BlairWatch - 4 comments

Once again, the irrepressible BlairWatch has chucked some mud our way:

Meanwhile on Fantasy Island Bullshitters 4 Blair think there's nothing happening, it's all Nick Robinson's fault... and you thought Blair was deluded...

I think that's about the third time that particular charge has been made against this site, so perhaps it's about time I made public my own views about BlairWatch. Ahem:

I despise BlairWatch. I have contempt for BlairWatch; contempt for its leading protagonists; contempt for its fostering of personal, paranoid, venal, and plain demented comments and commenters; its unwillingness to discuss or elaborate positive policies; its view that unless a particular policy, speech, or exposé is explicitly criticised to its own satisfaction that this constitutes acceptance and approval; that Bloggers4Labour is under any particular obligation because of its name or its membership; its protagonists' refusal to engage in cordial relations as grown human beings; and the fact that it seems perfectly satisfied for its many readers to leave abusive, anonymous comments at this blog ("Do you ever wonder what it must have been like to have been a minor official in the Vichy government?" was a fairly tame one), and no doubt others.

There may be other things I dislike about BlairWatch that will come to me in time.

So why the acrimony? This can scarcely have anything to do with politics:

• Apart from one or two trolls no Conservative blog or blogger has behaved in such a repellent manner towards this site. The BNP once linked to a few pages here from within their forum - no idea how the discussion went, but I suspect it was more reasonable and considered.
  
• Most readers of this site would surely agree that, when you take the many tens of thousands of posts we have syndicated over the past 18 months, there is no particular bias in favour of 'Blairite' politics, or Tony Blair personally. If some people speak out in support of Blair and Blairism, fine, millions of other people do. I hope everyone reads widely enough and challenges their own assumptions.
  
• Among the 400-500 posts I have written, there's undoubtedly a sympathy for what New Labour could be/could have been, a recognition of Tony Blair's interest in and understanding of foreign policy issues, and of the progress that Labour Governments have made since 1997, but certainly no blind adherence to any particular viewpoint. I'm genuinely interested in all policies - with little regard for their origin - that spread democracy (not merely an electoral process), wealth, tolerance, cooperative solutions, equality of opportunity, and redistribution - nationally and internationally. Nonetheless "slavish" is the word BlairWatch love (must add it to the tagline some day). Perhaps this blog's support of the Euston Manifesto only made matters worse.

This is the kind of muck that is very much par for the course for their site (my emphasis):

How do ordinary Labour voters sleep at night knowing they have been duped and are now accomplices to bLiar's criminal foreign policies which have (so far) resulted in the mass murder of tens of thousands of innocent women and children by US and UK stormtroopers.

If Labour (for it is not only bLiar but his parliamentary parasites) is forgiven these heinous crimes by the UK electorate then god help us! We will certainly become even more of a target for the angriest retaliation.

We invade, we kill, we steal their resources, we rape their women, we torture them, we create devastation in their lands. [my link inserted]

Just WHAT do we expect them to do? "Turn the other cheek"?

Hardly. Unless the UK electorate firmly denounces bLiar's war crimes then we will be fending off (wholly justified) retaliation for many years.

No, BlairWatch needs to remain as "BlairWatch" to see this slime-ball into total ignominy, incarcerated for life and made-an-example-of to show clearly to any other Whitehall Wanabe Warmonger that we-the-people will simply not tolerate treason.

Fuck off, BlairWatch.