Tony Blair will hold a mini-summit with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, in Berlin tomorrow amid growing optimism that he can crown his 10-year premiership with an international breakthrough on climate change in June.
Aware that his influence in domestic policy is dwindling, Mr Blair has decided to focus on four foreign policy issues during his remaining months in power in the belief that he can make progress on the environment, global trade talks, the Middle East peace plan and Africa.
Tragically, the fickle and unimaginative British public may not give him enough time to reform Islam and cure AIDS.
One of the sure signs that a long-serving politician is past his sell-by date is when he announces he will no longer get his hands dirty with the complex muck of petty domestic bickering and will instead take the high road and solve the riddles of peace, harmony and other global problems. (“Al Gore, come on down!”) This is redolent of Canada’s Pierre Trudeau in his last year of power. Having divided the country bitterly over the constitution and so damaged the economy that we were approaching IMF bailout territory, he sensed almost everybody viewed him with an exhausted, visceral contempt and was counting the days until someone–anyone–replaced him. Openly disdaining this parochialism with aristocratic hauteur, he consulted himself in private and set out with much fanfare to jet around the world knocking on the doors of foreign leaders to promote peace through accommodation between East and West and nuclear disarmament. As Reagan, Thatcher and JP11 were just warming up at this time, he ended up marching firmly against history and made an utter fool of himself, although his eternal adorers on the Boomer Canadian left can still be heard sniffing how “at least he tried.”.
There is, however, something quintessentially modern about this kind of conceit. We are surrounded by folks who make total hashes of their personal or professional lives, but who try to convince us, often successfully, that they hold the keys to resolving everybody else’s conflicts, putting all us on the road to good health, bringing our families together, etc. More and more, for some strange reason, we have come to see the everyday mundane challenges we face in our lives as incredibly knotty, but are convinced we could personally make the lion lie down with the lamb if only the stupid people around us would let us.
2 comments:
It seems boomer lefties like their predecessors can't do without a god to worship and adore no matter their clay feet are hanging out for all to see. These bleeding hearts feeling the pain of the downtrodden are so very similar. They're slick snake oil salesmen like FDR, Kennedy, Clinton, Trudeau, and all the foreign commies from Castro to Stalin to Mao to Arafat .... who live the high life secure in the devotion of their acolytes.
I'm hoping the blogosphere will bring an end to cults of personality because fatal flaws will be exposed and plastered across the internet before they can take hold. Obamaramadan is a good case in point. Both his and his lovely bride's moonbat credentials won't be flashed across the msm, but we'll be hearing about them nevertheless and eventually so many people will know the facts, the media kicking and screaming, will be forced to inform the general public.
Actually I heard snippets of Obama's speeches on the Drudge radio show last night and they were truly scary.
The buzzword with Blair is 'legacy' - ie. as he nears the end, he doesn't want to be remembered only for Iraq.
If this is true, it's actually quite short-term thinking. At the moment he is associated mainly with Iraq, and this is presumed to be a Bad Thing.
In the long run he will be remembered for the final destruction of ideological left v right party politics in Britain, and for the establishment of the monopoly of Blatcherism. (And Iraq will be viewed as a mostly Good Thing.)
Post a Comment