“It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat“
–tweeted by activist/comedian Jonnie Marbles, immediately before pie-ing News Corp godfather Rupert Murdoch at UK parliamentary hearing. Murdoch’s wife Wendi Deng reached over their bodyguard to strike Mr. Marbles, and curiously, hearing room cameras cut all direct images of the spectacle. Watching Murdoch deny knowledge or curiosity about NOTW wrongdoings, you wonder how word even reached him that his presence was requested at this parliamentary inquiry.
I’m thinking the PR coaching the Murdochs received is being overrated. Pretend to be a hands-off boss so not to expose your wrists to be slapped in cuffs? No one was buying Murdoch the Elder’s senility schtick, until the media began its spin, and wasn’t it amazing to gaze upon the breadth of media fealty shown to Rupert? Everyone wanted to distance themselves from Braveheart Marbles, because he purportedly threw audience sympathy to Murdoch. Right. The only ones fooled are those shills pretending. The world TV audience saw Murdoch for what they know he is, a blackmailer of world leaders, pursuing the ugliest of neoliberal war-making agendas.
Of course Rupert’s media was going to praise the Missus for her flying-clawing attack of the pie-wielding Marbles. It wasn’t intervention mind you, but retaliatory. I hope he can sue her. He’d already done the pie and was being subdued, she leaped over security to have at him.
Did Marbles spoil the show? Nonsense. He waited until the last of the softball questions, and took his turn. The parliamentarians may have been setting technical legal snares to trap the Murdochs at a later date, but certainly they could also have been asking, for example, did Murdoch wonder how the NOTW obtained confidential information, and was any ever withheld because it would lead others to question its illegal source. Also, did Murdoch ever use the threat of releasing confidential information to leverage government policy in his favor?
The big story for me was how the camera feed cleverly cut away from Marbles’ stunt. Ostensibly to capture the action suddenly coming from off-camera, but ultimately censoring the main scene. Where were the multitude of stills from that moment, of Elder Murdoch’s face filled with pie? Images abound now of the pie-wielder, caught effectively with egg-white on his face, but of Murdoch, not even a smudge, his splattered jacket whisked out of view before the frontal camera feed was let to resume.
How that sequence was managed for Murdoch tells a lot I think about the power he wields. Similar to the aftermath of the murdered girl’s violated voicemail. As the story broke, it wasn’t just messages erased, but internet caches of the early evidence, effaced even from hacktivists who know how to rescue unarchived data. Tracks of NOTW malfeasance erased by malfeasance at a much higher pay grade.
But I celebrate Jonnie Marbles, aka Jonathan May-Bowles, for daring something even the most powerful men in the world dare not, to humiliate Rupert Murdoch, on live TV with a world audience no less. It was a feat worthy of the shoe thrower, and no less deserved. I only hope the price Marples may have to pay, isn’t the fate of Sean Hoare, an earlier source of ire for Murdoch Elder.
I celebrate Jonnie Marbles’ last tweets before his deed:
I’m actually in this committee and can confirm: Murdoch is Mr. Burns.
RT @RachelvsPublic: Have you ever wondered what a verbal sudoku would be like to solve? This is it. #Hackgate #Yates
One gets the sense that they haven’t really done the required reading ahead of their presentation. Think they may fail this module #hackgate
It might be quicker if Baby Murdoch simply listed all of the things that he does know #hackgate
It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat
UPDATE: The Guardian gave Jonnie Marbles a chance to explain his stunt. He’s taking a beating in the comments, but here’s my favorite:
At last we have someone in this whole sorry mess who can own up and take responsibility for their own actions.
If the Murdochs had thrown a pie at Johnnie the article would read :
I never threw that pie. I was not in the position at the time to throw that pie.?
I don’t remember that pie, I throw 56,000 pies every day, how I am supposed to remember one individual pie??
If a pie was thrown, then someone I trusted must have thrown that pie.?
With hindsight I never threw the pie but if I had thrown the pie it was a mistake and I will apologise once all the facts are known about the pie and if I really threw it or not.?
This is the most humble pie day of my life.
Cheer up Johnnie.
COLORADO SPRINGS– Uh oh, news at six. I chanced upon District 17, room S380 today where Detra Farries is accused of dragging a tow-truck driver to his death earlier this year. The mother of eight was trying to prevent her vehicle, filled with all the family’s belongings, from being towed from an apartment parking lot. The result was horrific scene and Ms. Farries immediately cooperated with the police. But the local press has been very unkind to Ms. Farries and they’ve described the event as Farries jumping into her car to speed off. Hopefully they will temper their condemnation today as the evidence revealed the tow chains were not attached until after Farries got into her vehicle. Which means what, the tow-truck driver was defying Ms. Farries? I’m wondering, if Farries had been a white male, would a local TV audience more easily empathize with a driver refusing to surrender his vehicle, determined to move it himself instead of surrendering it to a tow-truck? Possession being 9/10ths, personal property rights, etc… At issue today was Ms. Farries’ $50,000 bond, five times higher than what it should be. The prosecution asserts that the mother of eight is a flight risk, pointing to her car-full of belongings as evidence of her airworthiness. Can you devise any more insulting a charge against someone who’s homeless?
So Michele Bachmann was a tax collector. Sarah Palin was an oil industry stooge. The media didn’t conjure these villainesses from whole or rare cloth. Most politicians are corporate functionaries before they bill the public to do it. If they haven’t dedicated their lives expressly to destroying the environment, the social fabric, your job and everyone’s quality of life, they’ve always understood your loss was somebody’s gain, and theirs. Know anyone like that around you? Practically everyone! That’s whose throats you need to wrap your fingers around. Shake the blinders off their eyes with good old-fashioned throttling. Shout them down. Shut them up. Shame and scorn them, the heartless, uninformed, apathetic pricks. Activism begins at the grassroots, pull those weeds from the roots.
So how do nonviolent, unarmed humanitarian activists protect themselves from weapons-wielding attackers? Not very well.
You’re looking at an underwater photo of the starboard propeller of the passenger ship 
Remember 
It promises to be quite a showdown. Israel has repeated that it will let no ship through to Gaza, the IDF has promised “surprises” for the would-be blockade-runners, while this relief convoy is upping the ante with luminaries political and literary. The US boat is carrying novelist Alice Walker and a who’s who of peace activists, no less than Medea Benjamin, Kathy Kelly, Ray McGovern, and Ann Wright. There will be journalists from CBS, CNN and NPR, so you’d think Israel wouldn’t dare jam their signal and superimpose its own news package like it did with the Mavi Marmara, but maybe it won’t have to.
So a retired Air Force man has to fess up that he was “Paula Brooks,” editor of the blog LEZ GET REAL. More critically, 
John Pilger’s documentary 
I just got an email from President Obama. He wants me to lead. He says the politicians in Washington won’t do their job unless I do their job for them. At face value, that’s just weird. Are constituents to imagine that stump speeches fall by the wayside when the polls close and representatives develop amnesia from which only lobbyists can deliver them? Does anyone really believe that the public has to jump hoops for good governance? Who drinks crap-flavored Kool-Aid? 
Lawless and Godless. My stomach has been in a knot all day. I remember feeling this way when we executed Saddam Hussein, by all accounts a brutal despot. We tried him in a kangaroo court, without even the courage to make the audio or transcript public, because he would have ratted us out. Then we had him summarily hung. Now I’ve no great objection to regicide, I favor it actually when imposed by public coup. At the hands of foreign invaders it’s victor’s justice, and probably deliberately criminal to humiliate the conquered. Last night a US special forces hunt and kill team shot the unarmed Osama bin Laden and others, in a fire-fight whose casualty ratio was that of a firing squad. Bin Laden’s body was immediately disposed the way we taught Argentine and Chilean death squads to do it, disappeared out over the sea. Gone, just like those famous shoes that offended George the Wretched Bush, vaporized in post-incident explosives tests it was said, not kept by any Princeton grad as talisman keepsakes, like for example the bones of Chief Geronimo, the famed Native American resistance leader whose grave was robbed by elder alum Prescott Bush to provide the skull and crossbones for which the secretive society was named. Oddly, the operation to assassinate bin Laden was called “GERONIMO.”
This didn’t always need explaining– lynching and body snatching are INJUSTICES. There used to be an understanding of what “taking the law into your own hands” meant. Killing someone outright doesn’t bring them to justice, and I’m not alone to assert that killing someone -even after a trial- is premeditated murder. We’re not hearing any such voices on the media unfortunately. Even in the days of mob lynching, the crowd once drained of its blood-lust would sober to the crime it committed, often masked. That said, the press has always responded with statements of pitiable glee. In Colorado, even the most gruesome lynchings, race-related and otherwise, prompted congratulatory editorials from the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Rocky Mountain News and the rest. However, political leaders were usually more careful not to be celebrating extra-judicial revenge killing.
I’m sure they would rather have pulled Osama bin Laden from a hole for a 2012 October Surprise, but the US media narrative makers must have figured out that Mumbledore Gaddafi is not proving telegenic enough to upstage the king of Islamic villainy. Now US airstrikes are killing the Libyan dictator’s children and grandchildren, we can’t let a bogeyman win audience sympathy.