Maureen Dowd: "Labors Love Lost"

MoDo takes on Tony Blair's successor in Great Britain:

Gordon Brown’s smile does not look at home on his face. It sits there uneasily, like an uninvited guest at a party, until his features can resume their comfortably dour grooves.

The brooding Scot ended his decade-long run as a hefty Heathcliff to Tony Blair’s chatty Cathy, stepping out of the shadows Friday with visible relief to begin a campaign for prime minister that he has already won.

Grumpy Gordon is an enigma compared with Captain Showbiz, as the glib Mr. Blair is called by a morning TV host here. The 56-year-old son of a Presbyterian minister, with hooded eyes and frugal charm, will be hard pressed to compete on the European stage with Iron Frau Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, dubbed “Thatcher without petticoats.”

Mr. Brown’s school friends came on TV to say he was more fun than he looked. “He enjoys a good glass of wine,” said his pal Bill Campbell.

The chancellor has been striving to move beyond his reputation as a man so obsessed with the budget that he wouldn’t even share the details in advance with Tony Blair. He traded the green eyeshade for pastel ties. He told a women’s magazine that he liked the rock band Arctic Monkeys, but later couldn’t name any of their songs.

Mr. Brown was considered the uncool half of the Cool Britannia team that swept into power on a wave of Champagne, celebrities and Cherie Blair’s New Age guru. But thanks to his role as W.’s interlocutor and translator, Tony Blair is uncool, too.

The first boomer prime minister got a blazing start in trying to make Britain more modern and tolerant. But he fell in with an American crowd of bullies who were turning back the clock on modernity and tolerance, and Tony abused Britons’ trust.

Blair Gets Booted, But We're Still Bushwhacked!

Let me paraphrase one of the few decent things I heard on Friday's "Real Time with Bill Maher" on HBO:

"Tony Blair cited his reason for stepping down from leading Great Britain

as a desire to spend more time (not with his family BUT)

humping Bush's leg, just like a good little lapdog should."

Goodbye, Cool Brittania

No more lapdog for Bush? No more bridge between the U.S. and Europe?

Read what The Newshoggers (Cernig, especially) have to say on the matter of Blair's anticipated resignation tomorrow.

Wew.

The Iranian-British Hostage Crisis And The "Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You" Principle

Since yesterday, we've had a steady dose through the media of "How dare the Iranians treat the 15 British sailors as they did?" They were kept in isolation at times, not always fed the foods they would prefer, heard gunfire while they were blindfolded.

Mind you, what the Brit marines experienced sounds like a day in the fucking amusement park compared with what the Brits, and ESPECIALLY Bush's America does to people they call "enemy combatants" (yet few are ever charged with same) and hold in places like Guantanamo Bay/Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and countless secret prisons throughout the world, such as the one we operate in Syria where we "disappear" people off the streets and send them off for months or years of torture, terrible interrogation techniques, degradation, etc.

So before you cry extensively for these hostages who were released with gift bags and fresh clothes, think of what WE as American citizens, allow to happen in OUR names.

More Political Cartoons Part 1

On the subject of Bush, Cheney, the Iraq Escalation/Surge, and Tony Blair's announcement of Great Britain's exit strategy for its troops from Iraq; from New Jersey, India, and Canada... all available at Political Cartoons.

The British Speak While U.S. Republican Senators Go Mute: England To Withdraw Troops From Iraq

CNN has just reported that Prime Minister Tony Blair, often called George Bush's lap dog, has announced a sped-up timetable for withdrawing English troops from the abyss that Bush has made Iraq. British citizens have been screaming for an end to their participation in Iraq far longer than it has been popular here.

And with this announcement, can Blair's final days be long off? I doubt it.

Would that Bush's last days were less than the nearly 700 which remain.