The Mooch Puts His Foot In It Again With His Daft Comment About Celtic’s New Bhoy.

It’s one of the most well-known quotes in all of cinema, but it’s one you so seldom hear in real life, perhaps because most people don’t recognise the insight at its heart and only base it on the man who said it; “Stupid is as stupid does.”

That the entire movie is about how Forest Gump attains fame, fortune and glory whilst doing things most of the people around him regard as mindboggling and stupid makes that only one of that film’s very many superb in-jokes.

No-one does stupid quite like The Daily Express. And no readership anywhere in the country is as stupid, because stupidity is what they are spoon-fed day after day within its dire pages.

It is a paper you would only pick up if you wanted your intelligence to be insulted, or if you were so biased that what you really wanted were your prejudices confirmed.

Without question though, it is a newspaper which understands who its audience is.

The last people on this island who will go to their graves claiming that Brexit was a good idea. The last people to hold a candle for Boris The Bullshit Artist.

People who believe that the most obvious flaw in the UK’s immigration policy is that we don’t use the navy to sink the small boats in the Channel and make the recent arrivals rake the bodies off the beach in exchange for their giros.

It’s the kind of newspaper whose Scottish edition sports desk hires Charlie Nicholas, the man whose version of written English reads like a mistranslation of badly punctuated German.

Their Scottish version retains all the poison of the English one, but has a peculiar, sick fascination with a certain court case and has a special hatred for Celtic supporters.

It has attacked us on the grounds of the songs, the silences we keep, the ones we don’t, the applauses we chose to observe, the banners we put up, the reaction to the Queen, the refusal to embrace the poppies and all manner of other things that could have been swept off the Ibrox forum floors.

Yes, they know who their target audience is alright.

That’s why I didn’t get angry but laughed out loud when someone who was actually angry sent me this back page headline of theirs from this morning, a little bit of anti-Celtic spite to attack of one of our new signings with the words of The Mooch twisted a little, just enough to generate the right amount of venom and bile.

They doubtless think that headline is a great laugh at our expense.

But stupid is as stupid does, and all they’ve really done is set themselves up to look ridiculous and the Ibrox boss up for something much, much worse than that.

This a guy who makes Forest Gump look like a Harvard Don.

The Mooch could have answered that question a hundred different ways yesterday, and all of them would have been better for his future prospects than the one he gave, about how they looked at Palma and decided to pass on him.

At a time when the players he did actually go for are being criticised for offering nothing it is the height of lunacy to make such a statement especially when we have so much previous for discovering gems and Rodgers has a record of getting the best from people.

If this guy proves to be the kind of success Celtic fans hope he will be, and simultaneously The Mooch’s own signings continue to offer little for all that spending, the comparison will crush this guy like a walnut under a sledgehammer, and he seems to almost be inviting that fate, idiotically, egotistically uttering words the equivalent of “bring it on.”

I suspect that Palma will play some role tomorrow, and if I’m right it might even be a match-winners one. That would fit beautifully.

That would be like a complete repudiation of Ibrox’s transfer window and The Mooch’s master plan. It would make him look like a complete fool, a squanderer of his club’s money, a terrible judge of a player and a mistake the fans will be determined that their club must correct. It would also hand us a four-point lead and more laughs at Ibrox’s expense.

That headline is ridiculous, but no more ridiculous is the fact that The Mooch actually did that yesterday, that he presented us with an open goal and the chance to contrast the signings we made with the one that got away.

They could have continued with the lie they tried to promote when we were linked to the player – that their interest was never real – and they’d have given this story nowhere to go … but The Mooch couldn’t help himself.

This is why I call this guy The Mooch; he lets that mouth get away from him all the time, he lets it move well ahead of his brain and that is going to be one of the things that costs him his job.

His attempt to spin this, and this paper giving him a helping hand, have virtually loaded the guns for us. That man is the proof of Forest Gump’s famous phrase.

Stupid is as stupid does, and nobody does it better than Mick “The Mooch” Beale.