War = Golf?

The idiot, ahem ... I mean the President of the US has announced that he too has sacrificed for American freedom. All those families who have sent loved ones overseas into an uncertain war can now feel reassured that their commander in chief is feeling their pain through his own self sacrifice.

George W. Bush has made the tremendous self sacrifice of giving up GOLF!!!

Not surprisingly most service personnel and their families have not felt their hearts warm to the news but rather their blood pressure rise and started to feel rather hot under the collar!!

Can someone please wake me up when this idiot has left office .... thanks.

WTF?????????

Can I wake up now, please? I cannot seriously believe that London voted Boris Johnson as their Mayor!! Really???
This guy is an idiot, a snob, and a buffoon. Can Londoners not see what electing someone with those credentials has done to America and the world? They want that for their city??
They've all gone mad. I understand if they wanted to get Ken Livingstone out (he's done some stuff some folks don't like, although I think he's done a decent job but I don't live in London so I can't really say), but Boris? Couldn't they have voted in the Liberal Democrat candidate? He's not an idiot surely ....

I am so ashamed and embarrassed for London. Good job its not a city I would ever wish to live in (big smelly sprawling grey mass of yeuch).

Can I wake up? Now? Pleeeeeease .......???

depressing state of the union

I read the Guardian mostly everyday. It is my way of keeping up with news at home (as well as the BBC) and of reading commentators that I like who keep my weary brain cells ticking over. One such is Gary Younge. His pieces are quite brilliant. His book "Stranger in a Strange Land" is a brilliant collection of his Guardian writings from America. I highly recommend everyone read it and I'm ever grateful to my dear friend who gave it to me as a gift.

I have just read another of Younge's posts in today's paper. He outlines the depressing failures of the Bush administration and highlights a most disturbing trend that has been fostered and developed by the same administration. The trend is for the administration to see itself as separate from the "reality-based" consciousness and as acting upon situation not assessing them. That this American Empire can act upon its own whim without any analytical thought of the consequences is quite petrifying! The fact that the administration appears quite proud of that fact is astounding!!

One commenter on Younge's article put it perfectly and left me thoroughly depressed:

America's decline is a result of structural, systemic and ideological factors beyond George W. Bush, but he (with a little help from Bin Ladin) has certainly accelerated the decline dramatically.

In the space of a generation it has gone from the nation that put a man on the moon to the nation that took 5 days to get water to the Superdome. It has gone from the nation that played a critical role in defeating Facism to the greatest threat to peace on the planet. It has gone from a being promoter of human rights to being a nation practices torture and 'rendition' and that clings to the archaic vengeance of the death penalty. It looks up more of its own people than any other nation in history. It's failing healthcare system has led to financial nightmare, reduced life expectancy and even shorter heights for its citizens. It must borrow or sell assets to the tune of $2.5 billion every day in order to get by. It is a pariah, albeit a powerful one, among the world community.

America will never recover from the Bush presidency.

Gordon the Gopher and Curious George

Having just wasted five minutes of my life looking for photos of Brown and Bush, I find it rather telling that I can't find any the normal way I pillage for legal visuals for this 'ere blog. This shows how in the grand news circle of the USA, Brown meeting with Bush was a non-event. In many ways it is an accurate assessment.

Lets see. We had George spout off about what a funny guy Brown is and not a 'dour scot' at all (pronouncing dour to rhyme with sour instead of poor) and how they'll be fast friends. I have an image of Bush boring Brown silly with tales of 'my great great great great grandfather' was Scottish and 'oh I went there on holiday' (- oh well it was the G-8 summit but you get the picture).

[One of my favourite sports is informing Americans who claim to be Scottish too (yes they actually say this) that no they are not - they have Scottish heritage and you can't be called Scottish unless you've put up with horizontal rain pelting your frozen forehead as you walk home from school in February at age 10. If I'm particularly successful I follow it up with saying that someone who has Indian parents but has been born or brought up in Scotland with the accent and everything is Scottish!]

Back to GB meets GB. Brown on the other hand looked like he was about as pleased to share two meals and a dubious golf cart ride with George as a colonescapy! No friendly remarks made about the blithering dunderheid to his left. Just an agreement not to rock the Iraq boat for now and help get George focused on something actually humane and worthwhile like world poverty and Darfur (likely payment for no boat rocking antics).

Gordon is coming into his own by all appearances in the UK. Everyone seems relieved to have someone less concerned with holidays with the rich and famous and more meat and potatoes politics. It should not be surprising that after ten years of smoke and mirrors Blair governance, warts and all Gordon is a welcome relief. But I think Gordy's slippery salmon to the North may prove to be more of a challenge than he thinks (see here for a brilliant take on the recent flag debacle)

The funny aspect is that Cameron's emulation of Blair appears to be backfiring in a serious way!! Maybe he'll finally go back to admitting he's an aristocratic toff after all?

Farewell my slippery friend!!

I would like to start off by stating a fact. Tony Blair is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He is not the head of state. He is not a president.

I am starting thus, not to enlighten my American readers (I flatter myself but my American readers are way too intelligent not to already be totally aware of this fact!) but rather to ground what I am to write in that fact. The press in the UK and the world are acting as if Blair is a president who is resigning. The level and degree of attention are completely in line with a presidential farewell.

The UK has no president. We have the Queen as our head of state. She is a figure head who firmly stays out of politics. We have a prime minister who is the leader of the ruling party of government. For the past ten years that has been New Labour and their leader has been Tony Blair. I have always thought this system to be a good one in theory. Good because no prime minister could get infected by a God complex and would always be kept in check by their party.

This theory worked to a degree. It worked until Margaret Thatcher. She changed things. She ruled by crushing her opposition. She was elected on the promise to put the "Great" back into Great Britain. So she attended international meetings as if Britain still ruled the waves and the world and bullied other leaders into place with her infamous handbag. Thatcher showed that given the right circumstances and leader, a God complex was indeed a possibility for a British Prime Minister.

This was the political culture that Tony Blair inherited. It is the form that he so quickly took. He quickly forgot that one of the main reasons for the 1997 landslide victory for New Labour (N.B. New Labour not Tony Blair) was that the country wished to be delivered from the ruling hegemony of Thatcherism. The UK was asking for deliverance from a political policy dictated by one prominent ruling figure (John Major was a last gasp demonstrating how corrupt, embittered and pathetic the Tory party had become).

I voted for New Labour in 1997. I celebrated all night with my fellow students. I went to so many flats in Edinburgh where everyone was on a complete high. The clouds had parted and the sun was finally shining.

I remember discussing Tony. He seemed like a family man, a Christian - one of those who see their religious beliefs driving them to do good for the less fortunate in this world. We discussed all the wonderful people who would be forming the new government - John Prescott, Robin Cook, Jack Straw, and the wonderful gusty, leftist, Clare Short. Yes, we saw all the spin doctors following Blair at every step but we put that down to "whatever you have to do to get elected" and after the hell the country had been through, the hell that was my only experience of political life in the UK, we were OK with the concept of "whatever it takes". Everything looked rosy and possible.

2007. The UK is a better place to live for a great many than it was in 1997. The NHS is better funded, education is better funded, the poor are better taken care of and the economy has been strong as an ox for ten years. New Labour have under Blair managed a great deal of success.

So why all the cheering for Blair's departure? Should this post be about how the UK will go to the dogs without Blair and everything is doomed?

Blair over ten years has embodied the much quoted saying "Power corrupts and Absolute Power corrupts Absolutely". He took his inheritance from Thatcher and wore the presidential pretender badge with pride.

He charmed the world. He and Clinton were great buddies. Both can charm the socks off a centipede and they know how to play the game of media spin. But they both had a certain grounding. I do believe they both saw it as their responsibility to improve people's lives - but only on the "down low". Neither wanted to offend anyone with a large bank balance. Instead they courted them. But while the rich weren't looking they quietly improved the situation for the poor around the world (Africa for example) and fought for injustices where they found them (Kosovo).

I believe that Blair with Clinton by his side had a degree of sincerity and maturity which enabled the two of them to use the "special" relationship between the US and UK to better ends. Northern Ireland is now a country at peace because of the brave steps they took. Collecting debt repayments from poor African countries became something to be ashamed of and concern that we may be harming our own environment became something that was accepted.

Until 2001 I believe Tony Blair was doing a good job. Perfect? No. But good. I didn't like the media hype and spin that followed him around like a bad smell but I felt proud of my little country.

I think the point of Blair's undoing, the seed of his unpopularity in the UK, the moment he changed from Blair to BLIAR was when the supreme court gave the US presidential election to George W Bush. Bush and his cronies have poisoned America. So many people are angry with him. So many people are so sad at what the American nation has become. He slipped into the presidency like a snake. His residence at the White House has felt like a bad dream.

When I witnessed Blair befriending Bush I thought it a bit odd. I presumed, along with others, that Blair, being from a center-left party, would have little in common with Bush and that there may likely be some conflict between the two men.

Then September 11th happened and everyone in America "rallied around the President for the sake of the country" (I didn't see the need to rally round him, more ask questions of how this could happen on his watch - but that's another post). Blair said some eloquent things. He sounded like the serious leader speaking with reason and judgement. He wasn't going to shout about 'smoking anyone out of a hole'.

Ah ha, I thought this is why Blair had befriended Bush. He would be the voice of reason guiding this snake away from creating harm in the world. He would appear the lapdog but really be the sheepdog guiding things from behind the scenes.

I forgot, we all forgot in Britain about Tony's religion. It wasn't reason, or the political guidance of the world's superpower that steered Blair to Bush but rather their religious convictions. I believe that one major reason that the US and UK are in Iraq right now if because of the shared belief that these two men have that rescuing this country from Saddam is the just and right thing to do in the eyes of God. Whether it is conscious or not the whole thing smacks of the crusades. Bush also had God put in a word for him to make a huge amount of cash out of the project - Tony on the other hand was just happy being right.

This is the point when Blair went off the boil in the UK. I was in Scotland for the first part of 2003 and I remember watching the BBC news reports that showed that they were considering taking action against Saddam. I remember thinking they've got to be crazy, what does Saddam have to do with Al Qaeda? I remember rubbing my eyes in disbelief as they started trotting out "evidence" of why we should invade Iraq.

I wasn't the only one rubbing my eyes. The whole of the UK was in jaw dropping disbelief. Where was the Blair we elected? Where was the Labour Party, all be it "New" and shiny? I naively believed that the leftist MPs in the Labour party would keep this kind of thing in check. I was wrong.

Blair has created a structure of power within the New Labour Party where he governs in the mold of the politburo of Stalin's Soviet Union. There are circles of power with him at the center controlling everything. My friends and I have always been amazed that every cabinet reshuffle changes the names of the cabinet ministers but everything remains exactly the same.

Blair has taken the God complex from Thatcher to a whole new level. He had the nerve to take a country to war kicking and screaming. He ignored mass protest by the electorate who voted him in. He was no longer representing the people. He was representing himself. The whole Iraq fiasco has felt like a deep betrayal to the UK people. Instead of listening to the country, Blair decided to 'do what was good for us' as if we were an incapable child.

It does not feel good that the Iraq war has been such a disaster. It does not feel good to know that my gut instinct watching the BBC news in 2003 was correct. It does not feel good to know that Blair and Bush were wrong.

This is why Blair is deeply unpopular in the UK. It makes me angry that after what he has dragged us through in Iraq he can give a sugar coated, slick press conference full of emotion to announce the date of his resignation (the date - not his actual resigning like Harold Wilson did). All his pomp and circumstance being drawn out over his long farewell are sickening. There has been no apology over Iraq only carefully drafted spin that hints at it. Blair said in his "farewell" speech

"Removing Saddam and his sons from power, as with removing the Taliban, was over with relative ease. But the blowback since, from Global Terrorism and those elements that support it, has been fierce and unrelenting and costly."

This is no apology and his careful referencing of the Taliban and Saddam together shows his continuing adherence to the Bush doctrine of invading Iraq under the auspices of his "War on Terror". Blair shows that he does not believe him to have been wrong only those pesky terrorists who keep popping up like a hydra.

I am glad Blair is going. It has taken him a long time to go. He claims he is going for the good of the country. He is going because his party is forcing him to. He is going out like a victor in blaze of glory but behind all the fireworks and staged crowds the UK knows this charmer for who he really is. He is a snake in the same mold as George W Bush.