I am glad to see that Nick is standing up for difficult causes like being against genocide

Sigh. Well done to everyone who predicted the Tessa Jowell thing although it was not exactly rocket science. Also Nick has been on the phone to a dog handler about that cocaine on banknotes urban myth, though as far as I can tell he did not understand the response.

But the main piece on Rowan Williams is, shall we say, rather weak. Chunks of it seem to have been lifted from blogs (in particular I believe the fairly asinine "the Darfur massacre has killed thousands of Muslims, but the Muslim world is not up in arms about that, perhaps because both the killers and victims are Muslims, suggesting that this is not actually a religious conflict about Islam, some things aren't you know" line is a lift from Normblog), and Nick appears to be all over the place in trying to roll all the different civil wars and genocides currently going on into Sudan into one convenient package that can be blamed on the Left. I suspect that what is going on here is that this column is the result of about five or six people telling Nick "no, no, it's much more complicated to that" and him being too intellectually honest to just ignore them and go for his big theme, but too lazy or time and space-constrained to write a proper article about how ghastly and complicated the Sudanese situation is.

However, it is pretty clear from Nick's article that one of the things that would definitely not have helped any of the Sudanese crises would have been a bloody great speech from the Archbishop of Canterbury saying something along the lines of "can't you darkies get your act together? All of your problems are the fault of Islamism and I condemn you!". Or in other words, Williams' spokesman's point that his mission was a difficult diplomatic one is correct, and the Decent demands for ringing statements of "Carry On Up The Enlightenment" are simply stroking their own moral egos.

The belief that what actually happens in the world is less important than what view "the Left" takes of it is fairly and squarely there in Paul Berman (and I promise you, that review is going to hit this blog Real Soon Now). It's rather like the old joke that "I wear the trousers in my household. My wife makes the trivial decisions, like where we go on holiday and how to bring up the kids, but I make the important decisions, like whether we're going to support Japan's claim for a place on the Security Council". A joke which obviously would need to be adapted for the Jowell/Mills household but there you go.