Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy…
State of this:
I mean honestly, where do you even begin? Even by Daniel\u2019s rarefied standards of idiocy, this is a stonker. How is it stupid? Let me count the ways.
1. \u201cOur female head of government\u201d implies the existence of \u201ctheir female head of government\u201d. Which is odd, because the tweet is clearly aimed at Hillary Clinton, who isn\u2019t anybody\u2019s head of government.
Way to kick someone when they\u2019re down, Dan. What next? \u201cSo pleased that my daughter received a wide selection of Christmas presents, unlike those of certain families\u201d?
2. I dunno, I\u2019m no expert, but it\u2019s just possible that there are reasons why so few women make it to the top of politics which don\u2019t have anything to do with how marvellous Britain is.
3. Hillary Clinton was not \u201cthe last guy\u2019s wife\u201d. You can tell this, because she was not married to Barack Obama, whose wife is called Michelle. (Honestly, Daniel, I\u2019m surprised you haven\u2019t spotted the memes.)
4. She wasn\u2019t married to the guy before him, come to that. Her husband stopped being president 16 years ago, since when she\u2019s been elected to the Senate twice and served four years as Secretary of State.
5. I\u2019m sure Hillary would love to have been able to run for president without reference to her husband \u2013 for the first few years of her marriage, indeed, she continued to call herself Hillary Rodham. But in 1980 Republican Frank White defeated Bill Clinton\u2019s campaign to be re-elected as govenor of Arkansas, in part by mercilessly attacking the fact his wife still used her maiden name.
In the three decades since, Hillary has moved from Hillary Rodham, to Hillary Rodham Clinton, to Hillary Clinton. You can see this as a cynical response to conservative pressure, if you so wish \u2013 but let\u2019s not pretend there was no pressure to subsume her political identity into that of her husband, eh? And let\u2019s not forget that it came from your side of the fence, eh, Dan?
6. Also, let\u2019s not forget that the woman you\u2019re subtweeting is a hugely intelligent former senator and secretary of state, who Barack Obama described as the most qualified person ever to run for president. I\u2019m sure you wouldn\u2019t want to be so patronising as to imply that the only qualification she had was her husband, now, would you?
7. I\u2019d love to know what qualifications Dan thinks are sufficient to become US president, and whether he believes a real estate mogul with an inherited fortune and a reality TV show has them.
8. Hillary Clinton got nearly 3m more votes than Donald Trump, by the way.
9. More votes than any white man who has ever run for president, in fact.
10. Certainly a lot more votes than Theresa May, who has never faced a general election as prime minister and became leader of the government by default after the only other candidate left in the race dropped out. Under the rules of British politics this is as legitimate a way of becoming PM as any, of course, I\u2019m just not sure how winning a Tory leadership contest by default means she \u201cran in her own right\u201d in a way that Hillary Clinton did not.
11. Incidentally, here\u2019s a video of Daniel Hannan demanding Gordon Brown call an early election in 2009 on the grounds that \u201cparliament has lost the moral mandate to carry on\u201d.
So perhaps expecting him to understand how the British constitution works is expecting too much.
12. Why the hell is Hannan sniping at Hillary Clinton, who is not US president, when the man who is the new US president has, in three days, come out against press freedom, basic mathematics and objective reality? Sorry, I\u2019m not moving past that.
13. Notice the way the tweet says that our \u201chead of government \u201d got there on merit. That\u2019s because our \u201chead of state \u201d got the job because her great, great grandmother happened to be a protestant in 1701 and her uncle wanted to marry a divorcee \u2013 all of which makes it a bit difficult to say that our head of government \u201cran in her own right\u201d. But hey, whatever makes you happy.
14. Is Daniel calling the US a banana republic? I mean, it\u2019s a position I have some sympathy with in this particular week, but it\u2019s an odd fit with the way he gets all hot and bothered whenever someone starts talking about the English-speaking peoples.
15. Incidentally, he stole this tweet from his 14-year-old daughter:
16. Who talks, oddly, like a 45-year-old man.
17. And didn\u2019t even credit her! It\u2019s exactly this sort of thing which stops women making it to the top rank of politics, Daniel.
18. He tweeted that at 6.40am the day after the march. Like, he spent the whole of Saturday trying to come up with a zinger, and then eventually woke up early on the Sunday unable to resist stealing a line from his teenage daughter. One of the great orators of our age, ladies and gentlemen.
19. He thinks he can tweet this stuff without people pointing and laughing at him.
Here\u2019s a tip if you want to feel queasy on your morning commute: try watching the combover-with-a-man-attached that now occupies the most powerful office in the world explain why he\u2019s actually quite keen on torture.
In his first TV interview as president , Donald Trump responded to a question about waterboarding by saying:
\u201cWhen Isis is doing things that nobody has ever heard of since medieval times. Would I feel strongly about waterboarding. As far as I\u2019m concerned we have to fight fire with fire.\u201d
Trump, reports allege , is preparing an executive order that would reintroduce \u201cblack sites\u201d: unknown locations at which terrorism suspects are detained.
Torture, he says, \u201cabsolutely works\u201d.
Well, according to a 2014 Senate Report into what the CIA euphemistically called its \u201cenhanced interrogation\u201d programme, apparently not.
This report found that interrogators had used a series of brutal and, to most of us, extremely upsetting techniques, including threatening inmates with sexual violence and carrying out \u201crectal feeding\u201d without any evident medical justification. Detainees were also placed in ice-water baths and told they would only leave the hands of the agency \u201cin a coffin-shaped box\u201d.
Testimony from Majid Khan , a former detainee who subsequently became a witness for the US government, claimed that interrogators poured ice water over his genitals and recorded him naked.
\u201cIt is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured,\u201d said Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chaired the committee that produced the report .
Worse? According to the report, no substantial threat was uncovered via the use of the techniques:
\u201c At no time did the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques lead to the collection of imminent threat intelligence, such as the hypothetical ‘ticking time bomb’ information that many believe was the justification for the use of these techniques. \u201d
In fact, every one of the most frequently-cited examples of the agency\u2019s success using its \u201cenhanced\u201d techniques was found to be \u201cwrong in fundamental respects\u201d, as a Telegraph report from the time puts it. As former Guantanamo prosecuter David Iglesias put it bluntly in a PBS debate on the topic : \u201cIt doesn\u2019t work.\u201d
\u201cAs a former war crimes prosecutor, I can tell you, it\u2019s radioactive, and, more importantly, from a realpolitik point of view, it just doesn\u2019t work.\u201d
\u201cRadioactive\u201d is the right word. Not only can torture damage America’s reputation overseas, particularly in countries where the US military already has a controversial presence, it can potentially harm relationships with key allies.
Documents released in May 2016 show how the UK\u2019s involvement in \u201cclandestine rendition operations\u201d with foreign agencies during Tony Blair\u2019s premiership led to a prolonged rift in the UK intelligence community. As a Guardian report explains :
\u201c The head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, was so incensed when she discovered the role played by MI6 in abductions that led to suspected extremists being tortured, she threw out a number of her sister agency\u2019s staff and banned them from working at MI5\u2019s headquarters, Thames House. \u201d
If Trump attempts to restore torture \u2013 sorry, \u201cenhanced interrogation\u201d \u2013 to the official CIA playbook, he risks endangering the close ties between the US and UK intelligence agencies.
Any attempt to reinstate the programme will cause Trump domestic problems, too. Already, Trump\u2019s cabinet has split on torture, with CIA chief Mike Pompeo saying he would \u201c absolutely not \u201d restart the use of enhanced interrogation tactics.
Senator John McCain, who was subject to intensive torture including rope bindings and repeated beatings during his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in northern Vietnam, has unequivocally told Trump that the US is \u201cnot bringing back torture\u201d. In 2015, McCain helped bring in bipartisan legislation limiting permissible interrogation techniques to those listed in the Army Field Manual , a law he quoted today:
\u201c The president can sign whatever executive orders he likes. But the law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America. \u201d
The legislation was put in place not only because of torture\u2019s apparent ineffectiveness but because it \u201c diminishes us morally \u201d.
Different people hold different beliefs about the relative morality of torture. Yet there is something to be said for McCain’s red line. What a state is willing to sanction in exceptional cases often ends up informing its behaviour in ordinary circumstances. For some things, the best answer to when they\u2019re allowed is \u201cnever\u201d.
It is this moral dimension that makes Trump’s comments so shocking. When Donald Trump says \u201cwe\u2019re not fighting fire with fire\u201d, what he means is \u201cwe\u2019re not behaving the same way because we think the way they behave is evil\u201d. To me, that sounds like a good thing. To Trump: apparently not.<\/p>\n

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Sentiment rank: -2.7<\/div>\n

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