Brendan O’Neill is wrong. Again…

I know.. beardy fish in a lefty barrel.

Brendan O’Neill has two modes of operating:

1. 10 years behind the curve, in which he dazzles us with an insight that the rest of us have been expressing since Bob Walpole was PM. [1][2][3][4]
2. Sanctimonious cherry-picker.

Today, it’s the latter.

His argument amounts to this: Yes, I know Alec Baldwin is an awful human being who has spent the last 5 years regarding anyone to the right of Bernie as vermin. But if you take any pleasure at all in him having been involved in a tragic accident, you’re no better than him, are you?

But how much of an accident was it?

Whether Brendan hasn’t done his research or whether this is, again, him on the moral high ground, he fails to note that there are reports of several accidental discharges in the previous days on set, and that because qualified people had walked away from the shitshow, the crew were depending on people who were not fit to be doing the job of handing lethal weapons to people whose job is to dress up and pretend.

O’Neill baldly pre-empts police enquiries by stating as a fact that “Baldwin was not at fault”.

Oh sure, it was a cock-up. No-one is suggesting Baldwin knew the gun was loaded and that he wilfully shot someone, but was he an innocent actor who simply trusted his crew? Or was he an arrogant ignoramus who, having spent half a lifetime despising gun enthusiasts, revelead his fatal ignorance by failing to carry out the most fundamental safety duties of any person who is handed a firearm?

Evidently, it’s the latter isn’t it? I don’t know much about guns, but I do know that if someone hands you one, whatever they told you, you check it. Trust but verify. Is it loaded? What with? Primed? Safety on?

But because he’s a know-nothing gobshite, he didn’t do this, did he?

The prima facie facts are pretty damning.

And so, bumptious Brendan asserts that anyone who finds schadenfreude in Baldwin’s predicament is ‘no better than him’.  Really? Someone who has a dark sense of cosmic karma is no better than a historically ignoble gobshite who failed basic safety and consequently accidentally killed a person? Okay, Brendan. Whatever you say, mate.

The problem is this: The left made EVERYTHING about politics, and politics is a dirty mud-wrestling business.

Every successful political operator in history has won from the gutter. You may not like that fact, but your moral qualms do nothing to disprove it. You think Cameron or Blair or Obama or even Churchill won from the moral high ground? I beg to differ.

It’s too much of a stretch to think that Brendan O’Neill has reached his age and remained naive, so he can only be a self-righteous twonk. And we all have our moments, don’t we? But this man is the undisputed heavyweight champion.

AJ

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