Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (50938)	7/13/2004 12:30:29 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

I turned on CSPAN2 -- a tremendous resource, one of the only good channels out of a hundred -- and there was Tony Blair. He was being grilled by the British House of Commons Liaison Committee. Whew! They don't mess around. They had the gloves off. There was Blair having to deal face to face with these elected officials. They were asking very direct, pointed questions, and he was having to answer them. No, he did not answer them directly. He sidestepped, evaded, blabbered nonsensical doctrine that fell flat. But it was impressive just that he had to face them. Can you imagine Bush having to do that in front of the whole world? While the British governmental proceedings, at least in the House of Commons, lack the pomp and the blustery pretension of the US Congress, it's actually both more civil and more civilized. It's also clearly more democratic. There were more checks and balances in that room than I've seen in 20 years in the United States. Blair looked haggard, 20 years older than I remember him. No doubt he is under tremendous pressure, in a sense perhaps more from within than from without. He is now forced to justify this catastrophe that is ongoing in Iraq. It's bad enough the blunders and misjudgments that brought us to this point, but it's not over. Almost nothing bad about it is over. There's been a phony handover, which means nothing. And Blair is forced to constantly justify himself in a way that Bush never is. And it's hurting him in another way that it doesn't hurt Bush, because he does seem to have a conscience, which Bush is utterly devoid of. And he still has a smidgen of intellectual integrity, which Bush does not know the meaning of. He is now forced to continually justify the unjustifiable, to rattle off this doctrine about weapons of mass destruction and how Saddam Hussein once had them anyway we know and it's all getting so old and tired. Surely Blair is intelligent enough to know the hollowness of those arguments now. And the dissonance set up between what he knows in his heart and mind and the fraud he is forced to perpetrate is toxic. You can see him aging. If he never did another thing, he would still be guilty of starting this thing that no one will be able to stop for a long time, a war of mass carnage on a false pretense. And even if the war were not ongoing and the bloodshed unstoppable, he would still have to live forever with the legacy of being the British prime minister who led Britain into an illegal invasion of a sovereign country that posed no threat to Britain or the U.S. He will be the diametric opposite of Churchill. He will be the PM who sided with the fascists. The only justification he delivers with any passion, probably because it's the only one that is true, is that he did it to preserve his special relationship to the United States. In this case the big guy turned out to be a bully and a thug who does not respect the law or the rights of others. Blair aligned himself with that and the choice turned out to be a bad one. Where does he go from here? How could he ever correct his legacy now? He is stuck with that place in history and he hasn't even finished the torment of having to live it out. davidcogswell.com