Harry's Place: Just so you spell our name right

Harry's Place comes back at the guardian for their backhanded tribute including this handy check list of points about the article

1. The Guardian, a national ‘quality’ newspaper, is now running a weekly article by a fake, entirely invented, columnist who is spoofing elements of the ‘pro-war left’.

2. This week’s episode consists of a spoof tribute by this fictional columnist to a blogger who recently stopped blogging.

3. Ninety percent of the Guardian’s readers have no idea what Harry’s Place is and nor will they get any of the other little in-jokes from ‘Norman Johnson’.

concluding that

As was written here at the time of the first ‘Norman Johnson’ column, the joke is on the Guardian – they are spoofing a position that they barely acknowledge to their readers exists. For three years they have tried to convince people that the war against Saddam was only supported by right-wing Republicans in the US and ‘Blairite toadies’ in Britain and that only ‘neo-cons’ are concerned about Islamist terrorism. With the exception of the columns of David Aaronovitch, before he moved to a paper that goes in for a bit more diversity, they have not bothered to seriously address or give space to the parts of the US and British liberal left which did favour the armed overthrow of the Ba’athist dictatorship and they have virtually ignored pro-democracy voices in Iraq and the Middle East.

They themselves obviously have, however, read the debates that have taken place on blogs, away from the gaze of their readers but rather than bring that debate into the mainstream media through their opinion pages, the Guardian has chosen to mock an argument which it has yet to deem worthy of introduction to its readers.