18 January 2008updated 05 Oct 2023 8:50am

Drudging up the Lewinsky affair

The internet is aglow with chatter about the government's nuclear plans, and memories of the moment

As the dust begins to settle on the party funding fiasco, other matters are chewed over in the blogosphere.

Over at Burning Our Money, Wat Tyler is firmly behind the government’s plans to go nuclear. A comprehensive, if partial, evaluation of the wind power concludes: “The bottom line is that windmills may be a highly seductive idea from a distance, but once you get up close all you find is another giant dollop of wishful thinking.”

As if in response, Rupert Read, a Green Party councillor from Norfolk and EU candidate, blogs a compendium of his anti-nuclear arguments. He also speaks out against biofuels, claiming the craze for them is destroying rainforests when other sources of fuel are less damaging. He hails Biofulewatch, and calls on Greens to: “Firmly resist the biofuels bubble.”

Cassilis looks back on the persistent party funding revelations and says: “I really, really struggle to see why this should be such a big political issue. It reeks of the sort of problem that 100% of the non-political classes could agree on in five minutes but politicians are determined to offer a multitude of ifs and buts and pretend it’s more complicated than it is.”

Hot Ginger & Dynamite takes an interesting look at the reportage of the Russian government closing British Council offices. Western journalists – he states – are feeling nostalgic for the Cold War compared to today’s faceless terrorist enemy. He writes: “Our decades of hostility with the Russians provided a wealth of artistic and romantic allusions, which with each passing year become harder to separate from the reality of years at the brink of horrifying mutual destruction.”

As BA pilots are praised for saving scores of lives, Nick Robinson blogs while being hauled up with the PM’s entourage at Heathrow watching the crashed plane on the runway.

And finally, on the tenth anniversary of Matt Drudge’s web revelations of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, Guido Fawkes pays homage to the act he feels began to turn the tables on the mainstream media (MSM), leading to the rise of the blogosphere: “Conventional journalists in the MSM have shifted from sneering to fearing, from deriding to envying. Technology means that any talented trouble maker with a modem can achieve Karl Marx’s dream: ownership of the means of production and distribution.” How romantic.