Good time Charlie

Charlie McCreevy's interview with the Sunday Business Post was intended to put him in touch with the people. But such comments in the past have backfired for other politicians.

Charlie McCreevy is the proud possessor of a profoundly incongruous media profile. On the one hand, he is loved and mourned by the right-wing press as the sensible fiscal conservative sacrificed by cynical Bertie, pandering to the electorate's whimsical socialism. On the other hand, he is feted still more widely as the plain-speaking country-talkin' man of the people, ever-ready to stick it to the elites.

It's part of the genius of our ruling ideology, of course, that the incongruity is virtually invisible, and the pursuit of policies that make the rich get richer and are despised by most people is seen as "democracy in action"; while potshots at "elites" to which he palpably belongs himself are viewed as, at worst, politics as usual.

His Sunday Business Post interview was a classic of cake-had-and-eaten. He derided Brussels for a "take your medicine" approach to the citizenry, but went on to insist that Dr McCreevy knows what's best for the European economy. More notoriously, he spouted patronising guff about "ordinary citizens" but seemed to deliver it "straight from the heart", or thereabouts.

Those ordinary types, McCreevy said, "just want to earn a decent living, be able to afford a few pints, go to a game of football, and have a bit of sex". Apart from the unfortunate construction that might suggest Joe and Mary Soap have to pay for sex, this falls short of an explanation for massive popular turnouts to vote No on the EU constitution – the French and Dutch are not known for indifference to drink, sport and canoodling, but they apparently have some other interests.

The McCreevy soundbite, especially the reference to sex, is a calculated piece of populism, but what in reality could be more elitist than the caricature of "the plain people" as an accumulation of simple appetites?

Back in the 1970s, US agriculture secretary Earl Butz lost his job for telling a joke that attributed similarly apolitical appetites to black men: "I'll tell you what the coloureds want… first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit." In fairness, McCreevy's line lacks the racism, sexism and vulgarity of the original; then again, Charlie wasn't joking. In any case, don't expect the mainstream media to bay for his blood.

Meanwhile, the journalists who nod or giggle at McCreevy's "common touch" will continue to try to sell newspapers based on ordinary people's presumed appetite for diverse information about a complex world. If Charlie were right, they wouldn't have a hope.

Meejit's segue to "Deep Throat" is via 1970s US politics, rather than via McCreevy's sex reference, okay?

The voluntary outing of former FBI official Mark Felt as Woodward and Bernstein's secret, high-placed source has opened the floodgates to self-important pontification from journalistic experts, especially but not exclusively in the US. Watergate is widely seen as the press's finest hour, but with the chest-thumping comes a bit of breast-beating too, as we earnestly worry about the power the Washington Post took upon itself, challenging the US president on the word of one anonymous source. Would Deep Throat even have got past 21st-century newspapers' strict no-anonymity rules?

Relax, everybody. There's more we don't yet know about this "Woodstein" story. And anyway, in Meejit's recipe book, all talk of "strict journalistic rules" should be served with large grains of salt. The phrase is a virtual oxymoron – thankfully, because the craft's latent anarchy is its best hope of transcending myriad constraints.

An outbreak of rule-making, as seen lately at the New York Times, is generally bad news: when Meejit read that paper for a few days last month, there were plenty of stories that obviously used anonymous sources, but these sources were boringly paraphrased instead of quoted. In other words: we get the potentially dodgy information without the compensation of lively human voices.

Give us a Charlie McCreevy interview any day.