Right Wing Nut House

Funny. I always thought that the initials “BBC” stood for British Broadcasting Company. As revealed in this story however, it seems that I was mistaken. The most recognized broadcasting initials on the planet actually stand for “Bloviating, Biased Cads:”

The BBC was last night plunged into a damaging general election row after it admitted equipping three hecklers with microphones and sending them into a campaign meeting addressed by Michael Howard, the Conservative leader.

The Tories have made an official protest after the hecklers, who were given the microphones by producers, were caught at a party event in the North West last week. Guy Black, the party’s head of communications, wrote in a letter to Helen Boaden, the BBC’s director of news, that the hecklers began shouting slogans that were “distracting and clearly hostile to the Conservative Party”.

Last night, the BBC claimed that the exercise was part of a “completely legitimate programme about the history and art of political heckling” and said that other parties’ meetings were being “observed”. However, The Telegraph has established that none of Tony Blair’s meetings was infiltrated or disrupted in similar fashion.

This is both horrifying and extremely satisfying - kind of like the reaction I get when watching Michael Meyers slice and dice deserving teenagers in the “Halloween” movies. Have you noticed that Mickey always seems to target kids who were in the clique in high school that you hated with a passion? The good looking, smarmy, image-obsessed lightweights who always seemed to be the first to get laid and always seemed to have money to go to the best concerts, wear the best clothes, and drive the best cars? To watch the football star get it was always a cathartic moment for me, an almost orgasmic gratification in watching some of my worst nemeses scream in anguish as the knife plunges into their well built, muscular bodies over and over…

But I digress.

It’s horrifying, of course, because the BBC didn’t have the good sense to use different hecklers at different events and because the camera crew was way too obvious when filming the stunt:

Tory officials became suspicious at the meeting in Horwich, near Bolton, last Wednesday, when they saw BBC camera crew focusing on the hecklers rather than Mr Howard. They twice challenged the two men and a woman involved, and discovered they had been equipped with radio microphones.

Mr Black said that they described themselves as “shoppers”. In fact, they were under direction from a BBC team making a programme called The History of Heckling for the BBC3 channel. The programme, whose producer is Paul Woolwich, is in the process of being edited.

For God’s sake guys! If you’re going to pull a political dirty trick at least have the smarts to carry it out with a little bit of subterfuge. Next time, use two camera crews. That way you can have one crew on the politician you’re trying to smear and the other one on your brave, heroic citizens speaking truth to power.

And that explanation! You’ve got to come up with something better than this:

Last night a BBC spokesman said: “This is a completely legitimate programme about the history and art of political heckling. The programme observes hecklers at other parties’ campaign meetings and not just the Conservatives. The hecklers were not under the direction of the BBC and their activities did not disrupt the meeting in any way. The incident at the Michael Howard meeting only plays a small part in the overall programme. However, we will be investigating the complaint very fully and will be replying in due course.”

The spokesman was unable to provide details of any other campaign meetings attended by the BBC3 crew. He said that the hecklers had not been paid a fee, but could not say whether they had received expenses.

The “art” of political heckling? Only a clueless moonbat would think that shouting down the opposition is artistic expression. That explanation just won’t fly. And please, no humor is necessary in your official statements. Saying “we will be investigating the complaint very fully and will be replying in due course.” is an unnecessary interjection of levity. People have to believe that you’re serious about the inquiry into this deliberate smear. You and I know that when you use the words “in due course” you mean “after the election when our explanation won’t matter” which is actually pretty rich! But it may be too subtle for most Brits whose sense of humor tends more toward the broad strokes of Benny Hill or Monty Python.

Finally, please don’t make the same mistake that Dan Rather and CBS made here when they were caught trying to smear the President with fake documents. The folks at Black Rock caved in to the pressure way too quickly. If they had stuck it out a few more weeks, who knows what might have happened? They could have achieved their goal of electing John Kerry. At the very least, they could have saved themselves the time and trouble of going through the charade of an official “investigation.” Sure they would have been taking a chance that the only people who would’ve been watching CBS News after a few weeks would be either inmates in mental institutions and other folks unable to switch the channel on their TV away from CBS or people who only get one channel on their TV anyway.. As it is, that’s just about their entire audience right now so I guess it wouldn’t have mattered.

I would suggest the next time you want to pull something as outrageously clever and vindictive as this, you contact our own Democratic party. Or maybe some unreconstructed communists.

Pretty much the same thing, come to think of it…

Cross-Posted at Blogger News Network