It's really an amazing achievement, isn't it? One of my housemates has a copy of the book, and I can't quite bring myself to touch it. It feels like it should be radioactive.
I like the sense that comes from Blair that he was too terrified to confront Brown because he was terrified of Brown leading a ~leftist~ rebellion. It says a lot about the trajectory of the Labour Party that Brown would be considered - even by a third way politician so numbingly 'centrist' as Blair - a figurehead for the left.
He feels intense "anguish" over the lives lost in the Iraq war and failed to "guess the nightmare that unfolded".
What? You failed to guess that lives would be lost in the Iraq war? Or you failed to guess that a large number of people would never support an illegal war? Hmm.
It seems a friend's just noticed Blair feeling "a tug, not of regret but of nostalgia for the old British Empire" (p.126) ... Good fucking god!
Blair's language throughout this piece reminds me of how equivocal he was while in power, tending to frame as hypothetical or abstract real, human consequences to political questions. Like the response to the Chilcot question here -- Blair turns a question about moral and political responsibility for the way the invasion of Iraq was prosecuted, it turns into a question about Blair's *feelings*. As if the mark of moral integrity would be the abstract (and in real terms inconsequential) feelings he has post facto. Well, you know, good, it fucking SHOULD keep you up at night Tony. I hope it haunts your dreams. But the question was about regretting your actions and, as always, you singularly failed to answer it.
…that night she cradled me in her arms and soothed me; told me what I needed to be told; strengthened me; made me feel that I was about to do was right … On that night of the 12th May, 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct, knowing I would need every ounce of emotional power to cope with what lay ahead. I was exhilarated, afraid and determined in roughly equal quantities.
I fear that in the darkest of nights I'll twist in bed and find this image rising sulphurously up from the depths of my subconscious. I don't know what's worse, the prose, or the mental image.
His New Labour bollocks was certainly an improvement on what the conservatives keep coming up with but his never-ending disdain for every truly left idea/policy makes me want to kick him. FOREVER.
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Is he on some kind of mission to be wrong about every last thing?
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Mehdi Hasan has already quite nicely torpedoed a lot of the Iraq stuff here: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/mehdi-hasan/2010/08/saddam-iraq-weapons-report
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Stop right there Tony. Now stfu.
He feels intense "anguish" over the lives lost in the Iraq war and failed to "guess the nightmare that unfolded".
What? You failed to guess that lives would be lost in the Iraq war? Or you failed to guess that a large number of people would never support an illegal war? Hmm.
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Blair's language throughout this piece reminds me of how equivocal he was while in power, tending to frame as hypothetical or abstract real, human consequences to political questions. Like the response to the Chilcot question here -- Blair turns a question about moral and political responsibility for the way the invasion of Iraq was prosecuted, it turns into a question about Blair's *feelings*. As if the mark of moral integrity would be the abstract (and in real terms inconsequential) feelings he has post facto. Well, you know, good, it fucking SHOULD keep you up at night Tony. I hope it haunts your dreams. But the question was about regretting your actions and, as always, you singularly failed to answer it.
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He should have joined the Tory party. He'd have been right at home. I bet they would have taken him fox-hunting, too.
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…that night she cradled me in her arms and soothed me; told me what I needed to be told; strengthened me; made me feel that I was about to do was right … On that night of the 12th May, 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct, knowing I would need every ounce of emotional power to cope with what lay ahead. I was exhilarated, afraid and determined in roughly equal quantities.
I fear that in the darkest of nights I'll twist in bed and find this image rising sulphurously up from the depths of my subconscious. I don't know what's worse, the prose, or the mental image.
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Progressive my arse.
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