Nevertheless, Galloway will return to these shores claiming he overcame all the media bias _against_ him !

I am a long time subscriber to Private Eye, in years past "Gorgeous George" Galloway has been a frequent victim of the Eye's damning and often vitrolic satire. Yet in the upcoming recent election campaign the Eye featured regular "Commons Tearoom" comments on his opponent Oona King. Nary a comment on Galloway's involvement with MAB and the SWP, the election campaign protests against him by Islamic extremists, or even Oona's allegations of "Ugandan Discussions" which seem to have been vindicated by the soon-to-be-ex Mrs Galloway.

Galloway knows there is an consistant undercurrent of leftism and anti-Americanism in the entire media industry, not only in tiny institutional magazines like Private Eye but extended to all media, it has been galvanised by the re-election of Bush and Blair, and he is milking it for all it is worth, and he will _win_ out.

Galloway is an example of tired old pro-communist leftism that should have died along with the Soviet Empire, but he is far from unique, his silent supporters are everywhere, where's my tin foil hat ?

All the way along we are told of the right wing Murdoch style manipulation of news and politics, the stock image is that of the ultra-capitalist media magnate Elliot Carver from Tomorrow Never Dies, but the truth is that institutionalised media is much worse when controlled by leftists sympathetic to people like Galloway.

Private Eye, a leftist magazine? You're 'aving a laugh, shorely?

When did you last read Private Eye ?

Galloway is clearly dodgy in various ways; but I support him against this bizarre US inquiry because the US government is much worse and much more of a threat tha n Galloway. And I suspect Private Eye are thinking something similar.

And if you think the media are 'sympathetic' to Galloway, you're blind. Or at the very least missed his Paxo interview.

I don't think I said that "the media" are sympathetic to Galloway. I said that the two television news reports I saw on Tuesday night were blatantly biased towards him. I'm not stupid enough to extrapolate from that to every broadcaster and newspaper in the country.

I did see the Paxman interview. How on Earth Paxman managed to miss a target that easy, we may never know. Unless, of course, it was a cunning double-bluff designed to make Galloway look good, which is pretty hard to do.

There's nothing bizarre about the enquiry. They've discovered evidence; they're investigating it. Contrary to the impression Galloway's trying to give, he's not on trial.

He's already given at least one provably wrong bit of evidence to the enquiry, breaking the oath he gave at the start. I hope they prosecute him for that.

It turns out that the BBC's man on the spot was not only an old friend of Gorgeous', but also a political colleague and crony. And the Beeb flew him out there specially, rather than use their normal man in Washington, who was already there. The Hootsmon has the details.

Makes you proud to pay your licence fee, doesn't it?

Didn't see it myself, but from what I've heard large amounts of speechifying from GG interspersed with the occasional hesitant question from a senator seems to be a fair portrayal of what happened.

Perhaps that would have been a fair portrayal, but that's not what the BBC and ITV showed. It's a simple matter of time: you had to watch a couple of minutes of the report before they let you hear a senator. By any reasonable standard — standards of narrative, for instance — it's pretty bizarre to show GG's answers to questions without showing the questions he's answering. If the senators' performance was so dreadful, why not give them equal time and let them damn themselves? The reports were so biased that you couldn't even tell whether the senators' performance was good, bad, or indifferent: you just didn't see them.

>the US government is much worse and much more of a threat tha n Galloway

More of a threat? Certainly, although not to democracy and freedom. Were Galloway to get his way we'd see a lot less of both, but it's very unlikely he will. Worse? For whom? For Muslim terrorists and dictators, this has been proven beyond doubt.

But I suspect your little slogan has no more real content than the "Bushitler" idiocy, and in the same way trivialises serious issues to support your infantile political sensibilities.