Some news just wants to make you dig a hole and gibber quietly at the bottom of it. Henry Kissinger is being brought in by Sepp Blatter to advise on cleaning up corruption in FIFA! I expect Lord Triesman and Chuck Blazer to be disappeared by death squads, and carpet bombing in the Lancaster Gate area.
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Putting the fox in charge of the chicken run.
I think it was Tom Lehrer who said he gave up satire when Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize, because nothing he wrote could outdo real life.
Tom Lehrer, The Elements:
http://www.privatehand.com/flash/elements.html
Craig, I thought this was a sardonic post, a jibe at Big Footie. Then I checked, just for the hell of it and discovered that you're – I mean that Blatter – is being serious. Bleeding heck! I mean, we 're talking alleged corruption in sport here, not Agent Orange and napalm and little children running along the road with skin melting off their backs. What in the name of Ho Ch Minh does that mass murdering son-of-a-gun war criminal has-been piece of growling silicon have to do with soccer?????? I tell you what. Since the world has gone completely insane, let's go the whole hog and bring in Charles Manson to reform table tennis and Jeffrey Dahmer to clean up athletics! And while we're at it, how about Idi Amin for basketball, Pinochet for tennis and Mobutu for gymnastics? Dead? Doesn't matter – dig 'em up! Kissinger??? Kiss-my-ass!
For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours’ eyes?
There is always a motive behind anything Henry 'Dr Strangelove' Kissinger does – as former NASL chairman and friend of Sepp Blatter, Kissinger wants the next available World Cup to be held in the United States. Of course he will be doing a bit of 'shuttle diplomacy' to rise above the murk of 'under the table' transactions.
Do you suppose Kissinger is on the same side as Usmanov, or are they on opposing teams? Maybe something’s gonna rigged?
I agree with Mark that Kissinger has that agenda. Also with Suhayl on his description of the croaking mass murderer. I think of him as some hideous mutation of a bullfrog,
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Barcelona were wonderful to watch the other night and made MU look like the local team down in my park. Assume the Uzbek involvement in Barcelona's funding is still current. http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/03/un…
Henry Kissinger
Wasn't a cringer.
He felt no shame at all
At the Nobel peace prize ball.
Completely off topic but please allow. Urgent.
Jeremy Hunt plans to approve Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB takeover in a few days time. But the coalition is weak and divided. With a huge appeal now to Vince Cable – who knows the danger Murdoch poses to our democracy – we could derail the deal.
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In return for supporting David Cameron at the general election, Rupert Murdoch expected to own all of BSkyB months ago. He's angry thatwe forced the government to put the brakes on. The Lib Dems were hammered by voters last month and are now desperately trying to distance themselves from the Tories. So let’s raise a mass outcry to Vince Cable to follow his conscience and threaten to resign unless the government blocks this deal.
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Sign the petition calling on Cable to stand up against News Corporation, and for our democracy. We’ll deliver it with a splash to the Business Secretary next week, making media waves that could rock the coalition. With hacking scandals piling up and the deal's cost rising every day this could be decisive. Sign now, and circulate to everyone you know.
. http://www.avaaz.org/en/bkyb_decision_time/?vl
"Henry Kissinger is being brought in by Sepp Blatter to advise on cleaning up corruption in FIFA!"
That's because Blatter doesn't mistake bloated, corrupt international patronage schemes for missionary work.
Mark: "Kissinger wants the next available World Cup to be held in the United States."
The next "available" World Cup will be in 2026 when Henry Kissinger will be 103!!! It's possible that he is indeed playing the long-game and it is well-known that he is a big football lover (every World Cup he tries to wangle tickets to the final and writes op-eds in the grown-up papers about the tactics of each team). But I think you might be putting a bit too much stock in the importance of hosting the World Cup. The only thing Kissinger needs to make sure of is that the World Cup won't be hosted by Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, Laos or numerous other countries in which he could be arrested.
Interesting article (for me) in the Economist:
http://www.economist.com/node/18774796?fsrc=scn/t…
Come on you guys in Colorado., Get a move on.
. http://intensedebate.com/aboutus
Blatter could have availed himself of expertise from Olympics [IOC] or Cricket [ICC] who have both set salutory examples. But no he recruits that well known soccer pundit Kissinger. Still couldn've been worse. could've been Blair
Angrysober
eh? Kissinger might be 103 in 2026 – good maths! He will be a lot younger when they decide the 2026 2030 fixtures. hint: 2022 is in Qatar – hey I suppose Doha is America 😉 – or, Kissinger will try to get a re-vote, sure, he owes us a favor.
angrysoba, you don't have to be a mass murderer in order to be able of undertaking work whose nature is not akin to that of a missionary. Cleaning-out the Augean Stables of international football probably does require some degree of zeal, though, and since missionaries often have been extremely zealous (think of David Livingstone and the slave-traders), the attribution of soft-touch to the concept of 'mission' is hardly apt. The NASL should be ashamed of itself to have had this war criminal as its president and in my opinion, Blatter should be taken down (sacked) for this act of inviting Kissinger to work with FIFA. Instead of trying Mladic, then, maybe he should simply be made linesman to Kissinger's ref? Like Thatcher, he may enjoy having war criminals as pals – such is the way in the uber-wealthy VVIP circuit – but why should it simply be accepted? It seems that no-one in a position of authority in sport actually gives a damn. Ah, what precisely is new, then?
I agree with The Economist's writer (thanks for posting the piece, angrysoba) that Blatter should resign, since he's been running the show – the unbridled corruption has occurred on his watch and seems largely in conformity with his modus operandum and with the culture he has facilitated. So, in a parallel scenario, perhaps we might view Blatter as the cocktail-swilling, white-tuxedo'd dictator of that strategically-important banana republic called 'Football' and Kissinger as the 'CIA' arriving to help the 'dictator' remain in power by creating 'efficiencies'. History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Who said that…? Ah! Karl Marx. One of your favourites! Another German, eh? (!)
Hi Suhaayl. I think your first response was to my ironic remarks about Kissinger and Blatter. I am far more in line with the Economist's take on things in thinking Blatter should be got rid of. I've thought this for quite some time. Then again, I tend to agree with the Economist a lot as insufferably mainstream as that makes me.
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And, yes, indeed Karl Marx could have got this right:
. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8
.
But I wasn't joking about Kissinger and football:
. http://www.henryakissinger.com/articles/nw061206….
Scott Ritter on hyping the need to nuke Iran, sorry to digress with 'horizon events'. http://www.democracynow.org/2009/9/29/fmr_un_weap…
Suhayl, I can assure you that Blatters postwar haste to accommodate corruption and personal enrichment portfolio's of his executive is not some sort of Germano-genetic arborition, he's a sly fox who most likely knows stuff about each and every member of his executive, a puppet master, Q if you like. To have Kissinger, and many other Bilderbergers, as friends, inviting them in on the FIFA hyst, puts samaranchs past dabblings in the shade.
Axe him I hear, how? der kleine Schweinehund wird sich nun erst recht im Schlamm wohlfuehlen, nobody can touch him.
Sorry, 'the litle pig dog will now feel really at home in the mud'
Guys, if you're signing against Murdoch at Avaaz, you might sign against the F1 in Brutal Bahrain too. They have thousands of sigs already but need more:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/no_f1_in_brutal_bahrain/
The forelock tugging commentary on the Derby preliminaries from Claire Balding is totally excruciating. I believe her father and brother have connections to the royal horseracing lot. And what a lovely surprise for all of us. The Duke and Diuchess of Cambridge (who? Kate and Wills) have turned up too as well as those milliners' delights, the arms salesman's daughters..
Yes, thanks, angrysoba. I wasn't aware, before this current kerfuffle, of Kissinger's passion for football, so I've learned something. I guess every war criminal has a soft side – though he was an imperialist lackey, Idi Amin used to specialise in international 'anti-imperialist' jokes, for example. I'm sure Pol Pot engaged in some form of touchingly endearing pursuit in his time. Goebbles wrote novels, Hitler thought he was an artist, Stalin was a published, quite well-respected Georgian poet ("…this lad has lots of promise…"). On a separate, yet not unrelated, note, in the 1980s/1990s, there was that right-wing Republican senator (what was his name?), who used to play the blues at a high level. Such things remind one that those who wield power and commit crimes against humanity are humans like you and I and that – as per Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare et al – at some level we all are capable of such acts. Whether or not, in similar situations, we would commit such acts is entirely another matter. And how does one know? First, allow me to wash the blood off my hands…
Yes, Suhayl. Kissinger does have a more outwardly human side when it comes to things like football. And as you say, Idi Amin had some brilliant quirks. By most accounts he was personally very charming. If you've read The Last King of Scotland you may have found yourself rooting for him. There's also a really amusing anecdote in Francis Wheen's Strange Days Indeed in which Idi Amin summoned the foreign ambassadors to some remote area of northern Uganda to hear what he had to say. Because of its remoteness it took many of them a long time to arrive. Idi Amin even shut down the Ugandan Airlines forcing them all to drive. The Chinese delegation's car broke down ten miles from the meeting place forcing the ambassador to walk. When finally, Idi Amin turns up on his own private plane he tells the assembled diplomatic corps:
"Africans like chickens. Every African wants to own his own chicken. Africans will not allow Russians to come to their country and steal their chickens. Let the Russians remember that."
Then, laughing, he departed again.
I think that's quite amusing but Idi Amin did inflict horrific things on other Ugandans and had racist policies against the Asian population which was both morally indefensible and economically disastrous.
I expect that most dicatators (and high flyers in more democratic countries) are personally charming while also being incredibly ruthless.
Sorry just noticed your comment Dreoilin – re F1 in Bahrain – totally agree – I will sign and get more signatures thru Facebook with a possible header – TO BUY 'Red Bull' BUYS into TORTURE – the energy drink is expensive at > £1.00 – it costs 20p to make and package.