Naked to their Enemies

Common Sense
John Maxwell

It may very well have something to do with the very thin ozone layer prevailing this year, allowing the earth to be bathed in excessive ultraviolet radiation, threatening malignant melanoma for those with fair skins. Our destructive past is catching up with us and the poisons we have excreted into the environment are coming back to haunt us.

But I do wonder if it is the ozone layer which is also stripping away the glaze from the eyes of some of us, and, at an absolutely astonishing rate, revealing the nakedness of our emperors and the pathetic figures they cut once the gilt has been removed.

Take the Mexican Emperor, for instance, Vicente Fox. EL Presidente was last week forced to backtrack and effectively apologise for his government's part in attempting to get rid of its most dangerous opponent, the Mayor of Mexico City, Lopez Obrador.

It probably doesn't harm Mr Lopez Obrador that his (mother's) name is a Spanish word for worker (trabajador is more usual) and that he is a hard and diligent worker. He has become immensely popular in Mexico City for the job he has done as mayor. When his opponents decided to remove him from the presidential race, they could not have known that they would instead, spread his renown across Mexico and into the wider world.

Lopez Obrador is a social democrat, which in American eyes is next to being a 19th century nihilist. President Fox may have thought he was doing his sometime compadre, G W Bush a favour by landing Obrador with a criminal prosecution.

Obrador was accused of a minor, technical and utterly unimportant violation of an obscure land law regulating the process by which municipalities could acquire land for public purposes. But, with a criminal prosecution hanging round his neck, no matter how trifling, Lopez Obrador was barred from being a candidate.

The uproar the government's action caused produced protest around the world as well as in Mexico, and the mayor's profile is now higher than ever, because he not only forced El Presidente to back down, but brought down the attorney-general who prosecuted him, a candidate for the ruling party's presidential nomination.

THE INEFFABLE TONY BLAIR

Prime Minister Tony Blair (right) and Jack Straw
Tony Blair is a barrister who became leader of the British Labour Party just as the British were getting fed up to the teeth with Margaret Thatcher. He was one of those people who believed that if you can't beat your opponent, you should steal his clothes, dry clean them and proclaim them NEW! BRILLIANT!! SEXY!!!

He tried but didn't quite succeed in burying Labour's old working class clothes. He paraded his newness, his grand piano smile, his lack of ideology and his love affair with GW Bush.

Unfortunately for this Emperor Manqué, his touching faith in the Transatlantic Templar from Texas led him into indiscretion, most notoriously, into war with Iraq, or rather, into a criminal conspiracy to commit war crimes.

Aggressive war is a crime, according to the Nuremberg rules. Tony Blair thought he had hoodwinked his British public and the world when he claimed, falsely as it turned out, as most of us suspected, that the war was illegitimate.

In those days, Blair brandished before Parliament advice from his attorney-general saying it licenced him to go to war. As a lawyer he should have remembered two things: one, that no one can give you permission to commit an illegal act; two, that in this day, this age of instant communication, nothing can long remain secret.

On Friday, the pressure of public opinion aroused by the election campaign and concerted by the media forced Blair to publish the full text of the Attorney-General's Opinion, all 13 pages of it, and it strips the gloss from Blair's claims.

Alas for Blair, his embrace of the Bushian principles convinced him to disregard the very lawyerly advice in the Opinion. The Opinion makes it clear that the attorney-general did not give much for the chances of Blair proving in court that the assault on Iraq was justifiable.

It could have been justified, said the AG, if Blair and Bush had been able to persuade the Security Council to pass another resolution threatening Iraq with war, unless... The Security Council, remember, would have no truck with that. Old Europe, as Generalissimo Rumsfeld so appositely remarked, was out of the loop of Bushian reality.

So they went to war. And we, who were vilified for protesting in our millions round the world against the planned aggression, have been proved to have been right from the start.
It is an enormously satisfying feeling which cannot, however, balance against all the hurt and suffering caused.

Mr Blair has shredded his reputation. It is possible and British commentators think it probable that the Labour Party will still win this week's election. The voters, they think, will hold their noses long enough to vote Labour, since they know that Gordon Brown stands ready to take charge if the prime minister, for some unforeseen reason, should feel too 'indisposed' to continue.

THE ORWELLIAN GEORGE BUSH

The American Emperor has been able for so long to give the impression that he can walk on water that he probably thinks he can really do it. As Jay Bookman points out on Thursday in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Mr Bush arrived at his apogee on March 21, just a month ago, when the President signed a bill authorising federal court intervention in the sad case of Terry Schiavo.

Bookman says, and I agree with him: "By over-reaching so badly in that case, Republicans gave many Americans a fresh appreciation of the dangers of unchecked government arrogance, not to mention a renewed respect for the checks and balances needed to restrain that arrogance.

And when Republican leaders began to attack federal judges as part of their holy crusade against the only government branch beyond their control, what had been a vague and growing unease began to coalesce into a deep distrust."

It couldn't have come at a worse time, Bookman points out, because the numbers have begun to run against the administration. Most Americans don't think the federal judges are too liberal as the GOP says - 52% think they are just about right, while 16% think they are too conservative.

Only 25% agreed with Bush and his crusaders. In the same poll, 66% of Americans rejected the Republican jihad in the Senate, the so-called nuclear option to change the congressional rules to elevate some real Neanderthals to the federal bench.

And, to quote Bookman again, "on critical issues from Iraq to energy to the economy and social security, enough time has passed to see the results of Bush's ideology driven policies and it isn't pretty".

The Dow has fallen 800 points in six weeks, and 61% of Americans think the economy is getting worse. In the same poll, nearly 60% of respondents disapproved of Bush's policy in Iraq and 54% think the war is a waste of time. A Gallup poll disclosed that 60% of Americans now recognise that Bush deliberately lied them into war.

The impressive pantheon of the Bush Reich is shedding its tiles. The Senate majority leader is under attack for his ineptitude and his grovelling to the religious right. The Majority Leader in the House of Representatives, the pretentious Tom De Lay, is in serious danger of ending up in jail.

The man who led the moral assault against Bill Clinton is rapidly turning into a political leper, an untouchable.

OUR INVISIBLE PRIME MINISTER

It's long been obvious to me, if to no one else, that as soon as our Jamaican Prophet-Emperor was exposed to the harsh glare of political reality, his charms would melt like ice cream on a hot sidewalk.

Like the other Emperors, he has not had a good week. This week Portia Simpson finally got her way and, over the howls (one imagines) of the Prime Minister's Praetorian Guard, she got rid of the entire board of the National Solid Waste Authority, touts porous, or whole hog, as we used to say.

What the latest 'bangarang' reveals is how few people it takes to run this country. I once declared that Mr Neville Athenaeum wore so many hats that it was impossible to know which one he was talking through at any given time.

Alston Stewart, Kingsley Thomas, Dennis Morrison and Vin Lawrence make Athenaeum look like a piker. Stewart, the chairman of the NSWA, has his own businesses plus a radio station, KLAS, to manage as well. And managing a radio station is one of the world's most thankless jobs, reportedly akin to herding cats.

In spite of all these serious jobs, Mr Stewart was project manager for the government's mega-project at Sandals Whitehouse, the mismanagement of which will probably become a case study in the annals of hotel construction.

Butch Stewart (no kin), a man who operates and has built hotels in several places inside and outside of Jamaica, told me on Disclosure (Hot102, Wednesday, April 26) that he had never seen so much confusion. And, despite the fact that he is a shareholder in the project management company set up for the purpose, he was usually completely in the dark about what was going on.

On Breakfast Club the day before, the Supreme Grand Panjandrum in Chief, Dr the Hon Vin Lawrence, expressed surprise that Stewart had not known the true state of affairs. The cost of building the hotel had jumped from $60 million to $73 million and is now somewhere near double the original estimate, it appears. But who knows?

Dr Omar Davies, the minister of finance, has decided to get, if he can, to the bottom of this barrel of worms. One wishes him luck. It will be interesting to know what this latest disaster will eventually cost the taxpayer so that someday we might have some idea of what Mr Patterson's primacy has cost us.

The PM himself in what was expected to have been a triumphant farewell budget speech was his usual unexciting self. His speech might have been titled "Better late than never" as he announced, in the gloaming of his final year as leader of this country, that he will be using money from the Housing Trust to spruce up a few schools.

Instead, as he did not remind us, we have spent our not inconsiderable credit on grand and futile schemes, rescuing the bankers, building the Doomsday Highway and last, the monumental beach-stealing exercise which will forever rid ordinary Jamaicans of the onerous duty of going sea-bathing.

As Jamaicans say, when you have to jump off a cliff to get into the water, what you have to worry about "is not the drop; is the sudden stop".