Posts
Will Barack Obama be America’s Tony Blair?
by Scott Gilbreath ~ January 21st, 2009
London Telegraph reporter Gerald Warner has a very bad feeling about the presidency of Barack Obama. Brits, of all people, should know better than to be enthralled by Mr Obama. They’ve been there.
This will end in tears. The Obama hysteria is not merely embarrassing to witness, it is itself contributory to the scale of the disaster that is coming. What we are experiencing, in the deepening days of a global depression, is the desperate suspension of disbelief by people of intelligence – la trahison des clercs – in a pathetic effort to hypnotise themselves into the delusion that it will be all right on the night. It will not be all right.
We have been here before. In the spring of 1997, to be precise, when a charismatic, young prime minister entered Downing Street, cheered by children bussed in for the occasion waving plastic Union Jacks. A very few of us at that time incurred searing reproaches for denouncing the Great Charlatan (as I have always denominated Tony Blair) and dissenting from the public hysteria. Three times a deluded Britain elected that transparent fraud. Yesterday, when national bankruptcy became a formal reality, we reaped the bitter harvest of the Blair/Brown imposture.
I hate to say a discouraging word about Obama in this time of high euphoria, but I think Mr Warner has it right. The next four years could be very hard on the American economy. The policies initiated in the final days of the Bush administration and expanded with gusto by the Democratic Congress and White House will in all likelihood exacerbate the economic pain.
And there will be a cost in innocent human lives.
To anyone who kept his head, the string of Christmas cracker mottoes booming through the public address system on Washington’s National Mall can only excite scepticism. It is crucial to recall the reality that lies behind the rhetoric. Denouncing “those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents” comes ill from a man whose flagship legislation, the Freedom of Choice Act, will impose abortion, including partial-birth abortion, on every state in the Union. It seems the era of Hope is to be inaugurated with a slaughter of the innocents.
h/t: Orwell’s Picnic
Print This Post
January 21st, 2009 at 01:18 PM
The British are cynical. It’s what they do best. I believe that a reasonable hope is not out of order that Barack Obama is in possession of more deeply rooted principles than Tony Blair could every muster in a month of Sundays.
RR
January 21st, 2009 at 05:04 PM
I do hope you’re right.
January 22nd, 2009 at 04:14 PM
[...] A. Millar [...]
January 22nd, 2009 at 08:49 PM
[...] London Telegraph [...]