A little local Difficulty


Who is he? The Man in the Picture? It doesn't matter. At least not to you or me it doesn't. He is some young man who went to war. Perhaps he came back and perhaps he didn't.

Why do people fight wars? I mean Just Wars where there is a moral principle at stake, not the kind we are fighting in Iraq? They fight them to, among other things, preserve the truth, for, all wars are predicated on lies; in WW2 it was the myth of a Master Race, in Iraq it was Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Moral Principles. The phrase is almost a taboo subject, almost as if by saying it you are condemned to the file marked "reactionary and right wing". Our current local political map is littered with moral failure. In the case of the Liberal Democrats, who until recently were considered the "nice, fluffy" party, they have shown how lacking in moral principles they are. We had an alcoholic leader,
Charles Kennedy who everyone feels sorry for. I don't. Had he been just another Joe, trying to make his way with the problem of alcoholism, I would not have minded. But he was a political leader, and potentially the Prime Minister. Alcoholics are devious, wreck homes, and cause everyone around them to make excuses and mop up after the wreckage. I think there are obvious dangers having someone like that in charge, particularly someone who could not actually function properly. So his moral failure is deviousness, the implication of others in his lies and subterfuges and the putting of ambition before the national interest.

And then we get to the homosexual scandals. I believe in the case of
Mark Oaten, he is mainly guilty of hurting those around him; his wife and children. He paraded himself as a "family man" when his preferences were revealed to be diametrically opposed. The trawling after male prositutes and the attendant health risks, are hardly conducive to family life. And the latest failure is Simon Hughes, who got into Parliament by using homophobic literature entitled, "Simon Hughes, the straight choice". Another hypocrite and liar. I believe that private lives are private lives, but in each of the three cases, these men have publically presented themselves as something they are not. They have all lied and lied to save their miserable skins.

So regardless of who the young man in the picture is, he did join up to fight a war for the good of our country, so that we could enjoy freedom.

Lies pervert choice. Choice is a building block of freedom.

These ghastly people have in their small way eroded that freedom, and that memory, by the cowardly application of dissimulation and outright falsehood in the pursuit of personal ambition. How cheap and tawdry is that?

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