Tony Blair’s decision to go along with the invasion of Iraq destroyed his reputation, killed the Labour Party, discredited Blairism, and gave new life to the Tories. In other words, it was good news for conservatives. There is something odd about punishing the left for the sins of the right. After all, the Tories were more supportive of Blair’s excellent adventure than his own party. But, hey, we’re getting ready to do the same thing in this country, with people voting for people whose twisted worldview is impervious to evidence that their policies lead directly to economic catastrophe.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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But people are showing their displeasure in the only way they can. The economy sucks and the Democrats aren’t doing enough to make it better.
Who gets criticized and feels the heat for a spate of murders in a city? Gang bangers in the streets? Nope. The cops. Gang bangers gang bang. People don’t expect much else from them. The cops, however, are expected to stop them. Without getting into how realistic that expectation may be, I think a similar dynamic is at work in politics.
(Hell, apply it to Israel’s perpetual complaint that not enough criticism is directed at Hamas/Hezbollah/etc while the Israelis are accused of war crimes. People expect less of you when you are a terrorist group, and more of you when you are a democratic state centered around the basis of Judeo-Christian morality. It’s like Gingrich’s comment about the Cordoba issue: we’re not Saudi Arabia, we should be better on this issue. We expect more of ourselves, don’t we?)
Back on topic I, among many others, am still dumbfounded and frustrated with the Democratic establishment for allowing 2000-2008 to happen. “The Left” does indeed share responsibility for “the sins of the right.”
That being said, the practical implications of punishing the Left for this are self-defeating to progressives; we certainly agree about that. But there’s no one who gets it as bad as the one who is perceived as a traitor; snitches get it worse than cops.
It would be nice if we lived in a world where the ‘impervious to evidence’ crazies could be met head-on by a coalition of the practical who prudently disabled Fascist efforts with dexterous procedural parrying. A lot of things would be nice…
Predictably…as a radical right-winger…I love Tony Blair.
Progressives…much like Harry Truman, who left office with a very low approval rating, but is now respected…
G. W., in the long run, will be one of our best Presidents…
Yep, just like Herbert Hoover…
Actually, there are few differences between Tony Blair and the Dems’ situation this November. First, the Iraq war came about 6 years after Tony Blair first getting elected so we could all see that he had done some pretty good things domestically (Brown had a lot to do with that). After the war, there were Labour supporters (like myself) who didn’t vote for the next couple of elections (don’t forget Blair’s party won re-election twice – something unheard of for Labour) out of protest against the war. Speaking for myself, I only sat at home because my constituency is flaming red for labour and it wasn’t going to let any tories in power. In these latest elections, when I really couldn’t stand Gordon Brown or the labour party I voted nonetheless to keep the tories out – didn’t work though because the economy is/ was so bad that frankly Brown couldn’t have helped matters.
As for Blair, I used to think that Bush had something on him, that he couldn’t really think in his heart that war with Iraq was a good thing (he used to be a member of cnd – notorious left wing anti-war group). Now, I see that he was just as much blinded by ‘religion’ as Bush and just as craven.