire hackers to steal information.

The former first lady and New York senator had maintained that nothing was classified in her correspondence, but the intelligence community has identified messages containing “top secret” information.

Now, with Wednesday’s release, some 37 percent of Clinton’s work-related emails have been made public. The State Department has been releasing the emails at the end of every month, and it plans to finish publishing the emails in January, in accordance with a federal judge’s order.

From Wired April 2015:

For a secretary of state, running your own email server might be a clever—if controversial—way to keep your conversations hidden from journalists and their pesky Freedom of Information Act requests. But ask a few security experts, and the consensus is that it’s not a very smart way to keep those conversations hidden from hackers.

The BBC is reporting a Washingon Post breaking story that President Obama is a Russian agent…the Presidency has been hacked…

From the Washington Post:

The Washington Post can reveal that US government officials have announced that the President of the United States, Barack Obama, is under investigation as astounding information has come to light that he has been working for the Russian intelligence services for at least two decades infiltrating the American political scene and succeeding wildly beyond whatever the Russians could ever have hoped for.

Our official sources indicate that Obama was first spotted by then Soviet ‘talent scouts’ in the 1980’s as he began to involve himself in protests against Apartheid in South Africa and going on to study political science and international relations at university before moving on to work in the sphere of human rights and involving himself in local politics.

It has been alleged before that Obama is a KGB agent….’A Russian government official bragged that Barack Obama was a KGB operative and that his presidency had been planned since birth, an American physicist and government contractor reports.  The boast from a Communist Party official reportedly occurred during a business trip to Russia,16 years before Barack Obama was ushered into the presidency of the United States. The official boasted angrily that…

“You Americans like to think you’re so perfect!” she snarled. “Well, what if I told you that very, very soon you’re going to have a black president… and he’s going to be a Communist!”

The KGB operative was not finished. As she had now dropped this bombshell on the entire gathering, she felt compelled to continue.

“His name is Barack,” she sneered. “His mother is white and his father is an African black. He has gone to the best schools, he is what you would call ‘Ivy League’.”’

The exact time of his recruitment as a Soviet agent is unknown but the officials state that the Russians funnelled funds to him via Saudi Arabia and the Clintons in order to facilitate his progress in the political world.  Saudi Arabia may not seem to be a likely ally of the Soviets at the time as they were on opposing sides in Afghanistan but both sides recognised that it would be advantageous to put aside their differences to further their own agendas.  The Soviets saw a man who would be highly disruptive to the status quo in White America, one who would seek to undermine White dominance and futher non-White interests, thus weakening, fracturing and destabilising the US, as well as one whose interests in ‘human rights’ would put a break on US ‘aggression’ around the world that was making life difficult for the Soviet’s own freedom of action as well as breaking the old ties with ‘White’, colonial Europe…making Europe vulnerable to Soviet intrigue and threats once again.  The Saudis saw a man who was a Muslim, one who could ease the encroachment of Islam into America, be a powerful voice at the UN for Islamic issues and of course, one who could put an end to America’s support for Israel…and a bonus came later as he was in a position as President to suppress the investigation and report that indicated the Saudis had been behind 9/11.

Remarkably, considering the timing as the Soviet empire crumbled, the plan continued and succeeded, the Russian intelligence agency, the FSB, swiftly moving in to take over where the KGB left off.  Obama rapidly moved up the political ranks until he was in a position to compete for the Presidency.  The Clintons again obliged by having Hilary stand as the main opponent ensuring the votes for any other contenders were split and then stepping aside to allow Obama to win the Presidency.  Hilary of course eventually stood against Trump once Obama had run his time, but the Saudis had their own plan in place.  Clinton’s closest aide was a Saudi Muslim with links to the Muslim Brotherhood.  Even with Obama gone the malign hand of the Wahhabi Muslims would still wield power behind the throne pushing Muslim interests.

The Russians could not believe that such an outlandish and ambitious plan had succeeded and yet it had.  The Russians had a man in place at the top of US politics.  No matter that their own military was run down, that their economy was on its knees, they had the most valuable asset of all in their battle with the Capitalists, a man on the inside who held the levers of power.  And what an asset…one who stood aside as Putin annexed the Crimea, who stood aside as the Ukraine was attacked, a man whose ‘cautious’ approach to international politics allowed Putin the opportunity to become the hero who saved Syria, not from the Islamic State which Russia refrains from attacking, but from the Free Syrian Army rebels who oppose the Russian’s other puppet President, Assad.  A further and unexpected prize was that Europe was flooded with migrants whose numbers alone threatened the stability of the continent but whose religious identity also meant that Europe would eventually be torn apart by disastrous religious wars allowing, once again, the Russians to sweep into Europe unopposed to re-establish the old empire ‘in the interests of peace and stability’.  An Obama who also stood aside as the Saudis launched an economic war against America aimed at destroying the US fracking industry and undermining its economy with the ultimate aim of keeping it reliant on Middle East oil and gas and thus obliged to dance to the Saudi tune.  An Obama whose early withdrawal of US troops from Iraq allowed the Saudi backed Islamic State to sweep into Iraq and to establish the new ‘Caliphate’….one that the Russians ‘mysteriously’ refuse to attack.

All that may be over now as Obama faces investigation and Clinton failed to take the Presidency. President-elect Trump is of course seemingly Putin friendly but the question remains just how that will pan out in the real world and will his admiration for Putin extend to more than merely cordial relations with Russia or a more sinister partnership that carves up the world into convenient spheres of influence, China aside, a new world in which the liberal, progressive project is made history and a new era of empires and colonialism takes over?

Whatever happens history may not look kindly upon the Presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.

Oh hang on…that was all a big mistake, Obama’s not a Russian spy or a Muslim mole….must be something lost in translation as the BBC transcribed a Washington Post piece that announced the Russians had hacked the US power grid in somewhat alarmist tones…

The BBC started its report cautiously, the Washington Post [a Democrat supporting rag] it told us was reporting that ‘An electrical company in the US state of Vermont says it has found malware code allegedly used by Russian hackers on one of its company laptops.  The Burlington Electric Department said it had taken “immediate action to isolate” the computer, which was not connected to the electrical grid.  The government alerted them to the “Grizzly Steppe” code on Thursday.’

However it soon threw all such caution to the wind and began asserting that Russian fingerprints were all over everything from the attempt to take out Vermont’s power system to the US election’s rigging.  Never mind there seems to be no such attempt to hack Vermont’s power grid…the virus was on a laptop unconnected to the grid and probably infected by accident as the employee who used the laptop surfed the net in his own time. Not a targeted attack at all.

Infowars does what the BBC didn’t want to…adopt a sceptical stance to the Washington Post’s claims.

One other thing the BBC doesn’t bother to inform its audience of…the US’s own involvement in hacking and spying….strange really as the BBC was all over the revelations made by Snowden when they first came out…now they seem to have lost interest as they don’t play to the narrative now being peddled and used to attack Trump.

The US tapped Merkel’s phone and spied on her ministers…as well as on the French…

WikiLeaks: US spied on Angela Merkel’s ministers too, says German newspaper

US ‘spied on French presidents’ – Wikileaks

Odd how all that is being swept under the carpet as Obama proclaim’s his outrage at possible Russian cyberwarfare and claims Trump stole the Presidency because of that.

.

Leave Voters, the new Jews of Europe?

Who are the Fascists, who are the Gangsters?

Farage wants to control immigration.  He is denounced by the BBC as a Fascist, a Nazi even.  But is he the Fascist?

Or, are those who want to control what you say, what you think, how you behave, who want to control every aspect of your life, the real Fascists?’  We have been living in a version of 1984 for a long time now as our voices have been suppressed and our thoughts manipulated or made ‘unacceptable’, a war declared on ‘Britishness’.  It is a paradox that the loudest alarmists of the Liberal coterie declare we are heading towards the 1930’s again as they raise alarming but totally imaginery fantasies of Hitler on the march once more…but in one respect they are right, the vilification, demonisation and attacks, some actually physical, the death threats, those aimed at Leave voters, is certainly reminiscent of the 1930’s.  Leave voters have a good claim on being the ‘new Jews’ of Europe…how long before they are forced to wear Union Flag badges as marks of shame, how long before they  are forced to pay obeyance to the EU orthodoxy, swear loyalty to the Junckers of this world, how long before the bricks come through their windows?  The language used by the BBC journalists and presenters, by dictatorial politicians who want to overturn democracy and the Brexit vote, by the commentators who seek to denigrate, disparage and discredit Leave voters, is the real Fascism, language that also enables others, gives licence to them, to attack Leave voters, to spread hate, stir up anger and drive division in society.  It’s not just the big politicians like Farage that the tactics are used against, remember the UKIP councillor, Rozanne Duncan, whom the BBC set out to deliberately label as a racist as part of their campaign to win the EU referendum?  A massive organisation like the BBC falsely labelling a powerless and vulnerable woman as a racist without giving her the chance to defend herself.  For months the campaign of hate went on before the actual programme was broadcast as the BBC knowingly leaked out suggestions that Duncan had said something ‘racist’ thus releasing the hounds upon her.  Reminiscent of the 1930’s?  I’d say so. How about the use of vox pops?  A well known BBC tactic that selectively chooses who to interview and how to edit those interviews, and then draws their own, very selective, conclusions from them.  The BBC, as pointed out by ‘Is the BBC Biased?’ has been targeting a certain demographic as the ‘voice’ of the Leave voters….

From Emma Jane Kirky’s manipulative Brexit Street series on PM (making some of its Leave-voting ‘vox pops’ sound like stupid, feckless racists – to the delight of pro-EU types on Twitter) to Matthew Price’s startling “Not everyone’s so articulate” report on yesterday’s Today, both from the most deprived Leave-voting parts of two of the poorest places in England,…

…and…

…from Mark Easton and Ed Thomas’s various reports featuring either swastika-festooned or shaven-headed men as representative Leave voters to last week’s Holby City showing a white, working-class woman being stupid, cruel and racist towards a Polish immigrant (and duly getting her comeuppance)…

Have a look at this particularly nasty piece of work from the BBC that sets up two working class white guys down on their luck and exploits them to ‘illustrate’ how racist and uneducated Leave voters are [52 minutes in]…..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt5l1_Xj2Jo

A very unpleasant piece of television abusing its power to cruelly abuse and misrepresent these two men and by extension all Brexit voters.

Those who value freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, democracy and genuine liberal values should think carefully about just who are the real ‘gangster’s, the real Fascists…it’s not those who you might think of course,  or rather those whom you are told to think of as Fascist.  The real Fascists are paradoxically those who claim to be the voice of the rational, reasoned, intelligent, moderate, progressive centre but who are anything but.

The BBC’s stalwart elder stateswoman, Libby Purves, who describes herself as being in the lefty ‘tribe’, has railed several times against the ‘Liberal’ howl of rage, anger and contempt against Brexit, Trump, and their voters here in the Sun in June and recently here in the Mail.   Note however, she does not criticise the BBC despite its massive campaign against Brexit and Trump and its sickening post-Brexit portrayal of Britain as a nastier, more racist place.

Despite her fine words and sentiments telling us that…

It was not the actual vote that shocked, it was the online squawk of reaction by my timeline, my tribe: cultural icons, colleagues, friends. If they feel “let down, betrayed, distressed” by the result, so did I by the mass response of the liberal media and arts sector to this vote against a 43-year-old administrative arrangement….the carry-on was beyond parody: anguished bunker mentality tinged with patronising, generalising hauteur about those who voted Leave….elitism erupted like a poisoned boil…..it is almost comic to watch the affluent metropolitan left being cross with the zero-hours strugglers of Sunderland for disrespecting the instructions of a Tory PM and big business.

…Purves’ final paragraph leaves us in no doubt what she really thinks and negates everything she just said…

OK, they[Leave voters] may have spoken wrong and plunged us into difficulties. But it is not fair to blame them more than the arrogant, incompetent Brussels institutions and the decades when governments neglected inequality.

Of course, there is racism to be fought. Yes, there was some disgusting campaigning by Farage. Yet that is no excuse for polishing your liberal credentials by making bogeymen of the poor, the old, the frightened and the insecure. They voted. Listen, engage, help.

That’s pretty arrogant, condescending, dismissive and not a little ‘elitist’ isn’t it?…note the use of the word ‘wrong’ to describe how people voted rather than saying she disagreed with them, and then the rather contemptuous description of the voters as poor, old, frightened [irrational fear and prejudice of immigration of course] and insecure.  So basically Purves’ narrative is exactly the same as the ‘squawking’ Remainers…the Leave voters were wrong, uneducated, bigoted and afraid….a fear whipped up by the ‘disgusting’ [ie racist] campaigning of the likes of the ‘Fascist’ Farage.

The same narrative that could be heard on the BBC on 5Live this morning as the trio of Pienaar, Angela Eagle and Paddy Ashdown lined up against the lone Ian Duncan-Smith as they ‘discussed’ the terrors of 2016, that is, Trump, Brexit, terrorism and Russian aggression, all being bracketed in the same category, with the future being essentially world breakdown, conflict with rising Fascism and gangsterism  laying ruin to the Liberal world.

Ashdown parroted his master’s voice, the sinister and contemptuous Farron, as he tried to tell us the pro-EU Establishment were now the insurgents…apparently the great unwashed have had their ‘howl of rage’ and, well, let’s just push past that and get on with our cosmopolitan, decent Europhile lives and stay in the EU…the new dispossessed, the new voiceless marginalised victims are Remain voters, the ‘progressive, moderate centre’…you know, the ‘decent, reasonable, intelligent’ people as Farron might portray them.  So the Remainers have no voice other than the vast majority of MPs and Lords, the bulk of the media, including of course the dominant and vastly too powerful BBC, the commentatriat, the arts and luvvies incorporated, Academia, Big Business and the City, and the dark forces of has-been politicians still lurking in the corridors of power?  Yes, I can see how they are utterly voiceless and without power and influence.  And as for that irrational, emotion driven ‘howl of rage’ of the Leave voters?  In fact that was completely rational, reasoned and justified anger at the imposition of a Liberal tyranny that inflicted huge changes on their societies, cultures and lives that they were not just not asked about, but were in fact deliberately lied to and misled about.

This morning’s ‘Point of View’ on R4 was another example of the BBC trying to define the post-Brexit narrative as being ‘nasty nationalists with a hint of the Nazi’ voting for Brexit whilst sensible, nice people wanted to vote for Remain.  We were told that Putin’s Fascism is coming to France and America.  Trump apparently is an autocratic dictator who will destroy the democratic America and drag the world down with it.  We heard, or were supposed to  infer, that Brexit voters were those nasty nationalists, a nationalism we were told that was not based on the love of a place or culture but on hatred of ‘the other’, Brexit voters, the ‘volk’, [yes that word was used…and is used in several Remainer articles deliberately associating Brexit with the Nazi’s love of the ‘Volk’…a rather cowardly, sly way of calling Brexiteers white supremacists] see themselves as victims of aliens groups taking over their land…Brexit demands ‘an enemy’, someone to hate.  As said this was not explicit demonisation of Leave voters, you of course were meant to understand the references without them being spelled out to you.

Just another example of the BBC’s language of hate drumming up hostility, division and fear targeting Leave voters just as the Nazis targeted the Jews.

The BBC continues to press ahead with its promotion of the liberal’s mythical utopian project that, as with Corbyn, fails to reflect reality and the facts.  Whether Brexit or Trump the BBC buries its head in the sand and refuses to acknowledge reality and why it happened.

They keep talking about Brexit solely through an economic lens and, despite the evidence, try to paint a picture of doom and gloom whilst conversely not genuinely accepting that the EU is an economic basket case which in itself is a purely political project that has been forced through regardless of the disastrous economic consequences that are very real and very, very obvious.  When did the BBC ever ask what would have been the real result of staying inside the EU, an EU that is imploding on just about every front, economically, politically and socially?  They preferred to peddle the Remain claim that Brexit was a great unknown whilst the EU’s success and stability were a certainty.  Hmmm….so stupid…

Trump of course gets nothing but derision and mocking contempt, only yesterday we heard that people were looking for certainty and Trump recognised that…but of course ‘certainty’ is only for stupid people….so not only is Trump stupid but all those who voted for him….the ‘expert’ was absolutely certain about that.

Then there’s Obama, still the One who can do no wrong.  He’s at present making a lot of noise about Russia apparently hacking Clinton’s emails and effecting the outcome ofthe election…what the BBC reported as being like ‘a new Pearl Harbour’….lol.   If so…why?  Clinton must be seriously at fault allowing highly sensitive emails to be hacked and then why would such emails effect the outcome of the election? Only if they actually contained material that was seriously compromising for Clinton or the Democrats…the BBC doesn’t bother to investigate the emails preferring to avoid such difficult questions….as of course does Obama who should surely be disciplining Clinton for such a serious and dangerous breach of security.  Curiously the BBC seems unconcerned about the Russian spy, Snowden, who was aided and abetted by the Guardian, and the BBC itself, to attack US, and Western , intelligence and security, doing them enormous damage.

Obama is talking loudly of the threat to US democracy and when Trump won the Presidency Obama said…

“Everybody is sad when their side loses,” Mr. Obama said with Vice President Joseph R. Biden at his side. “The day after, we have to remember we’re actually all on one team. We are now all rooting for his [Mr. Trump‘s] success in uniting and leading the country. We are Americans first.”

However he has spent the last couple of weeks doing everything he can to undermine the new President and the democratic result of the election including of course pompous, sanctimonious speeches that ‘advise’ Trump on how to be a good President…something Obama knows little about…and as for democracy…Obama was pretty handy with those undemocratic executive orders using them to push through very controversial policies such as Obamacare, dodgy deals with the terrorist state of Iran and on  immigration.

The BBC of course doesn’t ask questions about the reasons for Obama’s attacks on Trump and the rhetoric about Russia…the BBC accepts it all as if every word were the truth and unpolitical when it is very obvious Obama is engaged in a highly partisan attempt to undermine Trump and make his presidency as difficult as possible.

Comes to something when we have to rely on ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine to bring us decent analysis of political news rather than the well-resourced and supposedly ‘gold-standard’ news organisation that is the BBC…

The problem with this story is that, like the Iraq-WMD mess, it takes place in the middle of a highly politicized environment during which the motives of all the relevant actors are suspect. Nothing quite adds up….this could also just be a cynical ass-covering campaign, by a Democratic Party that has seemed keen to deflect attention from its own electoral failures.

The outgoing Democrats could just be using an over-interpreted intelligence “assessment” to delegitimize the incoming Trump administration and force Trump into an embarrassing political situation.

The BBC…business as normal then.