This Spectator piece brings a couple of conjectures to mind:
1) Anyone who uses the phrase ‘pie in the sky’ is an idiot who should be ignored.
2) Anyone who believes absolute national debt, rather than national debt as a proportion of GDP, is a figure with any relevance to anything is an idiot who should be ignored.
These conjectures, happily, tie up with an existing known fact: that Fraser Nelson is an idiot who should be ignored.
And Balls is what then?
Not worthy of criticism?
I think the point is that Balls has been proven a liar not that you do not rate Nelson.
STB.
No, the point is that Balls is only a liar if you take a particularly halfwitted interpretation of what he said, per Mr Nelson.
No, Balls is a liar because what he said was untrue.
He did not talk about debt as a proportion of GDP, but debt, and he was talking to a general audience.
This is pure sophistry.
It would be easier to take Fraser Nelson's protests if he didn't engage in …ahem.. creative accountancy (and blatant one at that) himself. This piece is full of it.
http://irishtribesman.blogspot.com/2005/09/britis…
s/Ed Balls/Emmanuel Goldstein/
Based on your injunctions, Mr. Band, I have decided to always do the opposite of what you advise. After all, if I, and the MSM, had "ignored" the "idiot" Fraser Nelson none of us would have known that buried in the HMG's own red book was the *fact* that they intend to cut spending, not raise it. Similarly, our suspicions that Brown & Balls are about as trustworthy as Madoff & Enron would not have been so spectacularly confirmed as they have been.
Even so, I cannot but admire the way you gallantly lead the charge against impossible odds – anyone who attempts to uphold the reputation of Mr. Balls as a truth-teller deserves the MacBride Medal for Mendacity!
Just because Fraser Nelson is a bit of a knobhead sometimes/often (delete according to taste) doesn't detract from the fact that Balls is a lying piece of sh*t, in this and in a thousand other matters.
We might as well debate on the subject of "If Ed Balls tells a big fat lie in a forest and nobody hears him, is it still a lie?"
I remember reading on the day of the budget that spending was going to be cut in those years, surely?
Tangentally, isn't 'MSM' one of those phrases like 'mainstream medicine'?
Like they always say, if alternative medicine worked it would be mainstream medicine…