Letter from America – Ian Williams

Written By: Ian Williams Tribune : January 20, 2016

It’s a long road from when I interviewed Bernie Sanders for Tribune as mayor of small town in Vermont, or as the only avowed elected socialist in Congress. There is a genuine special relationship between the progressive wings of British and American politics. The upsurge of support for Sanders among Democrats parallels the huge groundswell of support for Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour  leadership election. To a large extent we can thank the Bill Clinton/Tony Blair axis. The recently released notes of the conversations between the two show them spending a lot of time on the “Third Way,” planning global meetings of the New Labour/DLC Axis, the Centre Left.

Before they took up office, several of us met Blair in New York when he and Gordon Brown came to “learn from the Clinton campaign”. Disturbed, even then, by the uncritical enthusiasm for Bill, we remonstrated that he would sell his grandmother in the street for votes. Blair blurted: “But he wins elections!”

Reckless about the feelings of grandmothers, let alone the traditional constituencies, the poor and minorities and trade unionists, whose cause would be given away, let alone sold, to win elections, Clinton set the model for New Labour – ostentatiously disavowing calumniated “special interest groups”, while pandering to the right.  Unlike Clinton, the Blair administration did a lot of good work – but party bosses did not want anyone boasting about it, in case it alienated the financiers whom they hoped would replace the unions as bankrollers for the party.

In both cases, the plan was to hollow out the popular base of the parties, denying members effective input on policy or candidates, to reduce it to a PO box for corporate donations. As we saw in the Labour Party, it became a self-perpetuating career escalator for machine politicians that eventually ruthlessly weeded out any signs of dissent and any ties with the unions apart from  topping up the collection box.

New Labour tried to introduce primaries, copying US practice, but the plan foundered on the different political histories. It was the unforeseen consequence of this emulation of primaries that it allowed Jeremy Corbyn to tap into the deep reservoirs of disaffection with machine politicians,  whose main manifestation hitherto had been abstention at one level or another from the political process.

Continuing the parallels, neither the New Labour establishment, nor Hillary Clinton’s courtiers, cocooned as they were in their incestuous world, realised how disaffected the core constituencies and potential activists were, let alone that Sanders and Corbyn could tap that resentment and potential enthusiasm.

Hillary, following in her husband’s footsteps with the corporate begging bowl, thought politics was all a matter of collecting big cheques from Wall Street and Hollywood. Sanders actually raised more money than her, from millions of individuals who piled their widow’s mites into his campaign. In the unlikely event of bumping into Blair again, I could cheerily say: “But he wins redneck male support.” There are, for once, real lessons for the British Labour Party.  Sanders has made a virtue of saying the unsayable. He has attacked bankers, called for a universal healthy service, supported unions, called for higher wages and more protections for workers. Rather than let the media and political elite set his agenda, he has set his own, which resonates with millions of people. He calls himself a socialist, which effectively disarms the opposition. Where conventional wisdom made “higher taxes” a magic curse dooming any candidate, Sanders made it a battle cry against the rich.

There are differences. Sanders came from so far off-field the media did not know what to do with him and Hillary’s supporters hoped that if they ignored him, he would sink into obscurity. He didn’t, and now their attacks only galvanise his supporters. Attention has also transformed Corbyn from an obscure backbencher into a media titan, and it can allow him to stick to the Labour agenda, with the refreshing change that the public had few expectations of previous trimming incumbents but have been primed by the daily hate sessions from the media to expect Corbyn to propound a full Labour agenda. And Sanders is only vying to be the candidate – while Corbyn already is.

50 Shades of Grey remaindered: From Sanders to Syriza, Moving Right is Wrong for Democratic Socialists!

42/http://www.tribunemagazine.org/2015/07/ian-williams-42/

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: July 11, 2015 Last modified: July 8, 2015

The worldwide triumph of mediocrity demands explanation. Across the globe, politics seems to have been abandoned to uncharismatic personalities who make the average bank manager look glamorous. Almost the only thing that makes the favourites’ line-up for the Labour Party leadership less yawnable is the Republican presidential primaries in the states, where there are so many runners that one Congressman issued a press release to announce he was not standing.

Surely it is time to revive the tale of the emperor’s new clothes: to point out and pillory the nakedness of the new statesperson. In fact, nudity would be an interesting step up for most them. One reason for the ubiquity of the 50 shades of grey among politicians is that our current imperial tailors are spin-doctors who weave their fabric from focus group fodder. They follow the Clintonian and Blairite principle of looking for a numerous enough group of people amidst whom to hoist their standards regardless of any political principles. Bashing unions, or immigrants, or the unemployed, if that’s what the tabloids want, they will chase then them down the foxhole.

This bizarre New Labour outlook is why so many candidates arrogantly assume they can ignore what members and voters say, and instead play to the media gallery, which is located in some alternative universe where There Is No Alternative to austerity and preferential taxation for plutocrats. The dismissive comments on Jeremy Corbyn’s lack of support among parliamentary apparatchiks is symptomatic of their unconcern for what members and traditional Labour supporters want. As New Labour fades into historical oblivion, like Alice’s Cheshire Cat, the last thing we will see is the smug smile on the face of the fat cats as they take their profits and run offshore.

Here in the United States, the Republican line-up is almost a vindication of market principles. Rarely has there been such a collection of spectacular market failures, usually rescued by family or government money. Donald Trump is the most outstanding blow-hard whose horrifying support among Republican voters typifies HL Mencken’s prediction. “On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Trump’s big defence of his business acumen is that he has never been personally bankrupt, and he can rely on the amnesia of the morons and the media to overlook the repeated collapse of his businesses, the Trump Plaza hotel, the Trump Shuttle airlines and the sundry casinos. That, in its way, is iconic. As with Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates, their business failures are all too oft interred with their nomination papers. Chris Christie of New Jersey, whose minions closed access from the George Washington Bridge to a town whose mayor would not endorse him as governor, wins the chutzpah award for his candidacy.

While these murky candidates, Labour or Republican, tend to get respectfully coverage, it is interesting to check out worldwide who is getting the crowds. In the US, media attention is overwhelmingly on the pundits’ choice, Hillary Clinton. She is well known, and a woman, so almost an automatic choice among the type of American liberals who overlook the historical gender triumphs of Ladies Macbeth and Thatcher. However, despite media bubble, the crowd puller on the hustings is not the former First Lady and accomplice to Clinton’s war on welfare, but Bernie Sanders. He is the only avowedly socialist senator, and running for the Democratic primary. It is perhaps a token of his potential that the Democratic machine in New York State is trying to keep him off the primary ballot there. While Hillary and the Republicans are tapping the usual billionaire suspects, Bernie has been very successful in raising lots of small donations from well-wishers.

It has to be said that while Bernie does not exactly have the glamour, nor even the oratorical skills of his rivals, he more than makes up for it with the sincerity of his democratic socialist ideals. And now we have an inspiration. The triumph of the Yes vote in Greece shows that, in the end, principles may be rewarded. Syriza should be an example to us all.

Neither Kilts nor Skirt Qualifies.

Ian Williams

Written By: Ian Williams

Tribune Published: July 27, 2014

Not long after Margaret Thatcher was elected, an otherwise progressive friend of mine confessed that she had voted Conservative, “Because Maggie was a woman.” I do hope that she has had some sleepless nights since then. We should be happy to see good women (and men) elected, but it is an unsustainable idea that estrogen any more than testosterone is in itself a qualification for high office. Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Angela Merkel might all have lactated at some time, but one does not associate them with the milk of human kindness, and they would all have been suitable for a casting call for Lady Macbeth.
Nothing became Barack Obama like his predecessor. As I wrote at the time: “His election might not be the Second Coming, but to pursue the eschatological metaphor, it would mark the end of the reign of the Anti-Christ.” However, despite the fawning press from the liberal punditocracy, if Obama disappointed you, just wait until you see Hillary Clinton. We are talking Tony Blair with boobs here.

Rarely can there have been a power couple more convinced of their self-importance than the Clintons, but within that couple it was Hillary who had more the messiah complex and stiffened the back of the invertebrate Bill when he wobbled in his fervor, as he so often did.
She stood by her man, and behind him, almost certainly urging him to “Do the right thing” to get the couple into the White House. That included flying back from the campaign trail to Arkansas as governor to sign the execution warrant for Ricky Ray Rector, the brain-injured condemned man who proved his unfitness for execution by saying Clinton seemed a nice guy – and asked to save the dessert from his last meal until afterwards. She was also an active partner in throwing black academic Lani Guinier to the neo-con wolves when they ran a campaign against her as a “quota queen”. Guinier had proposed a multi-member constituency system to allow minority representation without the ludicrous gerrymandering that blights American democracy. Nominated for an office by Clintons, her old friends, when the Wall Street Journal weighed in against her, they cut her loose politically and professionally.
Much praised for her forbearance in agreeing to work with  Obama when he so unforgivably defeated her, such forgiveness did not extend to defectors from her camp. It is clear that there is a little mental black book waiting for payback time for them. Bill Richardson, one of the more principled Clinton appointees, was saying only recently that his card was still marked, six years after he had endorsed Obama – and had had the decency to call Hillary to tell her what he was going to do. “Let me tell you”, he said then, “we’ve had better conversations.”
Hillary was notoriously responsible for making sure that the insurance companies got their pound of flesh in the Clinton healthcare proposals – and so bears some vicarious responsibility for excluding the single payer NHS option from Obamacare. After all, insurance companies are major healthcare donors. She backed her husband when the took huge steps to demolish FDR’s New Deal by supporting “welfare reform” that penalised poor and working families and put lifetime limits on unemployment benefits. She supported him as he rewrote the regulatory framework to allow the banks which had supported his campaigns so lavishly to reshape the financial system in ways that brought about the economic crash. And we are supposed to forget all this because it might end up with a president who, very occasionally, wears a skirt? Personally, I would rather have Prince Charles in a kilt.
The brouhaha about her is drowning out much more substantial candidacies on the left. Senator Elizabeth Warren has an appreciation for what is wrong with the country, and knows more is needed than just getting an ambitious and self-serving female in office.  She challenges the neo-liberal consensus, embraced by Hillary, which has led to disaster for the 99 per cent. And, beyond tokenism, Bernie Sanders is one of the few honest men to enter Capitol Hill and has the populist credentials to take on the Tea Party on its own ground with working-class and middle-class victims.
Choosing between a Hillary endorsed by oodles of expedient Wall Street cash and a Republican backed with crazed ideological money from the far right will be a tough choice.

Mrs T's Flawed Legacy

 A Floored Economy

By Ian Williams
The mainstream media epithet machine used to describe Margaret Thatcher for American readers as “the prime minister who privatized the loss-making state industries.” Of course she did no such thing. The enterprises she sold off made huge profits for the Treasury. BP was, after all, the state-owned creation of Winston Churchill and kept a constant flow of petropounds going into the Treasury. Selling it off to her friends in the City of London benefited its executives and shareholders but hardly the British public, let alone the US citizenry around the Gulf of Mexico.
Mark Twain said that while he wished no man dead, he sometimes read obituaries with great pleasure. I rather suspect that I will be denied even that enjoyment with the oleaginous brown-nosing that will surround the demise of Margaret Thatcher.
The woman contrived the collapse of Britain as an industrial power, squandering the windfall find of North Sea oil in the process and perhaps most reprehensibly helped erode the ideology of common welfare and concern that was consummated by the Labour government after World War II, which was after all, for most British people, the most significant achievement of that titanic struggle.
Less of a self-made woman than most obituarists will admit, she married well, to a millionaire who could support her in her political ambitions. To give her her due, she carved her way into an all-male chauvinist milieu with scrotum-crushing tenacity. She was determined and resolute in her ambitions. I was going to say strong-minded, but that would inadvertently have given her more credit than she deserved. Although undoubtedly more clued in than Ronald Reagan, with whose name she will be linked in death, I suspect that much of what the right see as ideological correctness was no such thing. Her motivation was not to dismantle the state so much as to ensure her continuing control of it.
She sold off public housing and stopped the programs to build more, not because she had deeply neo-liberal feelings that were offended by this intrusion of the state into the housing market but because she believed that doing so would break open what she saw as a Labour Party vote bank of council tenants, and convert them into property owning conservatives. In this and other respects she displayed a materialism and crude economic determinism that resembled the diehard factions of the Leninist left!
It was similar reasoning that I suspect impelled her break up of the great state-owned enterprises.   Coal, steel, railways, electricity and gas, were the stronghold of unions who not only had their fingers on the jugular of the nation but were the financial and political base of the Labour Party.  From her point of view, one cannot help but suspect this was a double whammy perpetrated on her political opponents, since the sale of the shares, she hoped, like the sale of public housing to its tenants would create a huge new voting population of conservatives.
It is worth remembering that she also introduced a poll tax to replace the local government property taxes, almost certainly with the aim of driving poorer, and as she saw them, natural Labour voters off the electoral rolls.
To her credit, in the same astute political vein, she forbore to privatize the National Health, not because she was attached to socialized medicine, but because she knew who her own voters were, just as they liked British Rail, which was left for John Major to privatize with disastrous fiscal consequences.
Despite all these measures, and despite the florid encomia now covering her pall, Margaret Thatcher never won a majority of the popular vote. Her arrival and stay in Downing Street owed much to her opponents. The Labour Party was tied up in sterile political arguments with ambitious politicians defecting to found the Social Democrats who later merged with the Liberals. It was that bloc of popular votes which deprived opposition Labour of the votes necessary to win elections. In each election a clear majority voted against Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party.
On foreign policy, it was her penny-pinching, withdrawing niggardly sums from, for example, the British Antarctic Survey, which sent the wrong signals to the Junta in Argentina and led to the invasion of the Falklands. She did indeed display courage and resolution in repelling that invasion, but fixing something she broke herself should dull the glow of that triumph. Indeed her defense cuts would have made the same operation impossible a year later!
That obduracy could be ugly - as when she gloated that she had bullied the Commonwealth’s and other heads of state into accepting only the most rudimentary token sanctions against Apartheid. On the other hand, she deserves considerable credit for persuading Reagan that Gorbachev was serious about detente. There were few others with the conservative credibility to do that.
She was not nice, not popular and a person of narrow but tightly focused vision. But her flawed legacy lives on, mesmerizing, for example, Tony Blair.  Apart from the pious politicians, one suspects that sackcloth and ashes will he hard to discern on the streets of London, that in pubs across the former industrial heartland of Britain, many pint glasses will be raised in tasteful celebration.
                                                         *****
                                                         *****
Ian Williams is the founder of Deadlinepundit Ltd, a public affairs media consultancy.

"Non" to Blair

Nicolas Sarkozy's attempts to push Tony Blair as president of the new European Union is a stark contrast to previous French treatment of British prime ministers - and not much to the credit of either Blair or Sarkozy.

Two score years ago and five, Charles de Gaulle gave the doigt to Britain's prime minister Harold McMillan and vetoed his application to join the European community. Four years later, the general did it again for Harold Wilson who had succeeded to No 10 Downing Street by then.

Apart from payback time for all the humiliations that he saw heaped on France and himself by Britain - including the British failure to be occupied by the Nazis - De Gaulle's argument was that Britain would be a Trojan horse for American influence in Europe. To some extent he was right, even if his real motive was to keep out a rival for influence in Charlemagne's former realms. But it has taken Tony Blair to make him absolutely right about the Trojan horse.

On one level, it is, like Blair's Middle East position, yet another non-job designed to give a redundant statesman a sense of self-importance. But from another point of view, it is an insult to Europe. Symbolically, Blair for European president would be like running the Reverend Ian Paisley for Pope. Elected into office as a Europhile, Blair soon followed the Murdoch line of reflexive contempt for Brussels, while acting as Washington's agent in the continent, fulfilling all of De Gaulle's worst fears.

While Europe is clearly a success story in economic terms, despite the anally retentive influence of German central bankers, it punches way below its weight in global politics, and one reason for that has been Blair's determination to toe whatever line came from Washington. With the League of Nations style of consensus decision-making in Europe, foreign policy decisions are reduced to the lowest common denominator, which for much of the last decade has been Blair, with occasional help from Berlusconi and the Poles.

It is also interesting to contrast Blair's absolute subservience to Washington with his Labour predecessor's role. Wilson managed to keep Britain out of the Vietnam despite Lyndon Baines Johnson's enormous pressure and his speech, in response to de Gaulle's veto, is worth looking at to see an alternative to both pandering and crude anti-Americanism. He said:

"The concept of a powerful Atlantic partnership can be realised only when Europe is able to put forth her full economic strength so that we can, in industrial affairs, speak from strength to our Atlantic partners."

While pledging Britain's loyalty to the Atlantic Alliance, he explained:

"Loyalty never means subservience. Still less must it mean an industrial helotry under which we in Europe produce only the conventional apparatus of a modern economy, while becoming increasingly dependent on American business for the sophisticated apparatus which will call the industrial tune in the 70s and 80s."

Ironically, as American industrial hegemony dissolved, and Europe's collective financial strength began to outstrip America's, Blair reduced Britain to absolute diplomatic helotry to the worst and most reactionary White House ever while the dollar declined by levels far worse than the beleaguered pound sterling ever did.

For him to hobble Europe as its president just as it is becoming economically capable of holding its own against the US would have truth emulating the fiction of Robert Harris, whose novel Ghost postulates an uncannily Blair-like British prime minister who had been recruited by the CIA to ensure precisely the kind of helotry we have seen. In retrospect, Harris's scenario looks a lot less paranoid than all those spook inspired stories about Wilson being a KGB plant. The EU should say "non" to Sarkozy's choice.

Clinton's Road to Blair's Downfall and Brown's Way Out!

Clinton's Road to Blair's Downfall and Brown's Way Out! Guardian Comment is Free

Whose dime is Blair travelling on?

Whose dime is Blair travelling on?

The former PM's new role raises questions of mandate and accountability, not to mention who's footing the bill for his Middle East adventure.
Ian Williams

August 2,

When Tony Blair was appointed as the Quartet representative, it was at the behest of the Bush administration. And for once, the White House seems to be putting its money where its mouth was.

British and UN sources confrimed to Al-Jazeera International last week that the US state department is picking up Tony Blair's tab while they work with their reluctant partners in the Quartet to set up a trust fund. Russian sources, who were not that keen on his appointment anyway, have said that they would be prepared to see Blair get international civil servant (tax free status) but would be reluctant to go further in the way of contributing.

The subject has upset even senior British Foreign Office officials, concerned not only at Blair's lack of a substantial enough role for an ex-prime minister, but also with the contradictions inherent in his in effect being on the American payroll immediately after his retirement, which was after all accelerated by public displeasure at his being so close to the Bush administration while in office.

The question of who pays for him and his office, and on what basis he is employed, had been getting the runaround. There is the soapy smell of money laundering here, with frantic attempts to disguise the source.

By Friday, the state department was declaring that "neither the US government nor the Quartet pays a salary to Quartet representative Tony Blair. We are working out the details of funding and support with our Quartet partners for Blair's staff as well as the costs associated with their mission. We expect staff will be seconded by other governments of the Quartet, including the US".

The UN spokeswoman said "there are discussions still taking place", and in remarkable harmony, his own office said on Thursday that "these issues are still being discussed. Our focus has been on Tony Blair's trips and getting the office up and running September". So is Blair paying for his office, his staff and his travel costs to the region on his own credit card while waiting for cash? One doubts it.

His spokesman's email address is @tonyblair.org, which is not as surprising as it may seem. The Quartet is an ad hoc partnership between Europe, the UN, Russia and the US, which has no institutional existence, no office, no rules of procedure and no organisation. There is a lot of mystery about what the Quartet does, and even more about what Tony Blair's part in it is.

Condoleezza Rice and the Americans have been very explicit about what his part is not. He cannot engage in any serious attempts at peacemaking between the Israelis and the Palestinians. His job is to help build Palestinian Institutions, but he is not to talk to Hamas, which actually won the elections and controls the Gaza Strip. That may be just as well since between Iraq and his refusal to call for a ceasefire in Lebanon last year, there is no guarantee that Hamas would talk to him.

Indeed, the presence of Blair as an official Quartet representative, refusing to talk to Hamas, reinforces the recent conclusion, leaked to the Guardian from Alavaro de Soto, the UN's previous special representative, that the Quartet is simply a means of binding the other parties to an American, and hence Israeli, agenda.

It is not Russian policy and certainly has not been voted upon by any UN decision-making body, to boycott the victors of the last Palestinian Authority elections. But here we have a former British prime minister, on the American payroll, doing just that in the name of the Quartet. It is not surprising that there is a degree of caginess on the part of the various parties. It is surprising that Tony Blair could not wait to start until some more acceptable and transparent payment had been worked out - and perhaps even more so that he would take the job without a more substantial role allotted to him.

And to highlight his peripheral status, Gordon Brown has approached former Robin Cook aide Michael Williams, freshly appointed to be Middle East rep at the UN to represent Britain in the peace process. Which reinforces the question. Who does Blair represent?

Blairing the issues

My commemorative piece on Brown's visit to the White House and the UN. in the Guardian Comment is Free.

Tricky Dick, meet phoney Tony

From Guardian Comment is Free
7 May 2007
What the end of Richard Nixon can teach us about the end of Tony Blair.

Ian Williams

How long will it take to rehabilitate Tony Blair? As Mark Anthony said about another military adventurist who came unstuck:

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interréd with their bones

As Tony Blair gets ready to call the movers into 10 Downing Street, it may be premature to exhume some of the soon-to-be-buried good from the loads of justified dirt about to be heaped on his grave, but a spirit of balance calls for some sense of perspective - as long as he actually goes!

In many ways, Blair's going with the director of public prosecution hovering over his head is reminiscent of Richard Milhous Nixon's impeachment-impelled exit from the White House. Nixon was not exactly one of my favourites when he was in office, but since then I have developed quite a soft spot for him. I think Blair suffers from the comparison, but there are nonetheless similarities: not least stealing the opposition agenda, but also a complete lack of public trust compounded by a complete sense of personal infallibility.

On the other hand, spending on welfare and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as court-ordered desegregation measures all reached a peak under Nixon. He stopped the war in Vietnam, recognised China, fostered détente with Russia, engineered arms control treaties, and ended the US's chemical and biological warfare programs. He stopped conscription and was the last president to consider a comprehensive national health service. He passed the Clean Air Act, and empowered the Environmental Protection Agency. By many rational standards of actual achievement, Nixon was the most liberal and progressive president since FDR. In fact, since his departure, most studies show that American workers' incomes have been stagnant in real terms.

Of course, Nixon also had dismissively anti-Semitic and racist attitudes... but hell, you have to take the rough with the smooth when dealing with a president who believed so much in transparency that he wired the White House to preserve all his own ill-considered words.

Watergate was his downfall, which in its way was the type of peccadillo that allowed both conservatives and liberals, outraged at how he had co-opted the liberal agenda, to unite against him. Just compare Nixon's public excoriation with the free pass given to Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra , where the Republican team conspired with the ayatollahs to keep Americans hostage until the election and then promptly traded arms between them and the Israelis to overthrow the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Not only did they get away with it, but half the pardoned perpetrators are now in and around this administration - and saying we should not talk to the aforesaid ayatollahs under any circumstances.

Now back to Anthony Charles Lynton Blair. One of his senior ministers complained during the first term that the government was actually doing a lot of good, but that they were not allowed to advertise it and there is a lot of truth in that.

From the perspective of an exile from the Thatcher years, I suspect that those who stayed behind do not always appreciate how much better things in Britain really are now than when Labour first took over. (Which is not to discount how much better they could have been were it not for the paranoid, power-hungry clique of New Labour that Blair led, with all its nannyish obsessions.)

It is difficult to reconcile all the early New Labour guff about empowering people with the ID cards, the ASBO , the attacks on civil liberties under the guise of anti-terrorism, the lie detectors for benefit claimants, and similar measures that intrude upon the life of British citizens in a way that makes the average North Korean commune seem like an open-house.

And then there is the sleaze. Blair's crowd descended on the Labour Party like Deng Xiaoping on the Chinese Communist Party, and in effect told it that greed was good. And the comrades took to it with the vengeance of the wannabee nouveau riches. The ministerial mayhem was of course capped with the Peerages for Sale wheeze, which was almost certainly based on an idea by Bill Clinton. It was intended to free the prime minister even further from any remaining ties to the residual socialism of the unions and the Labour Party, just as Clinton took the Democratic Party from what he called "Special Interest Groups" like working people, minorities and women, and handed it over to Wall Street.

Does anyone really believe that Blair did not know what was going on? Here we get to the real cause for his downfall. Who believes anything he says anymore? Lies led Britain into Iraq, and the prime minister now dissimulates in harmony with possibly the least popular president in the world who, incidentally, does not have a smidgeon of Nixon's solid domestic track record to rehabilitate his sleaze.

It took several decades before many people overcame their reflexive repulsion for Nixon. Indeed, even quite recently, I have had steak knives brandished at me across Manhattan dinner tables for challenging the received liberal view that wants to replace the "x" in his name with a hyperbolic swastika.

Even without Nixon's real achievement, Blair is smooth, articulate and photogenic, unlike him. And since Blair will probably be on the board of directors of Murdoch's News Corporation
in about the time it takes to sing the first verse of the Red Flag, he will be assured of an adulatory and amnesiac media across the English-speaking world, so one cannot help but suspect that his rehabilitation will only take several years. It may be a small price to say goodbye.

Blair and Nixon

The good that men do is oft interred with their bones....

A riff on Richard M. Nixon and Anthony C. L. Blair from the Guardian Comment is Free