Wednesday, January 25, 2006

The Sun shines out of our behinds

Have low have we sunk that we deserve The Sun, out of all people, giving us moral lectures about Mark Oaten?

The latest victim to be ripped apart by the demented UK tabloid brigade is rent-a-chap Mark Oaten, LibDem MP for Winchester, guilty of betraying his family-man credentials by having an affair with a rent boy.

The fact of the matter is that this country’s press has topped the most sickening levels of hypocrisy. Who are they, those tabloids, to preach about family values and a bloke's sexual anguish when they’re first in the queue with the most relentless, lurid, cheapest notion of sex. The very same Sun (and News of The World) that, by commodifying the female body, is responsible for cementing a macho-fuelled notion of beauty that results in generations of teenage girls wondering whether their knockers will ever be “up to the task”.

The same vulgar Sun that preaches about a populistic British grandeur while it forwards the shrewd self-interest business of non-British tycoon Rupert Murdoch, a right-winger who will not go down in history for re-investing his humongous profits back into this country.

But perhaps the problem is deeper. The problem of a rotten country that may not care about Tony Blair’s lies as he sends British soldiers to the deaths on the basis of a counterfeited PhD thesis. A country where certain press are so obsessed with page-3-boobs that, displaying memory-levels worth of a goldfish, they give the same Prime Minister such an easy ride over the connection between Iraq and Islamic terrorism reaching our shores. A press that finds rent-a-chap Oaten more relevant than a widening gap between rich and poor under a Labour government, with fat-cats payouts growing as fast as the £1.3 trillion debt bubble. A country that boasts 2/3 of the entire EU credit card debt, where the economy would collapse without its gurgle of virtual money, shopping centre after shopping centre. Where workers’ rights are at an all-time low and the education system faces another elitist overhaul. A country where Oaten fancying it ‘that way’ has more social relevance than a government holding 65 per cent of the seats based on a 27 per cent share of the vote.

Have low have we sunk that we deserve The Sun, out of all people, giving us moral lectures about Mark Oaten?

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