bliar

• Tony was tough on crime
• Tony was best friends with the Republican Party
• The Republican Party were very keen on crime
• http://www.republicanoffenders.com/
• Tony is a damn hypocrite
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He's off again. Tony declares his ambition "I want to awaken world's conscience". Some might argue that he did indeed achieve that by ignighting anti-war protests all over the world. But the - no sniggering please - Tony Blair Faith Foundation is all systems go. The  hubris of this man is beyond belief and his timing is shameful.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the killing of Dr Martin Luther King jr, one of the finest men to walk the face of the Earth and one who used his deeply held religious belief and inspiration to reach out to the poor, the disposessed, the excluded and those discriminated against.

His words had a real moral weight behind them, a power that came from beyond himself and he left a legacy and remains a source of deep inspiration having achieved much by his death at the early age of 39.

Let us ignore the cheap words of the snake oil salesman who held high office and turn to a simple pastor, speaking about his opposition to the Vietnam War, and see if we can learn something.

Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence

A grateful world is blessed by the news that Tony Blair, not content with his directorships, saving the Middle East, teaching Religion and politics at Yale, has decided to take on an extra burden on our behalf; He's going to stop Global Warming. 

With his track record of success, who can fail to say that the world is now in a safe hands. 

PS. Incoming!

It's always nice when a blatant piece of Blair puffery appears in the pages of the Guardian - even people like us, veteran watchers of a proven liar who surrounds himself with professional con artists, often struggle to understand what's going on in what passes for Tony's mind.  'Some Blair allies' planting stories bigging him up as EU President 'if it comes with real powers to intervene in defence and trade affairs' allows us to see the truth - naked lust for unaccountable power and weapons.  Which is, of course, what we'd concluded anyway, but it's nice to have another data point on the graph.

Really though, this should be a non-starter.  Germany will be opposed*, while Sarkozeon Bonaparte in France will be well up for it, which on its own should put the British public right off.  We don't like Europe, we don't like the French and we certainly don't like Tony Blair.  Combine the three and John Bull should get the raspberry out.  The Sun, of course, will suddenly discover a love of all things European at this point, doubtless pushing Tony as Our Man, telling those soft foreigners a few home truths, but the Sun ain't what it was, recently dropping below the 3m copies mark for the first time since 1974.  Ironically, the otherwise ghastly Daily Mail, which is faring rather better, will oppose 'President Blair' on every possible level, since they hate Blair and Europe and foreigners.

[More at Chick Yog]

* It is, however, a trifle worrying that the Germans are apparently pushing an Austrian to be President of Europe.  Will they ever learn?

Tony Blair, eh?  Tony Bloody Blair.  In the middle of a banking crisis prompted by greed and chicanery, the master of greed and chicanery picks up not one but two jobs with big financial organisations.  Amazing.  Anyone would think they'd picked him for who he knows rather than what he knows - after all, banks need all the friends they can get just now (right, Darling?).

On the other hand, the Telegraph reports that JP Morgan don't actually expect him to turn up.  I don't know about you, but paying £2m a year to keep Tony out of the office sounds like a good investment for almost anybody.  Think of it as protection money - if only Saddam had paid up, presumably, Tony would have invaded someone else.  Watch out for him in your neighbourhood if you haven't got the requisite finance.

Talking of Iraq, TYR has a typically incisive analysis of why and how the 'surge' failed, based on sound military principles of deployment of reserves.  George and the neocons, true to their principles, basically gambled the US Army away for a short-term boost in domestic ratings, while blathering on about the desirability of a strong USA capable of imposing its will on the world.  The key thing is to ask your local tiresome neocon apologist is why, if the surge is such a wise all-conquering strategy, they've got themselves into a position where it's the only weapon they can't use any more, any where but the fire is still burning.  That's before we even get round to mentioning Afghanistan.

Well, it was fun while it lasted.  Louise 'I'm the Respect Czar and I'll get totally pissed if I want to' Casey and her Blairite crew have been disbanded after it someone realised it was all tabloid-headline-grabbing bullshit:

Ms Casey, who was regarded highly by Mr Blair as a “can do” official, has been commissioned to carry out a cross-departmental review on how best to engage communities in the fight against crime.

That's a pretty tough punishment for being regarded highly by Blair.

Via the Magistrate's Blog

It's time to take stock of how Mr. Blair's fantastic legacy is being nurtured by his successor and I'm sorry to say it doesn't look good for our Tony:

Merging prisons and probation

Respect Agenda

Faith Schools

NHS Independent Sector Treatment Centres

Staying in Iraq Until The Job Is Done

Sucking up to George Bush and the neocons

Sucking up to the Sun at any opportunity

Locking people up without trial

NHS IT

Modernising Medical Careers

Now, are ID cards going down the same well-trodden yet unloved path, as Gordon tries to keep the ship afloat by throwing things overboard?  At the weekend, as TYR beautifully reported, he was in full nonsensical biometric sciency waffle mode, but today faced with a unanimous opposition with a damn good talking point and a public thoroughly roused to the dangers of letting the buggers have any more data, he sort of sort of not retreated a bit or didn't.  It's so hard to tell with Gordon.

Personally I think it's dead, but we should keep reloading the shotgun until it stops twitching.

In other news, the link between ID card IT and the myriad problems at the DCA (now Ministry of Justice) has been followed on Blairwatch for a while and there's an interesting snippet from SpyBlog from back in 2006 here that seems to suggest, interestingly, that C-NOMIS should be looked at in the light of ID cards (basically by using the NIR as the unique identifier across Home Office/MiniJustice systems).  If ID cards are going, does this explain why C-NOMIS was canned?  If Reid was forcing it to depend on ID cards, and this is taken out, surely that collapses it?  What other systems proposed during the Blair era were similarly forced to build in dependency on the NIR?

Tony's decided that he does 'do God' after all. He praises the American system where politicians talk openly about God - or rather right wing Christianity - indeed it is obligatory.

But the chilling quote is this

Tony may 'do God', but will he ever 'do consequences'?

Meanwhile, God's more traditional spokesmen are also giving interviews such as this thoughtful piece on Rowan Williams (pdf):

So far, neither Tony or The Almighty has explained why God was telling the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope that going to war in Iraq was wrong, but was telling Tony to go bomb the bastards.

And that is why we should keep religion out of politics.

I think we've all come to terms with Tony's utter belief in his decision to go to war in Iraq. He'll probably defend it to his dying breath. However it's still difficult to read or hear any of his pronouncements on his legacy. Remember that? The L word was the driving force behind the last year in office, where he was clinging on by his fingertips.

Various accounts have come out and I think pleading, begging and groveling were a more accurate description of his inner circle. What remains terrifying is how one man could ignore all the advice he was given and push the nation into war.

What's changed?

The Clunking Fist has also shown the same dogmatic tendency, with the briefing against  Lord Malloch Brown, the duffing up of Admiral Lord West on the Prime Ministerial sofa and the happy slapping of the Boy Miliband shows that nothing has changed, nothing has improved.

More from the Independent/Times snippeting of Andrew Seldon's book on Blair.  OK, obviously we're getting the tasty bits, but indulge us:

Quite right too.  After all, the one adjective we never use about Tony Blair's foreign policy record is 'pathetic'.  We usually don't have enough space after running through murderous, larcenous, imperialistic, neo-colonial, neo-conservative, kleptocratic, illegal, ill-judged, dodgy, wasteful, detrimental, deceitful dishonest, two-faced, insincere, untruthful, mendacious, double-dealing...

Any more?

Could it be that Kim Howells actually got something right when he spoke of the UK's and Saudi Arabia's "shared values"? No, I don't think so either but bear with me.

On the face of it, it would seem not, and this is yet another asinine statement from the Foreign Office minister who has few equals when it comes to talking utter crap. What could we possibly have in common with a despotic regime like Saudi Arabia that beheads its subjects and even forbids women from driving? But when you add New Labour into the equation, one can't help wondering if he doesn't have a point. With New Labour in power there are indeed some values that are shared by the two kingdoms. State corruption is one; unaccountable government is another and supporting America's wars is yet another. And let's not forget the shared enthusiasm for torture and the erosion of civil liberties (not that Saudi Arabia has any civil liberties to erode). So perhaps Howells' statement would have been more accurate if he had emphasised the shared values of New Labour and the House of Saud because I doubt that the people of the UK really do have the same values as that despotic regime.

There's another part of Howells' statement that doesn't stand up to scrutiny and that's the bit about "The case for working together to safeguard our security". We were told that the reason why the police investigation into BAE corruption with Saudi Arabia had to be halted was because of the co-operation and intelligence we were getting from the regime in The War Against Terror (TWAT).

Now we are hearing that the Saudi government did indeed supply the UK with information which might have prevented the attacks of July 7 2005.

Well, until we get a proper inquiry into 7/7, we won't know if that's true. Britain is of course denying that any such information was received (in which case we may as well re open the BAE corruption investigation) and the ill-advised state visit is now looking like a bit of a shambles with even David Miliband finding he has more pressing engagements than talking to the Saudis. King Abdullah has now hilariously accused Britain of not taking the War on Terror seriously, this from the country that spawned Bin Laden and 15 of the 9/11 hijackers.

So in the light of all this, it would seem then that Kim Howells is yet again talking crap.

Looks like it's one to be read.

I guess most of us knew that Blair wouldn't be satisfied with his job of Middle East peace [sic] envoy for very long. It doesn't give him the power he is used to wielding and it means that he has to face a few realities about the plight of the Palestinians and facing up to realities was never Blair's strongest point. So it shouldn't be surprising that Blair would use his current job as a launch pad for a more ambitious role. Worse still, Gordon Brown is supporting him all the way.

It's hard to imagine a worse candidate for the job. Nevertheless, Blair has been trying to raise his profile by ingratiating himself even further with his neo con masters. He's just given a speech at a charity dinner in New York in which he sounded more like mad Melanie Phillips than ever as he tried to compare Iran with Nazi Germany in the 1930s (video here).

Funny, I've been wondering the same thing myself only I see the threat coming not from Iran but from the deeply insane psychopaths in Washington and their sycophantic followers who have already destabilised the entire region. Of course Blair couldn't resist referring to September 11 2001 in a pathetic attempt to associate the Iranian regime with that atrocity.

So Blair is as hawkish as ever and seemingly determined to plunge us into yet another war. By becoming president of the European council he presumably thinks he can help bring about another disaster.

Minister on the radio talking about gambling and the will-he-won't-he attitude of Gordon Brown to the Manchester Supercasino;

Well, the decline of deep coal-mining has reduced the demand for pit props and she's too short to operate as a railway sleeper, but surely a useful position can be found for her in the foundations for one of the Olympic buildings. Now that's what I call a good political legacy.

Excellent news from across the pond - Bush's personal smokescreen, Alberto Gonzales, a man for whom the list of offences to be taken into consideration extends into treble figures, has resigned.  It seems that the old rule about the cover up being more damaging than the crime still holds true.  You'd think an Administration that started on its life of crime at the knee of Tricky Dicky would know that, but apparently not.  Trebles all round!  Personally, I think this is more significant than Rove, as Gonzales was effectively
stuffed by the Senate justice committee and Patrick Leahy in particular.  Some of the footage of Alberto's performance under examination is quite laughably crass.  The vultures are circling in force.