Friday, May 11, 2007

The Blair farewell message to Britain: you been 'ad

Those yellow lights on Bayswater Road made you look Chinese to me./ Little Ming Foo, the pearl of the east, turned out to be you, you great hairy beast." "Those Yellow Lights on Bayswater Road" Marty Feldman and Barry Took
David Seaton's News Links
Yes, in fact for the last ten years the British people have been befooled, betrayed, cheated, confounded, confused, deceived, defrauded, deluded, diddled, duped, entangled, entraped, escamotered, fooled, gazumped, gulled, hoaxed, hoodwinked, illaqueated, insnared, lead astray, nobbled, played false, fleeced, sniggled, snowed, swindled, taken for a ride, tricked and generally have been given quite a fucking. DS
Courtesy of the English Synonym Dictionary

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Bye-Bye, Blair - Slate

Abstract:
All through Blair's career, there has been a fascinating contrast, or dissonance, between appearance and reality, words and deeds, rhetoric and achievement. (...) We didn't laugh, or not immediately, when he said early on, "I would never do anything to harm the country or anything improper. I never have. I think people who've dealt with me think I'm a pretty straight sort of guy." Those memorable words were spoken in the wake of an episode—the rules against tobacco sponsorship of sport were waived after a large donation had been made to Blair's party—for which most of us didn't think straight was quite the word. Since then, there has been a long line of scandals with exotic names like Mittal and Hinduja, culminating in the baroque cash-for-peerages affair, and in the truly extraordinary moment last December when, for the first time in our history, a prime minister was questioned by the police at the official residence at 10 Downing Street. Straight sort of guy? He has been compared to Winston Churchill or to Margaret Thatcher, but the former prime minister he may best resemble is David Lloyd George, of whom historian Kenneth O. Morgan has written that, while Lloyd George's government had plenty of successes to its credit, what people disliked so much was "its tone as much as its policies, its atmosphere of intrigue and corruption." That fits the Blair years all too well. There is a connection between Blair's religion, with his antinomian sense that "to the pure all things are pure," reinforcing a conviction that anything he does must therefore be virtuous, and his conduct in office, the spinning and smearing, the dirty tricks and the cynical maneuvers. Above all, his departure is burdened by Iraq and the burning sense of anger and betrayal so many feel at the way we were taken to war by Blair pitching a false prospectus and selling us a bill of goods, all in his most exalted manner and for what he believed were good reasons. READ IT ALL

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