have muslims made cliff richard impotent?

Mad Mel again. This time, moving on from general bonkers criticism of atheism and breathtakingly ill-informed pontificating about vaccines and autism, she offers a gibberingly incoherent defence of the laughable theory of Intelligent Design. This stuff is hardly worth the trouble of refuting - instead I'll offer you a couple of tangential thoughts:

Clearly Melanie Phillips isn't a stupid woman; I hold this opinion despite her being universally wrong about pretty much everything. But there's wrong and there's wrong: backing the wrong horse in the presidential race, being a bit nutty about Israel, being generally barkingly right-wing about just about everything else, all these can be put down to differences of political worldview. Hitching yourself to the wagon of ID, though, is just, objectively, insane. This isn't some woolly political discussion with shades of interpretation, this is science. So you have to ask yourself: is she a) taking the piss b) trying to provoke, presumably to flog newspapers, or c) nuts? I'd be fascinated to know, but I really have no idea.

Melanie Phillips has been married, since the early 1970s, to legal journalist Joshua Rozenberg. You'll probably have seen him on the television from time to time - speaks with a slight lisp, bald, used to be a bit ginger. Now whenever I've heard him talk on TV or radio he's always seemed fairly sane. Admittedly he's primarily a reporter rather than a columnist and polemicist like his wife, so it's possible that he harbours some bizarre views on the quiet, but I'd be surprised. So what do they talk about at home?
JR: Hello dear, good day at the Daily Mail?
MP: Not bad - all Muslims are terrorists, Barack Obama is a Muslim and therefore a terrorist, paedophiles are stalking the land, a tidal wave of human effluent is streaming through the Channel Tunnel from eastern Europe, stealing our jobs and sullying the memory of Diana, evolution is a lie put about by homosexual atheist paedophile terrorists, the usual stuff, you know.
JR: That's nice, dear.
MP: How about you?
JR: Well, I did a brief piece to camera teasing out some of the complexities of a rape case in a sensitive and impartial and yet informative manner. What was that about Barack Obama again?
MP: Muslim terrorist.
JR: Oh really?
MP: Yuh-huh. Big time.
JR: Right. Glass of wine?
MP: Lovely.

I further commend to you the Daily Mail Headline Generator (actually I think there are a few of these on the web). I will now go and use it to generate a title for this blog post.