><http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-1102058,00.html>
>
>Why I will be rooting for a George Bush election victory
>
>Matthew Parris
>
>GEORGE W. BUSH needs a second term at the Whi te House. This US
>presidency is halfway through an experiment whose importance is
>almost literally earth-shattering. Its success or failure could be a
>beacon for the future. I want to see that experiment properly
>concluded.
Spooky. My thoughts exactly, right down to the inoculation metaphor I coined the other day:
>We should be properly inoculated against this error for it has a potency.
The fellow must be a lurker Doug? Though this wasn't in the script:
> The President may be no genius, but I am not one of those smug
>leftwingers who takes Donald Rumsfeld or Richard Perle to be fools
>or knaves, or who dismiss their argument as shallow.
Typical Tory, they can't stop themselves sucking up to the powerful. Bush is a moron, not merely a "fool". Knave is altogether too tame a description for the war criminal Rumsfield. (I agree with Hitchens, "This is why one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot." If Rumsfield was taken out out the back of the White House and summarily executed, I would be hard pressed to conceive of any substantial objection.)
>The removal of such systems of government, if necessary by force of
>arms, and the installation -- if necessary by force of arms -- of
>governments which resemble our own, become, to the liberal
>interventionist, only superficially acts of coercion, for he is
>lifting from people an alien yoke.
Bush is a "liberal" now? Practically a Marxist! Try to keep up Matthew, just stick to the basic idea, don't go trying to ad-lib, you'll blow a gasket, or a garter belt.
> If this is not how they see things today then tomorrow they will,
>they must. To the liberal interventionist, the thought never occurs
>that Saddam Hussein might have been a product of the whole Iraqi
>people and their history, as well as an imposition upon them.
How quaintly modest. I think past British, French and American interventions deserve a lot more credit than Matthew admits.
> They think that he was only an imposition and in their hearts the
>people know it. Remove him, thinks the interventionist, and they
>will love us. If at first they do not rise and hail us then another
>heave is called for: one last heave.
>
>Let them have that one last heave; and another; and another. And
>when every heave fails, and this President's successors have to
>begin the cruel and dirty process of withdrawal, let there remain
>not the ghost of a suspicion in any American mind that George W.
>Bush and his friends were not given their chance to try.
I don't mind the plagiarism, after all conservatives are by definition incapable of original thinking, big C conservatives of the pommy kind in particular. But it pissed me off to go to the website and discover that they have the cheek to want people to pay to enter the site. I'm tempted to send them a bill.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas