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 freedom and democracy". He is confounded by the fact that he has more 
 recently been roundly criticised by what he now calls "the feral media" 
 and he suddenly finds himself out of office and unemployed at only 54 
 years of age. What is a good christian gentleman and national political 
 leader to do in these circumstances? What happens when he is no longer 
 jetting around, talking on the phone with G W Bush on a daily basis and 
 chairing security meetings and war cabinets now?  What happens now that 
 he has lost the role of right hand man in the US Empire's War on 
 Terrorism? Well there is one thing, he has found a lifeline in that he 
 has also become a planetary celebrity for the NeoCon war party, the 
 globalisers and the corporate media barons. 
  
 One thing is sure, he will not go quietly. He still has a messianic, 
 evangelical, religious and political zeal that he needs to employ in 
 furthering his personal obsessions which always become deeply held 
 convictions and he is addicted to the exercise of the unaccountable 
 power that he has become used to wielding as Prime Minister. 
  
 New Labour has always been less about substance than it has been about 
 media stunts, focus groups, presentation and perception management thus 
 there is no surprise in Blair's visit to the Pope in Rome and the 
 accompanying blaze of mega-publicity about what would usually be a 
 private (even a not very interesting) matter of personal religious 
 conviction. This is the sort of thing that would be announced 
 undramatically, in a modest way after someone in the public eye has 
 made that kind of personal choice about their religious affiliation. It 
 is true that technically speaking there are those who find the idea of 
 a practicing Catholic Prime Minister at odds with the idea of the 
 Church of England being the official religious institution of the 
 British state but all this means in practice is that appointments of 
 Bishops to the Church of England would go through a committee (which 
 they do anyway) and someone other than the Prime Minister would sign 
 the papers. The Queen has plenty of other flunkies who could do that, 
 so this is not really a constitutional issue. 
  
 The real story is that this "Blair meets with Pope in Rome" media event 
 is PR managed hype. Blair has a been a crypto-catholic in all but name 
 for many years. His wife and children are catholics but he was always 
 said to be a member Church of England. Having already taken catholic 
 doctrinal instruction for some years, the actual event of his being 
 received into the Catholic Church is by now merely a formality and a 
 matter of timing. What we are subjected to however is a massive public 
 relations jamboree about his intended conversion in the full blaze of 
 the global media. This is more in Blair's style, it keeps his face on 
 the TV and his name of the lips of the powerful for whom he really 
 works (G W Bush, Murdoch, the corporatocracy and the wealthy global 
 elites etc.) This "Pope-meets-Blair" stunt is a very managed, public 
 and ostentatious run to Rome for a private blessing but revealed and 
 exposed in public as if he is in some sort of tantrum after being 
 unfairly dismissed from his job. The Catholic Church and Pope Ben-Edict 
 also needs and welcomes this kind of opportunity to show it's alignment 
 with the leading servants of new world order. 
  
 Don't think we have heard the last of Tony Blair in his new incarnation 
 as Tory b'Liar. He is one of those discredited Globalised Neo-Liberal 
 Zombie war people who will keep raising from the dead to disturb the 
 peace of living for a few decades yet. What he embodies of course is 
 the Post Modernist ideal that things mean what you want them to mean 
 despite what they really do mean. In this case, the success of failure, 
 the triumph of war crimes over peace. Blair offers us the template of 
 sucking up to power and money and the proof that if you are a white, 
 European and privileged you can be a major instigator of killing a 
 million people in an illegal aggressive war for the control of another 
 nation's oil resources and not only escape justice but be welcomed into 
 the oldest and largest religious institution in human history, the one 
 true faith, the good old Roman Catholic Church. 
  
 As Blair has discovered you can be elected to office with a clear 
 mandate, do the opposite of what you promised and no one can touch you. 
 If people object to your corruption you can just cancel the law with a 
 stroke of your pen. The Papal Knight of the Catholic Church Rupert 
 Murdoch may offer him a book publishing contract and G W Bush may want 
 him to act as a Christ like figure of peace who will stride the world 
 struggling to bring calm to the Middle East as an Special Envoy. Or 
 perhaps the Presidency of the Europe Union would be more to his liking? 
  
 His colleagues may have stabbed him in the back, the public may dispise 
 him and call him b'Liar, race relations in Britain may be in tatters 
 and he may be a war criminal with a million innocent deaths on his 
 conscience but Pope Ben-Edict and the Roman Catholic Church will accept 
 him with open arms and the Neo-Liberal Global elite will offer him all 
 kinds of prestigious speaking tours, high profile jobs or media 
 contracts and earning opportunities that will fill his wallet, satiate 
 his vanity and his engage his undoubted public speaking and 
 presentational skills. 
  
 The New Labour bosses and the major UK media establishment don't want to 
 face the war crimes and the military catastrophes they have so 
 vigorously supported as they ignore or play down the growing risks of 
 even more extensive wars. They admit that "the Iraq war has not gone 
 well" and "it would be a bad idea to attack Iran". They mutter under 
 their breath that "Bush is crazy, he is controlled by Cheney who is 
 completely paranoid and wants to use nukes on Iran". In this grim 
 situation there is a need to find some comfort, some hidden silver 
 lining in the clouds. 
  
 They need distraction and so there is much talk by Blair's defenders 
 about what they see as his positive contributions in the social and 
 economic sphere; "The Blair Legacy". Often cited are topics like the 
 continuing peace in the North of Ireland and the minimum wage law 
 passed by the Blair governement. It is true that a few things have been 
 done correctly and given ten years in power it would be surprising if 
 the odd thing had not come out well but on the balance of his legacy 
 even when you exclude the war abroad and poverty at home here again 
 Blair is exposed. 
  
 Recently we have seen the covers completely come off the PR engineered 
 back drop to the face saving talk about "Blair's legacy" with 
 revelations about virtually every sector of the economy including our 
 once massive steel and coal industries, a fragment of their former size 
 and now not only mostly closed down and sold off but with much of our 
 demand now imported. It seems that some of this coal and steel is being 
 produced in Asian factories and mines owned by a billionaire friend of 
 Blair who is also a major labour party finance contributor. Much of our 
 steel and coal is not any longer produced in relatively safe modern 
 industrial plants or mines by a unionised and reasonably remunerated 
 work force but in factories and mines where people often work for very 
 low wages under near slave labour conditions that would have shamed 
 even the brutal industrial capitalists in the darkest Dickensian days 
  
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 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)