What Do You Know About Mendacity

I've been following Sidney Blumenthal's guardian.uk piece all over the web—It's a fucking novel. He's written a novel, Death of A Prime Minister and Attention Must Be Paid.

Okay, so the saga is morphing into George's Long Day and its sloooow Journey Into Night, but so much the better. Blumenthal has picked us a juicy peach, worth memorizing. Worth clasping to your (figurative) bosom. Tragedy is nothing if not ... compelling.

In his relationship with Bush, Blair apparently misread the outward signs of American culture and interpreted them through British eyes. Bush can be so amiable and informal dressed in blue jeans that his manner can be mistaken for openness and cooperation, when it conceals a particular type of American class superiority and indifference. Bush, after all, seems so friendly compared with the glowering Cheney, who clawed his way upward. It's not easy for someone who's never traveled in America to grasp the evolution of the Bush family from north-east patricians into Texas Tories, and the dissolution of the New England character along the way, especially its sense of responsibility, duty and humility.

Bush's amiability towards Blair merely demonstrates his acceptance of the prime minister into his fraternity, his private club. But even if Blair got Bush exactly right in every nuance, the outcome remains the same. (Gordon Brown and Bush are a car crash waiting to happen.)

I'm sellin' tickets! I'm settin' up lawn chairs. Who wants the soda concession. Hoo boy.

Bush has an instinctive revulsion for serious intellectuals who have little capacity for the locker-room banter that is his mode of condescension.

On the other hand, I don't think you're going to catch George Bush on the same continent with a Gordon Brown. Instinctive terror is more like it.