David Aaronovich (Guardian Unltd): The Conference speech Tony should make

[Jack Rabbit]

We'll have a little fun with this one. This piece of nonsense deserves running commentary.

From the Guardian Unlimited
Dated Tuesday September 30

The conference speech Tony should make
By David Aaronovitch

Well here I am again. Vlad the Impaler, the effete warmonger, the Granita fop, Tony B Liar. Worse, by far - judging by what is being said and left unsaid here - than Saddam Hussein himself.

No, Mr. Blair, not worse than Saddam. You are an accessory to G. W. Bush. That's bad enough.

A lot of that has been about Iraq. OK, some of you are pacifists, like Mahatma Gandhi, and you don't like war on principle. Fair enough, I suppose, until they turn up to cart you off to the dusty field. But many of you others don't seem to care how many Iraqis old Saddam was killing, just so long as we didn't kill any.

And others simply believe that war should be used only as a last resort. Others were paying attention to reports that Saddam wasn't a threat to his weakest neighbor. As Robin Cook said, Saddam had no WMDs as one would normally thnk of them. And you knew that what Mr. Cook said was true, Mr. Blair. Instead of standing for what was right, you stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Mr. Bush and repeated his lies.

It doesn't appear to bother you at all that - according to all polls - most Iraqis still think the invasion was a good thing. You know better than they do.

Yeah, right. Like we're going to take seriouslyany public opinion poll in Iraq while colonial occupation troops muzzle the press, prevent elections and maintain a puppet governing council consisting of any quislings Bush and Bremer can pay off. It;s not like Iraq suddenly became a free country when Saddam ran out of Baghdad with his tail between his legs. It became an American colony. And whether you have any good intentions or not, the Frat Boy and his cronies plan to keep it that way as long as there's milk in that cow.

You are so certain that it would have been preferable to have left Uday and Qusay in their palaces, and the political prisoners in their torture chambers, yet you call yourselves internationalists!

Ahh, so you try to trap us into a black-and-white fallacy? Sorry, Tony Baloney. We're not going to make any excuses for the Tikriti clan, as you would like us to do. However, since terrorists have a presence in those parts of Iraq that Saddam used to control that they diod not before, perhaps you would like to tell us how that made things better? That's some progress in the war on terrorism you and the Frat Boy have made! Any more progress like that and Osama will soon gain nukes.

Of course it's embarrassing for me that we haven't turned up a bunker full of anthrax. No, not embarrassing - disastrous. I thought there was stuff there, so did the spooks, so did one D Kelly.

Oh, give us a break, Tony. We knew what you and the Frat Boy were doing. Both of you were cherry picking intelligence to support your dirty little war and supressing the real intelligence that refuting it. If you hadn't done that, you and the Frat Boy wouldn't find yourself ing the big pickle your in now. And don't think we feel sorry for you. You and those thugs on the other side of the Pond deserve to stew in your own juices.

There were other reasons. Keeping the Yanks from going completely unilateralist, nudging North Korea and Iran towards the light (and if you have a better strategy, I'd love to hear it), raisons d'état, the kind of stuff you elect leaders to make judgments on.

If your intention was to keep the Frat Boy from going completely unilateralist, you failed miserably. You know as well as anybody else he would have gone in without you and would have been very happy to do so. Rummy said he didn't need the Brits and he was right. You gave him a figleaf. With a few British troops in Iraq, the Frat Boy thinks he can credibly claimed to have forged a coalition. You have no good excuse for feeding his delusions.

Which, I finally have to inform you, I've decided not to do. I'm sick of being your whipping-boy, the lightning conductor for all your self-disgust. It's like having a million teenage children, all sulking and slamming their bedroom doors, and Cherie and I have had enough. It's Gordon's turn. Good luck to him. And for God's sake don't be so hypocritical as to give me a standing ovation. Goodbye.
(turns, walks off, and can be heard chanting)
Tony and Cherie. Up in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
You and Tony Woodley. Left without me. B-U-G-G-E-R-E-D.

And as soon as he's backstage, Interpol agents sieze his sorry ass and whisk him off to The Hague. Good riddence to bad trash.

This is, to my knowledge, the first piece by Mr. Aaronovich to appear on DU's EA page.
He is the Guardian's answer to Tom Friedman.

[Capt_Nemo]

1. Aaronovitch is a closet Likudnik

And wants the UK to fight the wars that Sharon and Mofaz dream of...
I think those IAF rebel pilots could teach him a lesson or two...

[T_i_B]

2. Worse than Thomas Freidman

Freidman comes across as an establishment crony (which he is), but even he cannot match Whoranovitch for snarmy snideness. He never gets posted on DU because he never writes any good articles. Simple as that.

The article is simply hurling abuse at that known contemptuously by the Blairites as "the left" which they spend hours writing patronizing peices, more often than not just using rampant straw man arguments in a pathetic attempt to try to bash the people whom the Labour party is actually supposed to serve.

If the Blairites are going to spend all their time doing straw man peices hurling abuse at progressives, then why the f**k don't they just do the honest thing and join the tory party? "new" labour and the tories are one and the same these days to all intents and purposes so they might as well.

Here is the perfect anecdote to Whoranovitch's talentless bitching, a brilliant article by fellow Sheffield Wednesday supporter Roy Hattersly. Notice the rational arguments in this piece Mr Whoranovitch, it's more than you ever get in your shite columms.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1051796,00.html

When in doubt or difficulty, the prime minister always completes a diversion from the facts by traducing his critics. The finest flowering of that talent came during his visit to this year's meeting of the Trades Union Congress when his speech rejected "the fantasy of an extreme leftwing government". He was about to face criticisms of foundation hospitals, top-up fees and a two-tier workforce. The implication that only Bolsheviks have reservations about those policies illustrates how flimsy the rational arguments in their favour are. It has to be admitted that defenders of the Project make up in affrontery what they lack in probity.

Yesterday Tony Blair, who came into parliament supporting nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the European Community and a massive extension of public ownership, announced that he had "always been on the modernising edge of the party". Perhaps Dr John Reid will soon claim that he has been Labour all his life. After his statement last week that critics of the government "come together under the banner FWW - Fed-up With Winning", we can only assume that he will say whatever is convenient at the moment. There are some of us who fought to win, way back in 1983 - the year to which New Labour supporters always claim their critics wish to return. The extent of that year's defeat had two causes. One was the insistence that the manifesto contained policies that the nation would never accept - see above: nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from Europe and massive nationalisation. Where did last week's three critics of the bad old days - John Reid, Stephen Byers and Alan Milburn - stand in 1983? The other reason for that year's debacle was the defection of the Gang of Four. How many No 10 advisers were SDP candidates who split the anti-Tory vote, therefore defeating sitting Labour MPs? Although I do not share the prime minister's Christian beliefs, I welcome sinners coming late to repentance. But I have doubts about their claim to a sudden monopoly of virtue.

The desire to remain in permanent opposition is not the most damaging smear that is spread across the government's critics. Any Labour party member who has doubts about the Project is dismissed as outdated. For years, hoping that rationality would break through, I suggested that ideas should be judged on their merits, not on their age. Then I realised that the more intelligent members of the government knew that to be true, but found it inconvenient. The argument against PFI is not that everything should be publicly owned or that we should follow the precedent of 1945, but that it is a wasteful and expensive affectation.

Last week John Reid complained that the government's critics were dogmatists, not ideologues. It is the belief that private enterprise and the market produce efficiency that displays indefensible dogma. And the notion that competition, which the government wants to extend to hospitals and schools, is the answer to the problems of performance and accountability, is hardly modern. New Labour has moved through space not time - to the right, not to the future.