doubleshiny

I am generally suspicious of headlines.  I always check quotations, context and tone when I'm told that someone has said something 'outrageous', so when I read on BBC News that actress Rose McGowan had announced that she would have been in the IRA if she was in Belfast in the 1980s I checked out the real sources. The quotations simply said 'My heart bleeds for the cause', which is nothing unusual. American IRA sympathy is something which makes me balk but it's been around for so long that you can hardly still get upset about it.  She was promoting her new film 50 Dead Men Walking, an account of the life of a British intelligence mole who infiltrated the IRA in the 1980s. She plays a 'femme fatale' IRA member, laughably.

Unfortunately, with a little searching I also found this quotation : "I imagine, if I'd grown up in Belfast, I would have 100 percent been in the IRA". (The First Post).

What Ms McGowan doesn't understand is that if she'd have grown up in Belfast she would have 100% have been in danger of having her body parts blown off by the very people who were trying to 'free' her from the clutches of British rule. Let's not beat around the bush here, the IRA (more accurately the Provisional IRA) were terrorists. They killed indiscriminately with bombs and also discriminately with guns. They did not have right on their side because of the British Army's presence in Northern Ireland, and they represented a tiny minority of Irish people.

I have only ever met a couple of Americans who were intent on believing that the IRA were simply brave freedom fighters rising up against an oppressive nation, but they were deluded in the extreme and  very vocal about it. Mickey Rourke gave money to the IRA, some American businesses used to routinely collect for the IRA during the eighties. A relative of mine, an Irishman in the British Army told of his disgust that when ordering in McDonalds in America, he was told to take the money for his meal out of the IRA collecting tin because he had a Dublin accent. That's as offensive as saying "Oh, you're from Iraq? Well, give this money to Saddam with our best wishes". Thankfully the Americans I know are informed enough to know what the IRA did to innocent people in the UK.

Rose McGowan's comments are obscene given the atrocities that took place during the Troubles. Imagine a terrorist group assassinated a relative of George W. Bush, bombed Wall Street and then tried to blow up the hotel where the Republican Convention was being held. Would you expect British celebrities to get away with saying they would have been a part of this? Absolutely not, but the fact is that the IRA assassinated Lord Mountbatten, car bombed Canary Wharf and tried to bomb the Conservative Party Conference and kill Thatcher, and still  money rolled in through Noraid.

Ever wonder why there are no bins in UK train stations? It's because up until 2000 they still had a habit of exploding thanks to the 'freedom fighters' of the IRA. If Rose McGowan's 'heart bleeds for the cause' I wonder whether her heart will bleed after reading this list :

1973 Two of four car bombs explode, killing 1 and injuring 180.

1974 MP Ross McWhirter shot dead in his home.

1974 Bomb explodes on army bus killing 9 soldiers and 3 civilians.

1974 Bomb explodes at the Tower of London killing 1 and injuring 44.

1974 Guildford pub bombing kills 5 and injures 54.

1974 Woolwich pub bombing kills 2 and injures 28.

1974 Birmingham pub bombings kill 21 and injures 162.

1975 Bomb explodes at the London Hilton killing 2 and injuring 63.

1979 MP Airey Neave killed in car bomb outside the Houses of Parliament.

1981 Bomb at Chelsea barracks kills 2 and injures 40.

1981 Bomb disposal officer killed whilst diffusing bomb on Oxford St.

1982 11 soldiers killed and 50 soldiers and civilians injured in bombs in Hyde Park and Regents Park parades.

1983 Bomb explodes on December 17th outside Harrods killing 6 and injuring 87.

1984 Brighton hotel hosting the Conservative Party conference bombed. 5 dead and 6 permanently disabled.

1989 Deal barracks bombed, 11 killed.

1991 Bomb kills 1 and injures 38 at Victoria Station, London.

1992 Bomb kills 3 and injures 91 in London.

1992 Sussex Arms pub bombed, one killed, four injured.

1993 Truck bombed at Bishopsgate, one killed, 43 injured.

1993 Warrington city centre bombed, 2 children killed and 53 people injured.

1996 Truck explodes at Canary Wharf, 2 killed 40 injured.

This list is incomplete, and only features fatal attacks in England. If I were to list all of the attacks by the IRA, and those in which people were 'only' injured I'd be here all day.

If Rose McGowan thinks that she would be '100%' happy to be a part of cowardly, indiscriminate violence like this, she's either stupid or evil. I think stupid is the closer option.





 

I like the Writer's Block idea of writing a haiku about how your day's going. Here's mine...

My phone will not ring
I called communications
No-one will fix it

Sarah Palin has given her big speech and I just wanted to document how frightened I am of her. If the Republicans wanted to counter the feelgood-green-hope message of Obama's camp then they've certainly done it with this terrifying vicious nutjob who makes me want to actually abandon all hope and pack up for a new life on one of Jupiter's more hostile moons.

Her website paints her as some kind of cyborg, armed to the teeth and married to a dog sledder. It has a great stand-alone sentence in her bio "She also runs marathons". It sounds like a vague threat - if you run from Palin you're going to have to make it for 26 miles at least before she leaps onto your back and rips your throat out with her teeth. She's a 'lifetime' member of the NRA, in case there was any suggestion that  anything other than the cold embrace of the grave would remove the firearm from her holster.

Her children's names are even slightly nuts, they sound like they've been named after huskies - Track, Trig, Bristol, Piper and Willow. Someone should tell her that Bristol is English slang for tit. Bristol is the one that's been knocked up outside of Mrs Palin's beloved Christian wedlock. She was quick enough to parade the poor girl and her doomed boyfriend in front of the press and announce that they will be getting married immediately - don't forget son, mom's got an NRA membership, so the shotgun wedding won't just be a figure of speech.

She merrily accepts the nickname Sarah Barracuda. In case you didn't know, the barracuda's chief characteristics are powerful jaws (check, she looks like the lovechild of Bruce Campbell and a bear trap), and a voracious killer instinct (check, just look at those cold dead eyes and you can see that if you were stranded in the icy wilderness of Alaska she wouldn't wait til you were dead before cooking your carcass for sustenance). She is a former beauty queen, apparently named Miss Congeniality but to believe that you would have to conclude that the other competitors were in fact real barracudas. Palin admits to having smoked pot, which seems to be a requirement for presidential candidates of late. Good to know that the potential leader of the free world has a deputy who spent her youth parading in swimsuits, killing moose and getting chonged off her tits. It almost makes her human, but not quite, it's like these foibles have been generated by a random humaniser program.

From what I can tell she certainly don't like them animals. She pushed for people to be able to hunt wolves from helicopters, which I find both baffling and objectionable. It was apparently to control the wolf population and protect the moose. Protect the moose so that people could hunt them, you understand. It seems that the natural predation of the moose involving wolves with teeth and claws and men with guns was not as fair a contest as she'd hoped, so it's up with the armed chopper pilots to decimate the wolf population and leave those defenceless gunmen free to slaughter as many moose as possible.

Polar bears are also troublesome to Palin. It appears that the selfish little bastards make their habitat in what would otherside be perfectly good gas pumping country. Frustrating do-gooders had somehow managed to place them on the endangered species list, what with them being endangered and all, and this upset Sarah Palin greatly. She was so upset she tried to sue the US goverment for doing such a hasty thing, arguing that polar bears loved living alongside the majestic oil platform, because it reminded them of the sky scraping ice caps which she had melted with her laser vision only weeks before.  Whales? Yes, she wants them dead too, they also get in the way of gas and oil development.

Her official website bio claims that Alaskan nature is one of her interests, certainly true! She spends every waking moment trying to wipe it off the face of the earth, encouraging commerical expansion on protected land, and ensuring that the menace of wolves, moose, polar bears and beluga whales were eradicated, to save the Alaskan people from co-ordinated attacks by these numerous and vicious creatures.
Her opposite number Joe Biden looks like Gandhi in comparison. His childrens' names are Joseph, Robert, Amy and Ashley - pretty normal. You don't get the feeling that those names are actually acryonyms devised by United Robitics. He pretty much wins on the 'good kid' ticket - while Bristol Palin is attending ante-natal classes whilst also shopping for wedding dresses his son Beau is being shipped out to Iraq as part of the National Guard.

Biden's personal dislikes are not endangered animals or equality but violence against women and denial of educational progression to poor children. Biden for the win then, it seems.