"Cabbageboat".

If you get JT, you get Willie too. It's a double act comedy routine they do.

Did you have a word to Matthew Hooton when he likened Nelson Mandela to Thatcher and Reagan?

Or does that qualify as showing "good faith and respect"?

Kracklite, try to resist rising to Hooton's crude baiting. That's all he has to offer; what infuriates him is if you just keep arguing with him, civilly and logically, like you are doing. I would never have guessed you had any kind of mental problems, judging by your fine writing in The Standard; if Hooton has seized on some personal information he has about you, just ignore that. What infuriates him is when you calmly and systematically counter and occasionally even disprove what he says.

Hooton is a master of distraction and disguise---you just have to look at how many drippily supportive comments he has garnered on this thread from people like Hebe, Mark Thomas and simon g.

“When people like you and Morrissey start firing off personal abuse”

I raised an objection to some glaring falsehoods in a post by a notorious right-wing commentator. Nowhere did I “start firing off” anything like personal abuse. Perhaps you are thinking of Sacha, who uses a four-letter term of abuse for David Cameron, or of Craig Ranapia, whose posts are full of foul language and furious name-calling, as well as almost unbelievably naïve reiterations of faith in the integrity of one of the National Party’s nastiest and most cynical operatives.

“Thanks Morrissey, thanks for being impolite at the dinner party.”

Actually, Kracklite, I (like you and a few others not impressed by Russell Brown’s pious little exhortation to “show respect”) have not been impolite at all. It is the “moderators” here who have tolerated the behaviour of a cynical impostor writing provocative statements in the knowledge he is granted immunity because everyone else has been ordered to “show respect”. I am not impressed by the obscenity of an impostor speaking with a forked tongue, and I am even less impressed by the gullibility of the likes of Hebe and Craig Ranapia, neither of whom seem to be perturbed by Hooton’s comparing of Mandela to the people who actively and defiantly supported Pinochet, Pol Pot, Saddam, Suharto, Begin and the terrorists who tore apart Nicaragua in the 1980s.

The nerve of that impostor. Look at him waving his hand here....
http://cdn1.independent.ie/world-news/article29829821.ece/ALTERNATES/h342/PANews_bfce2d94-f4ec-4d75-b069-6d5218eab9d2_I1.jpg

Some time soon, I'll post a more thorough parsing of this bizarre concoction of sentimental posturing and cynical falsehoods, but right now I'll deal with two statements that stand out above all the rest....

1.) "....he was alongside Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev in the sense of bringing tyranny to an end...."
That is not true. I'll put Gorbachev to one side here, as I know as much about him as Barack Obama knows about irony.

Let's just deal with Reagan and Thatcher: they were the polar opposites of Mandela, who was a democrat and a champion of human rights and justice. Reagan and Thatcher openly sneered at such notions. Reagan's scofflaw regime backed and organized a brutal terrorist campaign in Nicaragua, for which it was found guilty in the International Criminal Court in 1986, and was an active backer of Saddam Hussein, the apartheid South African regime that imprisoned Mandela, Chile, Indonesia and Israel, as well as many other brutal anti-democratic governments and dictatorships. Thatcher supported all of the above, and even managed to go one better, when she announced her endorsement of the Khmer Rouge. Even Reagan wasn't that shameless, or that foolish.

2.) "Mandela was a guy who would do attack ads with the best (or worst!) of them."
Clearly, the implication Hooton wants us to draw here is that because Mandela was a robust and lively politician, that somehow makes him comparable to the likes of Hooton's scurrilous friend John Ansell, the director of National's attack ad campaigns and the genius behind National's race-baiting "Iwi/Kiwi" campaign in 2005. Ansell is a notorious antagonist and hater of all things Māori (he was and no doubt still is a supporter of Alan Titford)---and Mandela has nothing in common with him.