This has to stop
Fred Hiatt must be fired. Under no circumstances should he be allowed to remain in power and publish things like this:
Think of It This Way, Tony: At Least America Will Miss You.
By James Traub
The people of Britain will shed few tears when Tony Blair steps down as prime minister on Wednesday. But Americans will miss him deeply, the way we do the star of a beloved TV drama that the networks finally cancel. Not since Mikhail Gorbachev has the leader of a great power so utterly outlived his welcome at home while remaining the apple of the American eye.
First of all, which “Americans” did Mr. Traub survey when he wrote this editorial? I bet if he’d done traveled to Amur’ca’s heartland and done asked the local folk what they thoughta ol’ Tony Blair, the common response’d be, “Ain’t he that British feller who’s fightin’ with Dr. Evil allatime? ‘Do I make you horny, baby?’ Teh-heh-heh-heh-heh! I love that guy!” And of course, if he’d asked this American for his opinion of Mr. Blair, he woulda said, “OMG EAT IT BUSHPOODLE PWN3D LOL!!”
Why the crush? Just read Blair’s speech before Parliament on March 18, 2003, the day before the invasion of Iraq. A million Britons had marched in protest the month before; the leaders of Blair’s own Labor Party believed that he was making a terrible mistake, and in some cases had publicly said so. And Blair stood in the well of the House of Commons and warned that our equivocation was emboldening our enemies: “That is why this indulgence has to stop. Because it is dangerous. It is dangerous if such regimes disbelieve us. Dangerous if they think they can use our weakness, our hesitation, even the natural urges of our democracy towards peace, against us. Dangerous because one day they will mistake our innate revulsion against war for permanent incapacity; when in fact, pushed to the limit, we will act.”
Oh. My. God.
Blair went before Parliament and argued that war protesters were “dangerous” because they were turning Britain into a wimpy pacifist nation that Saddam would invade for the sole purpose of making Prince Harry his personal butt boy. This is a typical fascistic neocon argument: that protesting your government’s foreign policy only weakens national resolve, thus paving the way for scary brown people to take over. It can be found in every issue of the Weekly Standard dating back to… shit, actually, I think it’s just in every issue of the Weekly Standard.
But according to Traub, this disgusting belief- the belief that dissent is “dangerous” because it makes us look like pussies in front of Saddam- is what has “endeared” Mr. Blair to so many “Americans.” What a heaping pile of horseshit.
Blair’s argument was predicated on his certainty that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Which turned out to be wrong to the tune of, oh, hundreds of thousands of lives.
His speech, in short, was wrong. The British public, which lost patience with Blair years ago, believes that he led them into war in 2003 on a lie. A more charitable, and perhaps less dispassionate, conclusion is that he acted on a conviction that he would not permit troubling evidence to undermine. The same may be true of George W. Bush. I’m guessing, though, that a great many Americans who would never give Bush the benefit of the doubt would do so for Blair.
But doing so would be stupid. Blair is just as full of shit as Bush is. (Mr. Traub- why oh why didn’t you talk to me before you wrote this piece? I could have given you a much better “Real Amur’can” perspective on Tony Blair than some asshole at the American Enterprise Institute.)
And perhaps that’s because of the way they feel about Bush: Our leader was the naif, the showboat, the callow cowboy; theirs was his photographic positive — steadfast, worldly, eloquent.
Is substance still important in the world of Big Journalism? Does the fact that Blair was just as culpable as Bush for the Iraq disaster matter a fig to this guy? Or does Blair’s “charisma” and “eloquence” make up for the fact that he’s responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people?
And what eloquence! No doubt Americans are too easily impressed by genuine oratory because our own political life is so gassy with the fake, bloated variety. Bush seems to veer between two radically different rhetorical modes: the swelling biblical or Lincolnesque cadences (so obviously, if often splendidly, scripted for him) and the taciturn Texas county sheriff. His language has almost always seemed too big or too small. Blair, by contrast, always found the words that fit even the most solemn moment, as when he united the British people after the death of Princess Diana — “the people’s princess,” as he memorably called her. Or in the speech last month announcing his resignation: “Believe one thing if nothing else. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.” After a thousand years of great oratory, Britons may have developed an immunity to such stirring formulations; Americans sure haven’t.
And this, in the end, is what apparently sways “True Amur’cans.” It doesn’t matter if our leaders are competent or if they have their citizens’ best interests at heart or if they tell the truth. Nope, as long as they ken speak purtty, we is gen-you-wine-lee impressed. Yessuh!
You know, I’m glad that the typical American isn’t as stupid as Traub suggests we are (we’re close, mind you, but we’re not quite this dumb yet). For if we were this stupid, our nation would have died out long, long ago.
I could go on about the particulars of Blair’s speaking style: the punchy sentences, the strategic repetition, the homey expressions (“hand on heart”) that the British themselves often rolled their eyes at.
Yeah, you know why the Brits rolled their eyes at that stuff? Because they knew they were being bullshitted.
The terrible irony is that a man willing to risk his political career for the sake of his convictions came to be seen as Bush’s lapdog. The insult seemed unfair at the time and still does today.
Keep that last sentence in mind for later in the piece:
Blair pressed Bush to route Iraq policy through the Security Council, and he succeeded. Blair was willing to let U.N. weapons inspections continue, but the Bush administration was not. By that time, Blair could scarcely have withdrawn his support. He believed that Saddam Hussein had to be stopped. More than that, he believed that forcibly disarming the Iraqi dictator was wholly of a piece with the decision to confront Milosevic, another tyrant who posed a threat to his own people and to the West. The 2001 terrorist attacks may have transformed (or created) Bush’s worldview, but they only fortified Blair’s.
But once the prime minister threw in his lot with the Americans, he was trapped. Blair wanted to give the United Nations a central role in running postwar Iraq, as it had in Afghanistan, but Bush refused. Blair sent one of his most seasoned diplomats, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, to Baghdad to try to work out a political settlement among Iraq’s squabbling leaders, but L. Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, ignored him. What is tragic (or perhaps ludicrous) about Blair’s situation is that he had placed his fate in the hands of a man who did not share his views. He should have realized it. Perhaps he did.
So Blair apparently disagreed with a lot of Bush’s ideas, but was powerless to influence him, let alone stop them. What’s more, he kept pledging public support for everything Bush did, regardless of how ludicrous or stupid it was. What’s more, Blair completely failed at getting Bush to pay attention to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis or to global warming. You know what this makes Blair sound like, Mr. Traub? A lapdog. A bow-wow-woof-woof-liggity-liggity-lapdog. Woof.
It has been a long downward spiral for a leader who once seemed a protean figure in British political history. The transformation that Blair had to work to make Labor the overwhelming majority party in England was vastly more wrenching than the operation Clinton carried out on the Democrats. Even the harshest British obituaries — which is to say, the ones from the left — concede that today’s England is more open, more tolerant, more self-confident and more just than the one Blair inherited.
Uh, what about all the surveillance cameras Blair installed, like, everywhere?
But they blame him for promising much and accomplishing little in the reform of public services, for shamelessly hobnobbing with the rich, for ruling by fiat, for surrendering to the dark arts of spin and above all for lying — and not only about Iraq. For those of us across the ocean, this is a little bit like hearing that the boss you so admire is a monster at home. They would know, of course; but it’s still hard to believe.
Sigh.
I just don’t know what to say anymore.
Tony Blair leaves office under a cloud darker even than the one that shadowed Bill Clinton.
Clinton had an approval rating consistently in the 60s when he left office. While I don’t have the figures in front of me, I’d be willing to bet that Blair’s is somewhere in Bush territory.
His sad trajectory brings to mind Lyndon B. Johnson, another greatly gifted and even brave leader brought low by a ruinous war from which he could not extricate himself. Blair is still young and energetic, unlike Johnson when he left office, and has many years in which to redeem himself. The news that the Bush administration may tap him to serve as a special envoy to the Middle East suggests that opportunities for redemption could come sooner than imagined. Blair himself has said that he hopes to advance the liberal internationalist credo for which he once served as standard-bearer. But he will have to face the fact that nothing has undermined that credo so much as the war he fought in its name.
To which I respond, “Well DUH.”
I have no idea why Fred Hiatt chose to publish this piece. I could have penned a better op-ed if I’d had to write it while being chased through the woods by killer bees. Sure, it would have come out something like, “Tony Blair OW FUCK THOSE BEES HURT has failed repeatedly as a leader to HOLY SHIT STOP STINGING ME YOU STUPID INSECTS instill confidence that his eloquent statements have any substance behind them JESUS CHRIST, I THINK ONE OF MY EYES IS SWELLING SHUT,” but it would have been vastly more coherent and intellectually challenging than the stuff regularly published on the Post’s op-ed page.
What’s this all got to do with my toes?
“For those of us across the ocean, this is a little bit like hearing that the boss you so admire is a monster at home. They would know, of course; but it’s still hard to believe.”
And Mr. Hiatt’s doing his best not to believe it.
You can’t pick and choose your evidence. If your boss treats you well, throws you bones and titles and raises, but beats his wife and terrorizes his kids, you can’t go on pretending that his home life doesn’t matter after you’ve found out about it.
Hiatt’s article is giving ol’ Tony a nice, big, slobbery blowjob, because he’s being paid to do so.
Clinton had an approval rating consistently in the 60s when he left office. While I don’t have the figures in front of me, I’d be willing to bet that Blair’s is somewhere in Bush territory.
Um, don’t you guys keep the Great Gazoogle chained up in your basement for just such an eventuality?
Or check out this graph from the BBC.
Look, Blair is loved for one reason. He was the guy who sounded smart who agreed with the guy who sounds dumb. Thus, it was excusable, at least in the “sensible centrist” or “hawkish liberal” mind to go “Hey maybe the commander guy is right.”
Of course, anyone who actually listened to Blair talking about how Saddam was going to start WWIII in 45 minutes knew he was full of crap.
Once again equating unwillingness to arbitrarily invade an irrelevant country with showing weakness in front of the enemy. Once again equating the invasion of Iraq with self-defence.
What is worse, showing your incompetence, stupidity and carelessness in front of your enemy or showing a capacity for consideration and well-prepared, justified appliance of martial force?
I hate Islamism and have little but anger for muslims who give it power within their own environment, allowing it to amass resources and momentum for attacks on societies akin to mine. Which is why I hate Iraq – it does nothing to prevent this.
Britain and the rest of the coalition should leave Iraq. Not because the presence has caused cowardly bloodshed like that i on 7/7, but because it causes these attacks today without making them less probable in the future. The tactics and the strategy does not produce results. America has deceived its allies. The coalition should do the honorable thing and leave.
Dan- it was sheer laziness on my part, but it turned out my instincts were correct.
Colonoscopy Powell and Blair both gave “legitimacy” and intellectual/moral cover to ChimpIdiot, and thus enabled the War.
Mr. Traub’s piece has to be satire, right? Is he earnestly suggesting that a country in which shows like “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader”, “American Idol”, and “King of the Hill” are big hits, has some deep feelings about the oratory stylings of a person whom the majority of the country can’t even understand?
I has to be parody, please merciful God let it be parody…
Look, it was a minor mistake on Hiatt’s part. When he said “the apple of the American eye” he just mixed up the body part. He really meant “ass” instead of “eye.” You know. He mixes those two up all the time.
I spy with my little eye a “good concept, bad execution” argument about the Quagmire.
And btw, Senator Ted, “King of the Hill” is a piece of genius satire, I tell you what.
Jenniebeee – I fear that the satire of “King of the Hill” is lost on many of its viewers…
Blair’s satisfaction ratings this weekend: satisfied 33%, dissatisfied 60%.
Another bit of bollocks from Traub:
The Labour party was not anti-American. It always loved Bill Clinton, and still does. But it was, and is (apart from those who have now seized control of it) anti-Republican. Hence the reaction of Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader from 1983 to 1992 in a programme just broadcast:
From the same programme, a comment by Stephen Wall, Blair’s adviser on Europe:
One more thing from Traub:
Holy shit. ‘Redemption’? Blair was the only leader to agree with Bush that a ceasefire in Lebanon was a bad idea, last year. He thought the Israelis were doing a bang-up job bombing civilians. And that’s after all he’s done to Iraq. How the hell can Blair do anything but cause further hell in the Middle East? I hand you over to Robert Fisk for further open-mouthed incredulity:
Barney – The Labour party was not anti-American. It always loved Bill Clinton, and still does. But it was, and is (apart from those who have now seized control of it) anti-Republican.
Traub’s assertion that Blair was fighting “Anti-Americanism” in the Labour party is a remnant of the America = Bush article of faith. Sometimes that’s expressed as America = Republican, as in the “America lost in the 2006 elections” crap you hear from Gare-bear and the like.
the world’s last colonial war
Not to put too fine a point on it!
Here’s hoping it remains the last one, not merely “last” in the sense of “most recent up to now”.
OT, but the Supremes have once again voluminously shat upon the First Amendment:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19414473/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19414576/
I’m trying to think of a remotely recent case that the Supremes HAVEN’T completely bungled, and failing. Expat communities grow more attractive by the day, these days. So do anger management classes. And large jugs of liquor.
Many hard-right Islamophobes believe that the real Muslim threat is not a terrorist threat but a demographic threat. The reason why the West is vulnerable in their eyes (although most of these rightwingers wouldn’t say so openly) is because it views ethnic cleansing as a crime.
Could the wingnuts be deliberately trying to encourage revenge terrorist attacks by Muslims living in the West, in order to make their ethnic cleansing seem less unthinkably evil?
MCH, I was just going to OT on that myself.
I hope to hell Bush doesn’t get another chance for a SC appointment before we can get him the hell out of there. If I believed in a supreme being, I’d be down on my knees praying like a nun in a convent. How I wish they’d impeach the bastard. Ain’t going to happen, though.
On-topic, I really liked Blair when he and Big Bill were negotiating for peace in Northern Ireland. Then Bush was elected, and like a common slut, Blair just went right over to the new American commander guy and curled up all pretty in his lap.
Traub is an idiot.
Now the Senator hopes that this internet will get through the tubes, like on a big truck, but you’ll all just have to trust the Senator on this…
That Blair guy sounds smart, listen to the way he talks, he’s like one of them Beatles, or that Anthony Hopkins guy, ya know? Smart.
The Senator may not know the difference between Middle East policy and a bridge to nowhere, but you gotta have a smart guy doing this stuff, and Blair sounds smart, so what’s the problem?
Great satire is often lost on the mass audience and the stupid. Look at how Bill Bennett and his ilk tried to claim that his comment about “aborting every black baby” was the equivalent of “A Modest Proposal”
Shorter James Traub: “That Blair feller shore has a purty mouth!”
First of all, exactly what is wrong with “King of the Hill?”
And second of all, is it really accurate to describe it as a “big hit?”
What makes this assclown think we give a shit ‘n a half about Tony fucking Blair? Other coutries with second tier wingnuts for leadership are not the biggest problem facing us right at the moment. Oh sure, they’re fucking up social justice to whatever extent their constituency allows them, they’re governing by fear, militarism and xenophobia, they’re tearing down age-old tradtions and mores, and substituting a modern theocratic, totalitarian autocracy and squandering their nations futures with corporate giveaways and imperialist adventures.
*YAWN*
Been there, done that, got the tattoo.
When we pull the dirty, tattered, smoking remains of america out of the dustbin of history and start to restore it to something Jefferson would at least recognize, then we might have the freedom to concern ourselves with other leadership.
And if we do achieve that luxury, the one we need to be most concerned about is that most effective champion of eternal global warfare, Bibi Netanyahu. Because Olmert’s toast and if Bibi the Nuttiest Thug™ takes power I can promise you a regional conflagration, and three to two against global conflict…
mikey
great post, Hon. Brad.
I agree with Mikey – I pay a lot of attention to politics and I rarely think about Tony Blair, nor do I have any affection for him.
* though I did have a few sad moments after watching The Queen, for how sad his term of office turned out.
Shorter Traub: “His accent is soooo dreamy~!”
Well, for those who weren’t paying attention, The Queen should have made the point that Blair had only been PM for three months when Diana’s fatal crash occurred, and he was still in the post-election honeymoon period.
The British press had Blair pegged as a substance-free zone for a long, long time. His own party accepted it, because it helped them win elections. The ‘eloquence’ has long been mocked by political sketchwriters of all stripes, particularly Simon Hoggart of the Guardian: verb-free sentences and pseudo-logical constructions that fall apart when you look at them closely,
If there’s a tragedy to Blair’s career once Bush was selected by the Supreme Court, it’s that his Gladstonian impulse lacked the national clout that Gladstone’s Britain held in the world, and he instead resorted to begging for scraps from Bush’s table. And as ever with Bush, loyalty was rewarded with fuck-all. Still, he won’t go hungry in retirement, and this blowjob op-ed is best read as a pitch for his speaking career in the US. He won’t be in great demand back home.
The historical question will be whether Blair was really a creature of British politics, or a momentary aberration. Brown may have adopted Blairspeak, but he’s promised a shift back towards the empowerment of parliament.
The Queen should have made the point that Blair had only been PM for three months when Diana’s fatal crash occurred, and he was still in the post-election honeymoon period.
I think that point was made.
In other words, the more charitable interpretation is that he ignored reality because he really really liked the nukular Saddam fantasy. Charitable indeed. And just what the fuck does perhaps less dispassionate mean?
Quit crying over spilled milk, Gavin’s pseudonym. You assumed he was a hippie liberal and it turned out that he was actually very thoughtful. Get over it. We thought Bush as a conservative, for Christ’s sake. And we got over it.
Blair’s a sociopath. You can’t even accuse him of lying — he genuinely doesn’t understand the concepts of ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’.
Hiatt, on the other hand, is arguing that Americans are stupid enough to admire Blair and to mistake the wibble-wibble-wibble he speaks for great oratory. And that really pisses me off, because I say that sort of thing about Americans all the time, so why isn’t the WashPost paying me for it?
Ahh, I see. Blair used to be a hippie liberal, but he passed it on to Bush during a “closed door meeting”.
I just got my Tony Blair action figure with the matching pillow cases and sheet set.
You guys are bastards for trying to kill my buzz.
“…the swelling biblical or Lincolnesque cadences (so obviously, if often splendidly, scripted for him) and the taciturn Texas county sheriff.”
Which one is the petulant, coked-out frat-boy I keep seeing on the TV?
This is a disturbing glimpse into Fred’s fetid imagination simply is not supported by a review of the video.
There’s your whiny, petulant Decider Guy mode, who sounds like he’s about to cry and then hold his breath til he gets his way. Then you got your fake Kennebunkport caricature Texan drawl mode, dropping non-sequiturs about eating pig. You got your over-enunciating teleprompter-reading oblivious-to-the-scripted-lies mode, hyping “significant quantities of uranium from Africa”. You got your smirky cokespoon fratboy college cheerleader mode, heh heh “yeah, Major league” heh. Then you got your arrogant megalomaniac bragging bully Bring It On mode. You got your holier than thou Jesus-whoring preachy churchlady mode sassing you about the Sacred Bleeding Heart of Terri Schiavo or the threats to traditional marriage.
But nope, no Lincoln. None at all.
Basically, don’t talk the talk if you cain’t walk the walk. Was Blair ever in the armed forces? According to Wiki, no.
I’m more and more of the opinion that hypocrisy just doesn’t bother stupid people. They are purposely blind to any sort of cognitive dissonance. If I told my wingnut counterparts I disapprove, nay, hate ice cream and everyone who stands for ice cream while I’m messily eating a fucking Drumstick they would nod politely and shake their heads at those ice cream-loving heathens.
It is of course typical that in his mash note to Blair, Traub consistently talks about a non-existent “Labor” party. Shows the dedication and research he brought to his article.