Blairite Bricolage posted by bat020

A few months ago I had the dubious pleasure of transcribing the George Galloway v Oona King debate during the general election. What struck me was that Galloway actually speaks in full sentences - his fiery rhetoric is undergirded by a cold political logic (which is where its real strength comes from). King, in contrast, spoke gibberish, a weird melange of New Labourisms, marketing speak and wounded amour-propre.

I was reminded of this today when someone drew my attention to this slab of stream-of-consciousness dreck from our prime minister last Friday. Note the complete absence of any kind of political argument - instead we get a bricolage of Cold War ideologemes, one demonaic resemblance chained to the next with a handy all purpose comma. We all know about Bush's intellectual limitations, but we should not forget that the urbane Oxford educated Blair is just as pig-shit stupid.

And I think that the more I think about this type of phenomenon which we are dealing with and it is why I see this as a global threat that has to be handled at a number of different levels, including the level of ideas and ideology, as well as security measures, is that I think it has got some of the same characteristics as revolutionary communism, you know, in the sense that it has got an ideology, it is very extreme, that it can be used to engage young people at a certain level and in a certain way, it has got often the cells of it of a loose association with one another, but on the other hand they have got this ideology that binds them together, they know the types of places that they can go to to get the information and to try and stimulate this type of extremism and we have got to deal with it in a way that recognises that its roots are very deep, very extensive around the world, and you need to pull them up at the same time as dealing with all the rest of it.