Message to Obama and Brown – How about asking WHY?
It seems to me that either they are stupid or they and/or some of those who pull their strings want it, the explosion, to happen.
If there’s another answer, I’d like to know it.
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mary:
January 6th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
There is so much denial in both British and American politics that it is astonishing. I think a lot of it actually comes from the silly exceptionalism that is the collective psyche of these societies more than anything else, and this exceptionalism effectively drops blinders over the eyes of the politicians as well as the citizens.
To always see oneself as better, smarter, more culturally advanced, more enlightened, and more civilized than anyone else is dangerously arrogant and foolish. I believe the refusal of Britain and the US to see themselves clearly prevents them from understanding that their policies are at the root of the world’s bloodiest ongoing conflicts. For example, Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech was a portrait of denial in all its splendor; he cloaked the aggressiveness and bellicosity of US foreign policy in florid rhetoric, speaking of America’s duty to defend the less fortunate (while simultaneously exterminating them!). The pervasiveness of the exceptionalist mindset was painfully evident in the lack of criticism of the speech by anyone in the mainstream media or by any western world leader. Reading the text of the speech, I easily convinced myself that the words had been uttered by George W. Bush and not Barack Obama, who still receives more kid-gloves treatment by the press than he deserves.
Steve Meikle:
January 10th, 2010 at 8:49 pm
Power corrupts. And, when one defines the term “corruption” correctly, ie broadly, this is seen as any decline of a politician’s behaviour, not just in those behaviours that may be seen as criminal.
When a politician has become so conceited, as I saw in my own country when the PM had been in power for 9 years and dripped conceit, such a person is corrupted, even if they never took a bribe in their life.
They aspire to power and office, so they have to believe that what they aspire to is good and noble when in fact it is merely to be at the summit of a heap of ordure.
So nothing they do or those they seek to emulate did will ever be wrong.
Hence when one’s native self righteousness is inflamed by holding or seeking political office, all critics are regarded by these as being without basis, and all opponents of the life style they advocate are in their thinking terrorists or headed that way.
They dont ask why because they assume they know why, in the light of their own self righteousness.
Which is why I will flee the possibility of a life in politics, and it was once suggested to me, like the plague.