British Conservatives: "BUSH is NUTS" (warning: Weekly Standard)

Great article on how EVERYBODY else in the ENTIRE WORLD, no matter what the political persuasion, thinks Bush is a lunatic. You'll have to excuse some anti-left bias and incredulity in the tone - it's from the Weekly Standard, but the substance of the article is golden.

Here's an excerpt:

> http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/125kixrf.asp

George Osborne, the Tory MP for Tatton (and definitely not of the Michael Moore persuasion), reports that John Kerry is significantly more popular than George Bush among both Tory MPs and Tory voters. Indeed, he thinks that Kerry would probably do better in the Tory shires and suburbs than he would do in Labour's urban heartlands. His fellow MPs produce a laundry list of complaints about the Texan in the White House, ranging from his decision to withdraw from the Kyoto treaty to his keenness on God to his general demeanor (he looks as if he "might wail at the moon").

(snip)

Unconvinced? Try Sir Max Hastings, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and, for a time, one of Mrs. Thatcher's favorite journalists. In a recent column entitled "I hate George Bush" (at least you can't accuse him of burying the lead), Sir Max denounced American conservatives as "lunatics" and proclaimed that "every single bleak forecast about their follies has been fulfilled." To back up these arguments, Sir Max employed the full gamut of Moorist tropes--America is a land of gun-toting religious zealots; the Bush administration thinks that democracy can be marketed in the same way as Enron shares, etc.--before urging his readers to pray for John Kerry's victory in November.

(snip)

It is hardly surprising that conspiracy theories of the sort that Michael Moore peddles go down extremely well. Several Tory backwoodsmen peers have informed the House of Lords that American foreign policy is being run by a Likudnik cabal. John Laughland recently wrote an article in the Spectator, headlined "I believe in conspiracies," in which, among other things, he asked why "you are bordering on the bonkers if you wonder about the truth behind events like 9/11."

Indeed, when it comes to the United States, the British right and the British left often speak with the same voice. The Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror are at opposite ends of the political spectrum on everything from Europe to fox hunting. But when it comes to the Bush administration it is impossible to tell them apart. The Daily Mirror prints John Pilger's overheated prose about the evils of American imperialism. The Daily Mail regularly accuses America of being a "neo-colonial bully boy," and, in a breathtaking act of hypocrisy, it has even leapt to the defense of British Muslim detainees in Guantanamo Bay. The Spectator is becoming as antiwar as the New Statesman and has hired Andrew Gilligan, the man who was sacked by the BBC for falsely accusing Tony Blair of "sexing up" a government dossier on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, as its defense and international editor.

what with Tory Blair head permanently inserted in Bush's rear end and the Tory speaking like this I might even consider voting for the conservatives if I was back in the UK...well probably only for a second

Found this bit interesting " his keenness on God" - I don't think many Americans realise just how bizarre the constant references to God in everything from Grammy acceptance speeches to politics is to people in other western nations, it sometimes seems as if you've all JUST stepped off the Mayflower

Alan Duncan (Tory shadow secretary for 'constitutional affairs') this morning & he was saying how he would like to actively campaign for Kerry to get Bush out of office because of what a fuck up Bush has been internationally. Was quite odd actually hearing a Tory front-bencher being so blunt.

As to the article, I love how the Weekly Standard equates anti-Bush feeling with Anti-Americanism! With the exception of a couple, the Tory party is thoroughly Atlanticist & thoroughly Republican. But hey, we should all be used to the twisted logic of the neo-cons.

They're typical conservatives -- they pat themselves on the back for "seeing through Bush" (though anyone with an IQ over 90 could do the same thing), and like typical conservatives they also accuse all Americans for what Bush did, just like some silly conservative would vis-a-vis French people and Chirac.

Strip off the Tory's grand proclamations and you've got a Freeper with a bigger vocabulary and Oxford accent underneath. ;)

who knew?

I wish there was something they could do to get these fundie, warmongering whackjobs out of office. What if the whole world.....?