The news came as it emerged that Mr Farage has been hired by Fox News and the Fox Business Network as a paid contributor. He will start work for the channels immediately.
Watching him work the TV cameras was an education. He’s going to be very, very good.
I don’t know. He only has to open his mouth and I want to punch him.
I am an actual political supporter too.
He should be helping to keep pressure on BluLabour–not poncing around in the USA.
Why? “I would prefer him too”, okay, yes. But what moral imperative has he to follow your or my wishes?
I know he’s not a cheeky Mockney barrow boy, but he has that attitude. I suspect it will go down very well in Yankland.
I rather agree with Ecksy. He’s welcome to increase his workload by taking on the Fox role as long as he continues to needle Juncker and Verhofstadt and teases whichever of the unknown Italians becomes the next “President” of the European Parliament.
If Paul Nuttall wins in Stoke, then UKIP may be able to spare him for the job of unofficial (and for the UK government, irritating) ambassador to President Trump.
He will be able to needle Junckers et al by being on CNN. After all, they watch that sort of channel. So do their wives and children. So it will be much more annoying than being laughed at in Parliament.
Surreptitious Evil said:
“what moral imperative has he to follow your or my wishes?”
Depends where you live; he is still an MEP, which is an office with at least moral duties (and a paid one). And he’s Chairman of a European Parliament group, as which he’s responsible to voters from eight different countries.
So yes, he does have some obligations, to his constituents and the European grouping’s voters.
But since we all know the European Parliament is a farce, if he thinks the best use of his time at the moment is on Yankee television, that’s OK with me.
I enjoyed Farage’s piece in the Torygraph today
Farage is a Brit MEP, not the most high-profile politician in the US, but he is widely recognised in public. Howzat!
Vising Arlington Cemetery? Not that I think its a bad idea, in fact a good one for all politicians.
That reminds me of the news caster at the end of the Vietnam war who broadcast from Arlington Cemetery with the words, and I paraphrase because I an’t find a reference: Any President who wants to take the country to war should make the announcement from Arlington Cemetery and give his reasons why its a good idea.
I’m probably not the only one on here who thinks that the best any MEP could do for their constituents is to get a real job as far away from Brussels / Strasbourg as is practical.
Farage has a much higher profile in the US than any of the EU’s presidents.
If it’s German news, then Merkel is captioned as the German Chancellor. If it’s EU news, Greece or whatever, then she’s captioned as “de facto Leader of the European Union”.
@Jack C
It sounds like the Yanks understand the EU far better than many Europeans.
“That reminds me of the news caster at the end of the Vietnam war who broadcast from Arlington Cemetery with the words, and I paraphrase because I an’t find a reference: Any President who wants to take the country to war should make the announcement from Arlington Cemetery and give his reasons why its a good idea.”
Not a bad idea. And any politician who decides *not* to take the country to war (or to turn up two years late) should go to the Holocaust Museum at Auschwitz and explain why they think it isn’t.
It’s a matter to take very seriously, whichever way you look at it.
Sins of omission Vs sins of commission. I’d prefer the former in this case, otherwise we are expecting politicians ot have foresight.
“otherwise we are expecting politicians ot have foresight”
Lack of foresight applies to the consequences going in both directions. Sins of omission may be no less horrible.
Fair enough. I’ve railed against the Iraq war often enough because they didn’t plan for the inevitable victory.
But is it reasonable to think that US politicians who were against entry in to WW2 could have foreseen the holocaust?
I think he is just following the money, like I am.
I have also obtained an income in USD to wait out the GBP slump.
“Fair enough. I’ve railed against the Iraq war often enough because they didn’t plan for the inevitable victory.”
Such a plan was not feasible. It was known before they went in that they would have to stay and hold things together for a decade or two to achieve what they wanted, and they knew before they went in that the anti-war faction in the West would make that politically impossible. You do the best you can with the options you’ve got.
“But is it reasonable to think that US politicians who were against entry in to WW2 could have foreseen the holocaust?”
I think it is reasonable to think they could have predicted that something like it would happen eventually. They had already seen the Holomodor. They knew what the spreading socialist revolution was capable of. And Hitler had made his views of the Jews well known.
However, preventing the Holocaust was never a motivation for war for the Allies. After they found out about it (e.g. the Bund report) they suppressed the news, and although proposals were made to go in specifically to rescue them, or even to bomb the rail lines leading to the camps, nothing came of it. The US joined the war only when it became clear the US itself was under threat – they were not about to join it to rescue the Europeans; whether Poles, Czechs, French, or even the British, let alone the Jews.
However, my point was not that it could have been foretold, It was that nobody could foretell that it couldn’t happen if the US kept out. Lack of foresight applies equally in *both* directions, both to the decision to go to war, and the decision not to. The potential consequences of going to war are represented by Arlington. The potential consequences of not doing so are represented by Auschwitz. You don’t get to evade responsibility for the consequences of the decision by making some artificial distinction between commission/omission. Deciding *not* to go to war commits you to the consequences just as much. Whether or not we knew it before WWII, we know it now!
You do the best you can with the information you’ve got, and you think about what sort of person you want to be, and what you stand for. If you saw some girl on the train being mugged or assaulted, would you help? If you heard the kids next door screaming, would you help? Even if it meant you got hurt, or risked being killed? Even if there was a chance you was going to make the problem worse? The inability to predict what’s going to happen is not an excuse. The possibility of it going horribly wrong doesn’t necessarily mean the decision to intervene (or not intervene) was wrong.
The people buried at Arlington volunteered to risk their lives to defend others, because they thought it was the right thing to do, and worth the risk. It’s the duty of the politicians to only use them when it *is* the right thing to do, as best they can determine, but it is an insult to their memory to shrink from doing the *right* thing purely because you’re afraid of the political cost to yourself, the deaths of your soldiers. That’s not what *they* signed up for! They want to fight for something worth fighting for, like freedom.
The ex-military people I know who were in Iraq don’t talk about the politics much (it’s not the done thing), but I get the distinct impression that they were totally OK with the politicians sending them in; they were a lot more irritated with them by being pulled out too soon. They were never pacifists. Anecdotal, I know.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to divert the thread onto such a sombre topic. So, Nigel. Do you think Trump might give him a position as, say, ambassador to the EU?
An obscenity in the Iraq invasion is that the winners asked the losers to pay back some of the money that they’d lent to the unelected bad guy.
Yeah, but it’s Fox. No one’s going to watch it but a bunch of rabid halfwits.