The Book of Pecksniff

All the extracts from Blair's book that I've been reading in the papers... they've reminded me of why I used to always refer to Blair as "Pecksniff". It was my special name for him, even back at the start (I'm proud to be able to say I never voted for him).

Pecksniff is described in Chuzzlewit as "a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there." That what Blair is. An utter hypocrite. A series of empty gestures towards morality, probity, mature realism, conviction, progressivism, etc. But you follow the gestures and see that they go absolutely nowhere. And then you turn back to the gesturer and, just for a second, you catch the smirk.

The unctuous self-righteousness that leaks from every pore even as he ruthlessly furthers himself with every word and deed; the pained sincerity with which he winces over the foolishness of those who are misguided enough to disagree with him or doubt his word; the Christian piety with which he carpet bombed population centres. And all of it fake. Even now, it's clear that his dominant emotion concerning the Iraq war, and the subsequent fall out, is self-pity.

But the man is soaked in blood... and he knows it. All this "ooh, the scary thing is that he really believes it" bullshit. You can't write material like that forensically picked over here without knowing that you're being studiedly dishonest. The irony is that his own obfuscations and shifty evasions reveal the utter moral bankruptcy of the man better than anything else ever written about him. In a way, with the book's artifice concerning the case for the war, he's finally admitted the truth.

And we're supposed to care that all the royalties of the book are going to charity! So what? The bastard could give every other million he owns to charity and hang himself in Fallujah and it wouldn't make any bloody difference.


Oh, er... he's a bit like a Cyberman or something. There, that's made this post relevant to this blog. I'm covered.