The latest stand-up UK election debate (sans Cameron and Clegg) |
While stand-up comedians try to "slay" the audience, stand-up politicians have a different target, namely their opponents. "Stand-up politicians," by the way, are just normal politicians coached and brought into the TV studios to participate in stand up debates against their opponents.
The dream is to achieve a knock-out blow that will be replayed over-and-over in subsequent days, by looking one's opponent in the eyes, pausing, then, when everybody is listening, dropping a bombshell on him or her; like Lloyd Bentsen's famous "You're no Jack Kennedy" line, delivered in the 1988 Vice-Presidential debate to a hapless Dan Quayle, who had been nurturing sub-Kennedyesque posturings for some time.
That moment defined Quayle's career until he had a spot of trouble with his spelling a few years later. It is also the only reason that anybody ever remembers Bentsen, who was clearly no Jack Kennedy himself.
That moment defined Quayle's career until he had a spot of trouble with his spelling a few years later. It is also the only reason that anybody ever remembers Bentsen, who was clearly no Jack Kennedy himself.
One of the joys of watching political debates on TV is to see politicians self-consciously strive for that moment – almost always carefully prepared and rehearsed beforehand – before more often than not mistiming their delivery or fluffing the lines.
In the latest UK election debate – held oddly enough between the leaders of the five main non-government parties (Labour, UKIP, SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the Greens) – we had a moment just like this, when the Labour leader Ed Miliband turned to deliver what he obviously hoped would be a political stake through Nigel Farage's "evil racist heart."
In the previous debate, which also included David Cameron and Nick Clegg of the two parties in the governing coalition, Farage had drawn the ire of the Neo-Marxists who make up the political class in the UK by daring to question the right of AIDs patients from oversees to fly into Britain and freeload on Britain's National Health Service.
When Farage once more mentioned the popular viewpoint that the National Health Service should actually be "national" instead of "international," Miliband got his cue and immediately went for his carefully rehearsed lines with the alacrity of a gunfighter reaching for his pistol. You could almost hear the cogs and gears turning in his head as he modulated his voice and adjusted his posture to sound ever so reasonable and even mildly sympathetic to Farage:
"Here's the problem I have with you, Nigel. You want to exploit people's fears rather than deal with them."He then followed up with a string of coded attempts to evoke the image of Farage as a "racist" fear-monger, while oddly staying on first-name terms with him. The irony here is that nothing quite creates the same degree of fear in people today as the merest whiff, hint, and suggestion that one is a "racist."
The real exploiters of fear, therefore, are those skilled at bandying about the R-word and all its many derivatives. This includes Milliband, a man who leads a party that actually oversaw and connived at industrial levels of inter-racial child rape in his party's electoral heartland against its traditional supporters, the White working class, yet who remains poised on the brink of government.
This explains his comment "I don't think we should just dismiss people's concerns as prejudice" and his references to Labour's "hard thinking." These were to serve as a shield against any counter-attack by Farage, who, if he had been more on his toes, could have turned things round by talking about the very real fear that ordinary British people feel whenever the subject of immigration or preserving their country comes up. But Farage is just as much hamstrung by the fear of being seen as "racist" as anyone else, if not more so.
While Farage skillfully plays to the sentiments of those who fear losing their country to mass immigration, UKIP is not actually an anti-immigration party – it can't afford to be. That would paint it as too racist. So, to compensate for its anti-Europeanism and its desire to reduce immigration from the Eurozone, it has to state that it is in favour of more immigration from the former colonies of the Commonwealth. It also has to make a show of fast-tracking any ethnic members it has to prominent positions. Anything to stop the horrible, nasty taunts of "racist," "fascist," "Little Englander," etc.
Around 15% of voters intend to vote for "Nazi scum." |
It is a fear of social ostracism and losing one's job, of just generally being thought of as a "nasty piece of work." It is this fear, inculcated into the people of Britain, that has been exploited again and again by unscrupulous politicians like Miliband, bent on importing an additional electorate, lowering wages, and crowding Britain to maintain property prices. It is this fear that drove the BNP into the political wasteland, and it is this fear that leads UKIP to water down its policies and rig its candidate lists in a forlorn attempt to counter the inevitable accusations.
Fake asylum seekers and non-Whites seeking undeserved placement, preference, and legalistic leniency have also jumped on this bandwagon of fear. But worst of all, it has been exploited by the Muslim pedophile rape gangs and their enablers in the police and social services in towns like Rotherham. It is the exploitation of this fear that has allowed the mass rape of English children on an industrial scale for decades, and which ensures that those responsible, like the leadership of the Labour Party, can still pass beneath lamp posts instead of swinging from them.
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