Iraq:

A month or so ago, it was predicted that attacks would cease as a result of Saddam's capture. Now they're continuing, the CPA are obliged to come up with excuses.

Will Self:

If there’s a word in the English dictionary that I don’t know, I don’t know what it is. But Will Self probably does, and it is his dazzling prolixity as much as his bleak, cynical humanism that attracts legions of misfits, students, and drug addicts to his prose. In My Idea of Fun, the serpiginous Fat Controller detonates pleonastic bombs, sets off “lexical flashes”, irradiates his audience with blasts of sesquipedaleanism. The description appends just as well to Will Self. I can’t remember when I first started liking Self – perhaps when he interviewed Julie Burchill for the Independent in 1999 and tastefully tore her most prized writing to shreds without being unnecessarily vitriolic. He reserves, as always, his most scorching contempt for the political class, the authoritarianism of New Labour, and Blair, that “poetaster of the bland”. Still, it is refreshing to see just how willingly Self relinquishes his charitable sense when writing fiction, for fiction is mercenary – either one makes the kill or one does not deserve to be paid. So it is with Dorian, perhaps his best novel to date, and certainly his most recent.

Johann Hari:

Johann Hari is eloquent in his affronted dignity in today’s Independent, blasting the petulant homophobia of commentators in the rightwing press, which barely musters remark outside of the liberal press. The Gay Police Association (an unfortunate name, inviting a variety of homophobic sneers) has decided to press an official complaint against Richard Littlejohn, the bigotted nappy-filler who writes for the Sun when he isn’t scribing literary masterpieces about gay lawyers, black crimmos, asylum seekers and political correctness. Political correctness sanctifies a certain kind of ersatz transgression, in which the outraged conservative wimp will pretend to be put upon and oppressed by modern day Jacobins seeking to curb freedom of speech. Couched in the language of rebellion, any old reactionary twaddle can pretend to be slightly subversive – picture the wry old right-wing fox, with a twinkling eye for the ladies and a line in ‘wicked’ humour.

Howard Dean:

Howard Dean posing as Ralph Nader? Surely not!