Mr Blair’s muddy reputation
Uncategorized - - Posted on March, 27 at 3:10 pm by Tim
Being lectured by either John Howard, George W. Bush or Tony Blair on how the invasion of Iraq is all about values is like being lectured by the Three Stooges on the importance of non-violent dispute resolution.
Australians have now been treated to such lectures by the Larry, Curly and Moe of the Coaltion of the Willing, the latest being Mr Blair’s appearance in our parliament today:
The war against terrorists was as much a battle about values as it was about arms, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an address to a rare joint sitting of parliament today.
Yeah, some values you’ve got there,Tony. How about your claim that Saddam could launch a WMD response within 45 minutes of being attacked? Or how about your conspiracy with George W. Bush to “fix the facts around the intelligence” as revealed in the Downing Street Memo? What’s your view on the value of George W. Bush’s policy of torture and prisoner abuse? And if it was about values, why did our prime minister say he would’ve left Saddam in power?
And as if all this stuff isn’t problematic enough, isn’t enough to show the hollowness of Blair’s rationalisations, here’s an even better reason to take what he says with a grain of, um, sand:
It seems that the Prime Minister and his family had quite a holiday in August as they relaxed, for once, away from the glare of publicity. Journalists who accompanied them on a trade mission to Latin America were told only that the Blairs were staying behind for a private family holiday near the tropical resort of Cancún.
However, the Maroma Hotel, where rooms can cost up to $1,260 (£865) a night, has since proudly displayed a picture of the Blairs above its reception desk. Staff still talk about the “wonderful” experience of caring for Britain’s Prime Minister and his wife, who mixed amiably with other guests and tipped generously.
During their stay at the hotel, the Blairs were particularly impressed by the Temazcal, a Mayan steam bath, where they took part in a “rebirthing ritual” wearing nothing but their swimming costumes.
Mrs Blair, whose enthusiasm for New Age and alternative therapies is well known, initially went to the Temazcal on her own. But she so enjoyed the experience that she persuaded a slightly shy Prime Minister to join her the next evening.
The ceremony took place at dusk: Mr Blair and his wife, wearing bathing costumes, were led to the Temazcal, a brick-coloured pyramid on the south end of the beach.
According to the hotel brochure: “The Temazcal ritual is equally beneficial for the mind and spirit. Led by Nancy Aguilar, the participants are invited to meditate, feel at one with Mother Earth and experience inner feelings and visions.”
Ms Aguilar told the Blairs to bow and pray to the four winds as Mayan prayers were read out. Each side of the building is decorated with Mayan religious symbols: the sun and baby lizards representing spring and childhood; a bird to signify adolescence, summer and freedom; a crab to represent maturity and autumn; and a serpent — the most sacred in the Mayan Indian culture — to symbolise winter and transformation.
All that is even before you get inside. Within the Temazcal, a type of Ancient Mayan steam bath, herb-infused water was thrown over heated lava rocks, to create a cleansing sweat and balance the Blairs’ “energy flow”.
Ms Aguilar chanted Mayan songs, told the Blairs to imagine that they could see animals in the steam and explained what such visions meant.
They were told the Temazcal was like the womb and those participating in the ritual must confront their hopes and fears before “rebirth” and venturing outside. The Blairs were offered water melon and papaya, then told to smear what they did not eat over each other’s bodies along with mud from the Mayan jungle outside.
The Prime Minister, on holiday just a month before the September 11 attacks, is understood to have made a wish for world peace.
Before leaving, the Blairs were told to scream out loud to signify the pain of rebirth. They then walked hand-in-hand down the beach to swim in the sea.
Screaming out loud sounds like a good idea.
Posted in Uncategorized |
March 27th, 2006 at 3:49 pm
Wonder who Blair, Howard and Bush are recommending we back in the Iraqi Civil War? Or do we just get on with our lives and make no never mind.
Do any of them have an actual policy about what to do as the war slips into its fourth year. Their certainty was majestic when they ordered the first salvos of cruise missiles to rain down on Baghdad.
They seem to have gone a little quiet now.
March 27th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
Do any of them have an actual policy about what to do as the war slips into its fourth year.
Their policy is that there isn’t a civil war. But yeah, the issue of ‘taking sides’ is fraught, to say the least, complicated beautifully by the Iranian connection.
March 27th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Oh yeah, you’ve got to protect those values {whatever they are}.
I see he insists on conflating the unprovoked attack on Iraq with the WoT. Clearly dishonesty MUST be one of those values worth fighting for.
“This war is a defensive war. It was forced upon us by our enemies, who wish to destroy the possibility of life and growth for our nation. If they succeed, our present generation will have lost everything that countless German generations have won over millennia of struggle by hard work and sacrifice. Our nation’s history will end in shame and disgrace.”
~Joseph Goebbels {1943}
March 27th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
A very underwhelming speech. Glib, clever-sounding, but ultimately just words. Like all of his speeches: lots of wind, signifying nothing.
I was amazed at the sycophancy of the media stooges, though. You’d think they could spot a phoney by now. As if a speech (written by someone else for him) meant anything.
March 27th, 2006 at 6:34 pm
Nice to see Marsbar is equating the head of the British Labor Party to Josef Goebbels.
Where’s moore’s law when needed.
If had boitered to listen tot he speech, Marsbar, Blair was expounding everything the left used to stand for. Yes, i know that’s old fashioned these days.
Christ, you’re ignorant. Going off to the daily Kos everyday and picking up their dose of vile does not make what you said thoughtful in the least. Take a breath while you are chewing Marsbar, yuou may learn something from the most successful leftist in several generations.
March 27th, 2006 at 7:33 pm
Just pointing out that the cheap rhetorical tricks have been used before, actually. Not exactly the same as “equating the head of the British Labour Party to Josef Goebbels”. A suble difference apparently lost on the ignorant.
Now tell me U&S… are you impaired in some other way that I’m not aware of?
March 27th, 2006 at 8:36 pm
Marsbar
You equate Blair with a Nazi thereby immediately invoking Moore’s law and I am the one who is impaired. If had bothered to listen or read the fucking speech you would have realized that there is a Leftist position for the war. This position differs from the nihilism you and the rest of the pack follow these days.
Your default position is that you’re against the war but didn’t support Saddam, which is the same position the left was in during the 30’s when Stalin had signed a peace treaty with his buddy in Germany.
So if you are going to comapare Hilter’s propaganda minister compare him to the collective to which you belong. Not Blair.
March 27th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
And don’t you love the way Blair’s speech was reported by the Oz MSM; apparently Blair’s limp, platitudinous defence of the Iraq war has put pressure on - wait for it - the ALP. As if there were some constitutional requirement for the UK and Australian LOC parties to walk lockstep on every issue. And as if Blair himself was not under approximately a million times more pressure on this issue in his own neck of the woods. And as if Blair’s Iraq policy had majority support within his own party, let alone his nation.
And as for him being the COW’s most articulate advocate - dear Lord. This morning on the Today show I saw him sweating and squirming under the fierce, forensic inquisition of their resident hairdo Jessica Rowe. He looked for all the world like a man planning his retirement.
I would humbly submit that the ALP’s policy on Iraq (whatever exactly it is, anyway) is the absolute least of their current problems. This just demonstrates how surreal the Australian political debate has become.
But, I’m sure we’ll pick up the Oz tommorow and find the likes of Greg Sheridan waxing lyrical about what an “important” speech it was, clinging to the fiction that such speeches, however eloquent, can make a spit of difference at this stage. Blair is simply following the lead of his chum in the US. Their standard - their only - response to policy failure and falling support is a “concerted PR offensive”. Never mind the substance of the policy, about which they have no new ideas. If they can just find the right props, the right setting, the right syntax, the right inflection, the right imitation of grave, faux sincerity, all will be well. They’ve obviously all been weaned on movies of the ilk of “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” or “The Princess Diaries”, where at the film’s climax the hero makes an inspired speech which turns the tide and melts the hearts of their enemies. And if the spin isn’t working, which it hasn’t for a long time - well, just spin harder. I swear that by the time this Iraq adventure is over, these guys will have achieved enough centrifugal force to drill to the earth’s core.
March 27th, 2006 at 8:57 pm
U&S: you might want to check Moore’s Law before you accuse other people of ignorance. Presumably what you had in mind was Godwin’s Law.
As I asked once before, are you really this stupid and lazy, or is it just a persona you adopt for the internet?
March 27th, 2006 at 10:03 pm
Moore’s Law: the observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. (thanks Webopedia)
He’s a riddle inside a mystery inside an enigma, is our chum Uggers.
Unless he was referring a different Moore? Michael? Dudley? Mary Tyler?
March 27th, 2006 at 11:04 pm
Ah, so that’s how Blair shakes off the guilt and shame of the Iraq fiasco, he goes for a rebirthing. Start over again, nice and fresh.
The battle of the death squads has just begun. But hey, there’s only 60 to 90 men, women and children being executed and beheaded each day now, Saddam would have killed more, maybe.
Wonder how long that foul rationalisation will continue to be trotted out for?
One more year? Two? Five? A decade?
It’s not a genocide when it’s Muslims being slaughtered, apparently, just ’sectarian strife’.
March 28th, 2006 at 1:16 am
“Going off to the daily Kos everyday”
Speak for yourself joe. It does seem you spend an awful lot of time there looking for stuff to get outraged by. Like a US preacher always ripped and gripped by the porn he keeps looking for.
The way you carry on here and on other blogs is really starting to suggest you just want to be angry regardless of whatever.
Doesn’t much sound like you’re feeling good about your own life.
March 28th, 2006 at 2:28 am
Incidentally, I was introduced to Tony Blair this Saturday - for about 30 seconds. He’s much taller in real life. Seriously. He’s a big strapping lad in person and very charming.
So I wimped out on asking him about Iraq. Not to mention I was very deftly moved on by his handlers as I started waving my glass of champers about.
Also Cherie smelt very nice. A tea rose-based perfume I reckon.
March 28th, 2006 at 4:45 am
‘It’s not a genocide. . .‘
Please. If there is any word you are going to allow to retain some semblance of its original meaning, please let it be that one. The last candidate for genocide against Muslims was in Afghanistan, and even that depended on accepting tribal allegiance as opposed to ethnicity as a sufficient discrimen.
The one before that was in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the one before that was in Iraq when Saddam tried to wipe out the Marsh Arabs.
Darfur is a contemporary candidate, although the muslisms are, of course, the killers. Presumably there would be a genocide in Israel as well did not the, er, Muslims lack the means.
March 28th, 2006 at 7:06 am
Mark Steyn:
“I see the western press has pretty much given up on calling the Ba’athist dead-enders and foreign terrorists “insurgents” presumably because they were insurging so ineffectually. So now it’s a “civil war.” Remember what a civil war looks like? Generally, they have certain features: large-scale population movements, mutinous units in the armed forces, rival governments springing up, rebels seizing the radio station. None of these are present in Iraq. The slavering western media keep declaring a civil war every 48 hours but those layabout Iraqis persist in not showing up for it.”
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1139395658749&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Apparently it’s not just the western media keep declaring a civil war every 48 hours.
March 28th, 2006 at 7:19 am
Apparently it’s not just the western media keep declaring a civil war every 48 hours.
No, former interim Iraqi PM Allawi called it a civil war too. But don’t tell Mr Steyn. And as Mr Bush said of Mr Allawi:
“Well, Prime Minister Allawi was here; he is the leader of that country. He’s a brave, brave man. When he came, after giving a speech to the Congress, my opponent questioned his credibility. You can’t change the dynamics on the ground if you’ve criticized the brave leader of Iraq.”
Musn’t apply anymore.
And here’s Steyn on Allawi:
“Ayad Allawi, the first prime minister of post-Saddam Iraq, was in Washington to give a joint address to Congress. A tough, stocky, bullet-headed optimist, Iraq’s interim leader delivered a simple, elegant and moving speech,
“Just for the record, Allawi is not living in a fantasyland. He’s living in Iraq, and he begins his day with a dangerous commute across Baghdad’s ”Green Zone.””
So as both Steyn and Bush noted earlier, Mr Allawi is there, he lives there, isn’t living in fantasyland, and is to be taken seriously.
Don’t you guys ever get sick of contradicting yourselves?
March 28th, 2006 at 7:39 am
“Your default position is that you’re against the war but didn’t support Saddam…”
So about that painful pimple on your arse… are you against us removing it with a chainsaw?
Just because the wingnuts say something doesn’t make it fact. That’s one of the hazards confronting the neocons and their deluded hangers-on. Cold reality has a nasty way of wrecking their plans.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
~White Queen, Through the Looking-Glass
March 28th, 2006 at 7:52 am
as if we need more proof that Blair and Bush are liars
March 28th, 2006 at 11:29 am
Apparently it’s not just the western media keep declaring a civil war every 48 hours.
In wronwright’s comments on this subject you will note yet another of the semi-regular goalpost shifts in the right’s position on Iraq. Apparently now the standard for success is if Iraq doesn’t descend into full-blown civil war, at least according to the entirely arbitrary and subjective criteria dreamt up by Mark Steyn.
It would seem that even the most determined adherents like wron have quietly retreated from the old “liberal democracy domino theory”. Shame.
March 28th, 2006 at 11:41 am
There’s Nabs, as vapid and as empty as ever. Tell about your meeting with Blair again, Nabs. Was it all of 30 secs. Wow! That’s newsworthy for us.
It’s great you’re telling us about hobnobbing with the great and powerful. Maybe the story belongs in people magazine, that deep and meaningful mag you buy every week for “news content”.
Opposite of deep? Vapid? Yea I guess right.
March 28th, 2006 at 11:47 am
Nabs says:
Doesn’t much sound like you’re feeling good about your own life.
Me
Nabs, if you are going to get personal may I suggest you look at yourself in the mirror. I am not the one going around various blog hangouts telling people I mix hard liquor with illict drugs. You do that. Cocktail, you call it.
I am quite happy in my life. What’s your excuse for self medicating with non-prescribed drugs?
So stop projecting your miserable existence onto others.
What’s wrong mom hasn’t sent you the monthly allance this month?
March 28th, 2006 at 12:26 pm
Getting a bit sensitive there Ugly Joe. Now calm down and tell us about Moore’s Law again. Please?
March 28th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
Zoot
Every rhino in the world is looking around for a skin as thick as mine. So, no I ain’t getting sensitive and not suffering pms.
Yes, I made a mistake confusing Moore and Godwin’s law. However the guy above nicely corrected that for me without adding much more.
By the way, how’s those shades of yours, Zoot. You stopped wearing them to bed, right?
Nabs, is the one needing help.
He seems to “drink his cocktail” and then goes off looking around to attack a righty. Never anything to say. In fact the 30 sec Blair meet is probably the most substantial thing he’s ever
said.
March 28th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
I suspect every rhino in the world is grateful not to have a SKULL as thick as his.
March 28th, 2006 at 6:07 pm
Marsbar.
Try and be nice for once in that truly miserable life of yours.
March 29th, 2006 at 6:46 am
And the potkettleblack gold medal goes to ugly and simple, with daylight second. Amazing.