Kraft durch Freude

Further slackness from me. All too predictable, frankly: I impressed myself keeping up the blogging for five months with rarely more than a few days' gap.

Good old Polly. Always with our best interests at heart. Once again it occurs to me to wonder whether she can possibly be for real, or whether she is, in fact, some kind of joke perpetrated by the Right to remind people what the Left is really like when it gets going, fuelled by hubris and spite. Such an idea was touched on in an early, yet infrequently bettered, episode of The West Wing, Take This Sabbath Day. Of course, the idea as expressed therein was a political inversion of my idea of The Toynbeast:

JOEY [KENNY]: Mr. President, I’m here ‘cause I’m running a campaign for Bill
O’Dwyer, who’s running...

BARTLET: In the California forty-sixth?

JOEY [KENNY]: Yes sir.

BARTLET: O’Dwyer’s an empty shirt.

JOEY [KENNY]: Sir?

BARTLET: I don’t like guys who run for congress because they think it’s a
great gig. Find yourself a live one and I’ll get interested. In the meantime,
the devil you know beats the devil you don’t. And I like the devil I got.

Bartlet prefers to leave a fulminating Christian Republican in post in the 46th rather than step up funding for his Democratic challenger because, as Josh puts it, every time he opens his mouth he's "good for a couple of million dollars" in contributions to the Democratic party. Similarly, I'm sure that every time Polly Toynbee writes another one of her tedious great-enabler, tax-and-spend, redistribution=progressive, blah blah blah IsleptthroughtheEightiescakes articles, what's actually happened is that somewhere, a few classical liberals sat in a room and wrote the most terrifying, illiberal things they could think of and stuck it under a picture the smuggest-looking woman they could find. Must be good for a few thousand pounds' contributions (this is Britain, not the US!) to the Conservatives.