TJTB,

It's "whom" ... an object.

What terrorist has been arrested --- someone like Jihad 0bama or Jihad Jane Fonda or whom?

Dislosure and Disclaimer

Conservative Party leader David Cameron has "alchemized a position of more or less glutinous consensus," says fellow Tory Boris Johnson. Cameron has vowed not to touch the National Health Service. By David Bailey.

David Cameron is a snob, a toff, and an upper-class twit, with a pedigree of name-brand families across centuries of finance, culture, and social standing, including the Queen's, who is a several-times-removed relative. He is everything a modern politician in a country determined to see itself as proudly middle-class should not be. He is, too, a member of the British Tories—indeed the leader of that unelectable party associated with mean-mindedness and execrable privilege. He's also a P.R. man—with the skills and temperament to perform a makeover on himself and his party—which isn't very popular, either. so he's made himself over in that regard, too. His seven years as head flack at the big television group Carlton Communications was a brief professional excursion for him, just an experience in business, according to his aides.

This sounds churlish. And what I am—I think—is impressed. Here's a modern political scene: a hundred Everymen in a makeshift auditorium in a strip mall in Reading, once a solidly British middle-class London exurb, but now a crossroads for South Asians, Africans, and Middle Easterners seeking a middle-class life in Europe. This could be an angry town-hall, Tea Party meeting, of the U.S. kind. The Brits, after all, are nearly as jobless as we are, their country more broke, their politicians even more disliked (in 2009, scores of members of Parliament were found to have flagrantly abused their expense accounts for items such as garden repairs and bathroom remodeling). but whatever the question is, David Cameron—43, tall, and handsome (if you go for a slightly moonfaced look)—can find the point of agreement. then he layers on the relative exigencies, such that even the most attentive will have lost any thread of conflict by the end, which is always on an up note.

While this all sounds cynical, it is, too, curiously calming and novel—Cameron is a politician who quells, smooths, conflates, reassures. one who, in a few weeks, may lead an electoral reversal of a magnitude not seen in 80 years in Britain, and do what was considered pretty much undoable: bring the Conservatives and, in a sense, the upper class—a post-class upper class, if you will—back to power.

The U.S. and Britain are as linked in their politics as they are in their exchange of music, literature, and television (e.g., much of reality television is a British import). Margaret Thatcher is ever joined to Ronald Reagan; George Bush Sr. and John Major each made the other look older; bill Clinton was teamed with Tony Blair; Blair then enabled George Bush's Iraq war. there could not now, however, seem like two more divergent figures than America's most famous conservative, Sarah Palin, laser-focused on her own passionate supporters, and Cameron, who has banished his party's most soulful members to the attic.

"It's hard for us to understand, if I can put it that way," says Cameron, straining for understatement, about the Palin phenomenon, as we chat in his Parliament offices shortly after the new Year.

There are, in both countries, three political directions, a toxic right, a statist left, and a third way—the trickiest approach—which involves complicated role-playing, ideological legerdemain, and marketing acumen. It's a political movement exemplified by bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and, owing to Monica Lewinsky and the Iraq war, seemingly discredited by them. David Cameron is the latest third Wayer.

The billboards are everywhere: an airbrushed Cameron with the enthusiastic legend "We can't go on like this. I'll cut the deficit, not the NHS." Magically, the National Heath Service, that historical bugaboo of Conservatives dear to the middle class and great unwashed of Britain, is removed from discussion.

"I don't believe for a minute he believes protecting the N.H.S. is a good idea," says Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, the Tory-leaning weekly, with some mixture of disdain and admiration.

Third way politicians are contrast gainers. at their best, they make their opponents look not only unreasonable but unmodern. Next to Clinton, George Bush Sr. and Bob Dole appeared to be from other centuries. in Blair's case, John Major and the ensuing Conservative leaders he opposed became fusty, comic figures (with bad teeth). Cameron stands against the current Labour Party prime minister, Gordon Brown, the Scottish parson's son, whose lack of ease, personal remoteness, and instinctive doctrinaireness make him seem, compared with the unflappable Cameron, dark and flawed—a political train wreck.

This is all the more curious because by background Cameron should be the rigid one. but a point on which this election will likely turn is that temperament trumps class.

Exhibit a in the class war, and in the Labour Party's attempt to paint Cameron as a foolish toff, is a picture taken in 1987 at Oxford, where David Cameron attended Brasenose College after Eton (the ultimate neon sign in class consciousness). It shows 10 young men, including Cameron and Boris Johnson—the Conservative mayor of London who in an upset in 2008 beat the popular left-wing incumbent, Ken Livingstone—as well as other highborn types. they are all members of a secret society, a Lord of the Flies rich-boy club known for spectacular drunkenness and casual destructiveness, the Bullingdon Club, posed in tailcoats, all with arrogant and dripping-with-scorn expressions, looking ever so much as upper-class young men might have looked, in the description of Frank Luntz, the American pollster who was at Oxford at the time, "on the eve of the Battle of Britain."

"This was after Brideshead aired in the early 80s," says Stevan Keane, a former Guardian and Channel 4 editor (i.e., a media lefty). "While these may be real toffs, by the time they stood on those Oxford steps toffhood had all but been dismantled in Britain by 50 years of social—and socialist—engineering."

It's role-playing, in other words.

If David Cameron was playing Brideshead at the time, now, with much Everyman bonhomie, he's playing something much closer to Big Brother—an understanding of identity politics which can make the Labour Party, gamely playing the class card, seem hopelessly flat-footed.

Indeed, Boris Johnson has become the most endearing Conservative politician in Britain—many would argue the most popular politician—by playing (or consciously overplaying) this role of quintessential, somewhat ridiculous, and extremely entertaining Bertie Wooster type of appealing toff.

Johnson's antics have arguably had for Cameron the beneficial effect of making him (vastly more posh than Johnson) seem so much more like a normal bloke. or, in a further flip of pop-culture interpretation, Cameron is appealing because he's closer than most to Johnson's re-invented toff.

Cameron could make plasticity and marketing technique a political virtue—that is, in a sense, what he's running on.

After Oxford, Cameron becomes a Conservative Party apparatchik. He's shortly a party favorite, renowned, even in his 20s, for his talents at preparing politicians for question time—when members of Parliament querulously question government ministers.

He meets Rachel Whetstone, a Tory aide and marketing prodigy, and her future husband, Steve Hilton, a Saatchi & Saatchi executive, who will become the pillars of the Cameron marketing and brand-development brain trust. (Whetstone is now a senior marketing executive at Google.)

And he meets his future wife, the personable Samantha Sheffield, who will become one of his greatest political assets and whose family is even more highborn and wealthy than his—her father is a descendant of King Charles II; her stepfather is William Astor.

It's through her family that he exits politics in 1994, at the age of 28, and goes to work as a P.R. man for Carlton, the television company. This is, it should be noted, not just the P.R. business, but the P.R. business to the media business, which is yet another layer on top of another layer of artifice.

In 2001 he's awarded a safe Conservative seat and becomes a new-blood Conservative backbencher. He bonds with another young M.P. and eager political marketer, the 30-year-old George Osborne, also a former Bullingdon Club member—they become cyclists, which they will adopt as a symbol of Conservative vigor and eco-friendliness—and both soon become part of party leader Michael Howard's inner circle.

In Conservative shorthand, Osborne, the brilliant tactician, will become the brains of the party; Boris Johnson, the party's most charismatic figure, its soul; and Cameron, the most media-ready of the new blood, its face.

In 2005, after Howard goes down in the Conservative Party's third consecutive overwhelming defeat, Cameron, with Osborne managing his run, makes a bid to become leader. Bookmakers put him last out of the field of candidates.

But then something happens at the party conference in Blackpool: Cameron, without lectern, teleprompter, or notes, delivers an address of such verve, spontaneity, and clarity that he sweeps the conference. Pay no attention to the fact that this was all carefully rehearsed.

"He was plausible. That was a big development in the Tory Party, a plausible figure, someone not beset by obvious negatives," says Ian Osborne, a Conservative Party adviser.

Cameron Obscura

CAIRO (AP) - Al-Qaida's American-born spokesman has called on Muslims serving in the U.S. armed forces to emulate the Army major charged with killing 13 people in Fort Hood.

Adam Gadahn, who was raised in California, describes Maj. Nidal Hasan as a pioneer who should serve as a role model for other Muslims. he urges Muslims in America to carry out attacks against U.S. and Western targets.

The video posted on a radical Islamic web site on Sunday featured Gadahn, also known as Azzam al-Amriki, dressed in white robes and wearing a white turban. Gadahn converted to Islam and joined al-Qaida and was charged with treason in 2006.

There is a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.

Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

American al-Qaida spokesman lauds Fort Hood killer