Daniel Hannan, Guido and the American Right

Guido is terribly proud that Daniel Hannan's speech, straight out of the Guido playbook of diagnosing Gordon Brown's "pathologies" and wrapping himself in libertarian bollocks, has become something of an internet sensation. Noting that the clip has attracted the attention of such illustrious organs as the Drudge Report, he declares:

Cometh the hour, cometh the man - we are all ditto-heads now; Rushies and the Co-Conspirators.

He slightly surprises me with his eagerness to take up the mantle of "dittohead", but it fits like a charm. After all, doesn't Guido's blog have exactly the same right-wing echo chamber effect as Rush and Fox News do for the US? Isn't his comments thread full of the same brand of half-sentient hate-spewing twats that call Rush? Guido seems to be embracing the comparison before any of his regular critics really articulated it properly, just to block off that particular line of attack.

Anyway, on to the clip itself. Since it was released on Tuesday, it has become remarkably well exposed; yesterday it was the most watched clip on YouTube. So is it all that remarkable? Well, to be fair, it's well crafted, to the point, snappy, and clearly expresses Hannan's position. What's more surprising is that it achieved this without much exposure at all from the MSM in the UK. Interestingly, Hannan has become something of a hero to the US right, with Rush Limbaugh (de facto leader of the Republicans) endorsing his words, Fox News cheerleader for the markets Neil Cavuto interviewing him, and well known crazy person Glen Beck inviting him on his show too.

Why, then, are the UK Conservatives not more proud of him? Hannan seems to be viewed by his own party as a slightly loose cannon, being one of the more headbanging eurosceptics in the party, a cheerleader for joining the loony fringe of Europe, and in fact he's already been expelled from the EPP himself.

In many ways, the interviews with the US media are rather more revealing than the speech itself. In the Cavuto interview, he pretty much takes ownership of being the"do nothing" party (look at about 3 mins in), and answers "yes" in response to the question "in the same situation [of the US banking crisis], would you have said "Let 'em rip"?".

I have to say, watching those videos is quite entertaining in at least one respect: the right wings of both our countries are currently maintaining that their particular screamingly socialist government is taking their country to much lower depths than are to be found anywhere else in the world. The result, when you bring the two together, is a pissing contest. Witness much claiming to have it worst from both sides of the pond.

The most amusing bit, though, is this big stompy red quote from Guido: "It is the speech that many Republicans wish they had someone to deliver to Obama". Um, no. The Republicans have plenty of populist ranters who could deliver a little mini-speech like this. Trouble is, none of them could say it with a straight face, because unlike Gordon Brown, Barack Obama hasn't been in the driving seat for the last ten years. He's been there for three months. If the Republicans tried to pull this, they would rightly be derided, because it was George Bush who turned a surplus inherited from Clinton into a deficit.

Daniel Hannan is said to be somewhat perplexed at the traction he has achieved in the US. Let me help you out, Daniel: It's a distraction. Like so much that the Republican noise machine does, it's a talking point to try to prove a point from a country with different circumstances to those of the US, and then import the "take home message" to the US, without people noticing the bait and switch they've just been offered whereby something that reflects badly on the Republicans becomes the fault of "socialists" over there in Yerp. There's a reason they'd rather talk about the backstory in someone else's country: it's because they've only been the opposition for three months, and most of that backstory in the US is their backstory.