Nick Clegg

should be winning my vote (Yorkshire MP, a liberal of the right stamp) for leader  of the Lib Dem Party but a couple of reports and pics have made me suck my recently scaled and polished and therefore aching teeth.

1. He admires Martin Luther.  That’ll be the Martin Luther who wrote in support of stabbing and slaying revolting peasants?

‘If the peasant is in open rebellion, then he is outside the law of God.  Rebellion beings with it a land full of murderers and bloodshed, makes widows and orphans and turns everything upside down like a great disaster.  Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly remembering that nothing can be more hurtful or devilish than a rebel.  It is just as when one must kill a mad dog; if you don’t strike him, he will strike you, and the whole land with you.

M. Luther, against the murderous and theiving horse of peasants, 1525

Luther’s 1543 pamphlet On the Jews and their lies is hardly an admirable sentiment in the mouth of an historical figure to be admired, either. Not very liberal, Nick.

2. Pic with Mother Theresa’s Sisters of Charity.  (The pic changes with each visit). No.

By and large, I don’t support people who admire the justifiers of mass murder (Luther’s enthusiastic support for genocide costing 100,000 ish lives in the 30 years war might not have come to Nick’s attention, in which case I apologise) and those who think death surrounded by nuns and prayers is preferable to a life free of poverty and disease.

Note to both Nick and Chris Huhne: be wary of Gandhi, too.  He wrote approvingly of Hitler.

Hier ich stehe, ich cann nicht anders.