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Saturday, Jul 29, 2006
Tony Blair: More than just a poodle
I've been struggling to find the right metaphor for Tony Blair. Bush is easy to characterize: he's the intellectually lazy, emotionally stunted scion of a family used to wielding vast power on a global stage. Bush is such a stooge, the parody writes itself.
Tony is the poodle, of course. Not the noble puddel hund bred as an aquatic specialist by German hunters whose names are lost to time. Not that kind of poodle, but rather a non-threatening toy poodle with the fine coiffure, trained to jump through whatever ridiculous set of hoops it's commanded to.
But that image doesn't catch it all. In his own way, he's a smart one. He must cringe inside as he hears Bush clumsily dissemble. Unless flustered by Bush's magnificent presence, Blair is able to display a command of vocabulary, diction, grammer, logic and facts that is worlds beyond Bush's meager capacity.
But Blair is also an idiot in his own way, failing to grapple with the fundamental questions of his day with any constructive impact. Thus I dub the brilliant idiot sidekick of the know-nothing mean-spirited scion to be hereafter known as:
Recently Tony revealed his deep grasp of history, as he drew lessons from one sectarian struggle to brilliantly illuminate the path through the problems of the present day ...
Terrorism brings the reprisal; the reprisal brings the additional hatred; the additional hatred breeds the additional terrorism, and so on.
In a small way, we lived through that in Northern Ireland over many, many decades.
Now, what happened after September the 11th -- and this explains, I think, the president's policy but also the reason why I have taken the view and still take the view that Britain and America should remain strong allies, shoulder to shoulder, in fighting this battle, is that we are never going to succeed unless we understand they are going to fight hard. [...] But it is not a reason for walking away. It's a reason for staying the course and staying it no matter how tough it is: because the alternative is actually letting this ideology grip larger and larger numbers of people.
Oh wait, I meant the opposite. Gosh, that means ... Oh my word, what have I done?
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