I’ve previously remarked on the Guardianista tradition of sliding one’s ass over any unattended blame and incubating it as one’s own. So far as I can make out, this is done for some kind of autoerotic purpose. Documenting each and every instance of the phenomenon is, alas, a task too far for any sane being, but a couple of recent examples caught my eye.

First, Dmitri Vitaliev informs readers of Comment is Free:

With the world’s spotlight on China and widespread criticism of its repressive actions, one should not forget that the knowledge and technology used to create the world’s most prominent Big Brother society was designed in the west, often by the very same corporations whose advertisements on TV take up the time between the relay race and the javelin competition.

By much the same logic, Guardian readers will no doubt be happy to blame China for half the wars of the last thousand years on grounds that the Chinese invented gunpowder. No?

Meanwhile, associate editor Seumas Milne looks to events in Georgia and offers the following, er, analysis:

By any sensible reckoning, this is not a story of Russian aggression, but of US imperial expansion and ever tighter encirclement of Russia by a potentially hostile power.

As Tim Worstall points out, Milne also seems to think that reducing Russia’s control over fuel movements from other independent states is some kind of NeoCon provocation. Such is the logic of MilneWorld™.