Truthout: The Next War - Crossing the Rubicon

[freedomfries]

The Next War - Crossing the Rubicon By John Pilger
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 10 February 2006

Has Tony Blair, the minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilized world and brought carnage to a defenseless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?

Perhaps he is seriously unstable now, as some have suggested. Power does bring a certain madness to its prodigious abusers, especially those of shallow disposition. In The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, the great American historian Barbara Tuchman described Lyndon B Johnson, the president whose insane policies took him across his Rubicon in Vietnam. "He lacked Kennedy's ambivalence, born of a certain historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective thinking," she wrote. "Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of his office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contradictions."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021006A.shtml

[savemefromdumbya]

1. Add Blair to the long list of perpetrators throughout British history

[upi402]

2. Nice post T!

The disfunctionality of those who, once drawn to power, cannot see anything but the fruition of their ambitions, is a common thread in authoritarian leaders. And Johnson had that personality, I think, despite all the great social programs he initiated.

Seeing Blair speak in Parliament after watching BushI drool on his chin as he sounds-out the words on the teleprompter is quite a contrast. But this only makes Tony more dangerous still. How could the Brits re-elect him? Blighty's press is not as cemented as a neocon propaganda organ as ours is.