May 26, 2003

PHILLIP NEEDS HELP

Phillip Adams is deeply confused, as Andrew Bolt reveals:

The failings of this otherwise gifted and charming man go deeper, as I realised from one of his letters to me, in which he complained I'd got his history as a communist wrong.

"I was not a member of the Communist Party for 14 years," he snapped.

"Try 14 months. I joined that fine organisation when I was 16 and was expelled when I was 17."

I wondered how I'd got this so wrong, and soon discovered my mistake. As I wrote back, "I have no excuse -- I relied on a notoriously and wildly inaccurate source . . . Phillip Adams".

It was Phillip himself who'd written six years ago how he'd left the communists "after the crushing of the Prague Spring" in 1968, having joined "in 1954, at the ripe old age of 15".

So was Adams 15 or 16 when he joined? Did he leave after 14 months or 14 years? Where are my trousers? I need money for the bus. The government! Who keeps changing the television station? Did you steal my tablets?

Posted by Tim Blair at May 26, 2003 06:48 PM
Comments

Man, that was an elegant take-down. I have to learn to pepper my venom with complements like 'otherwise gifted and charming man' while slipping the knife in.

It allows a credible measure of even-handedness that 'slack-jawed illiterate donkey-fucker' dosn't.

Posted by: Amos at May 27, 2003 at 01:19 AM

Mr Adams is very highly regarded by many of my teaching colleagues, but especially so by English teachers. What more proof could anyone need that the man is an idiot?

Posted by: ZsaZsa at May 27, 2003 at 01:43 AM

God DAMN, Tim, you crack me up!

Posted by: ushie at May 27, 2003 at 02:56 AM

Come now, Tim. You are being too hard on the man.

The explanation is simple. Phillip WAS expelled after 14 months, but it took another thirteen years for him to take the hint and leave.

Actually, I suspect that he is confusing the the Hungarian uprising of 1956 with the Czechoslovakian one of 1968.

Posted by: parallel at May 27, 2003 at 12:19 PM

Does Rumsfeld know? End of commie dickhead writer problem.

Posted by: Jake D at May 27, 2003 at 02:16 PM

Given the demonstrated capacity of memebers of socia;ist movements for thuggery, expulsion and counter expulsion seem rather mild, only notional excommunications, as eneies within the party/move,movement endeavour to out twit each other.

Twitting, when predicated of the infighting between socialists: a means of maintaining hostilities when exhausted from a recent spate of exchanging clubs.

Posted by: d at May 28, 2003 at 10:07 AM