Doctor. What is it he does now? Look, how he rubs his hands.
Gentlewoman. It is an accustom’d action with him, to seem thus washing his hands.

Sir Roger has been listening and reading about celebrity war criminal Tony Blair’s 720 page excuse for his inexcusable war crimes,

And as he listens and reads Sir Roger’s mind is flooded with lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Macbeth. What hands are here? Ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

[ ... ]

Lady M. Yet here’s a spot.

Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why, then ’tis time to do ’t.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?—Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

What, will these hands ne’er be clean?—Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!

Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale.
I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried; he cannot come out on ’s grave.

To bed, to bed! there’s knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What’s done cannot be undone.

 Exit.

Doctor. Foul whisp’rings are abroad; unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles; infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.
More needs she the divine than the physician.
God, God, forgive us all!

Except Tony Blair, who “loves not Caesar less but loves Rome more”.

Yet do I fear Blair’s nature; It is “too full o’ the milk of human kindness” to be authentic.

In fact, what Blair has done, has endorsed, has pursued, has prozelytised for, has lied through his teeth for and has conveniently forgiven himself for is, simply, unforgivable.

And on top of all this, of course, what he did has made the world a much more dangerous place for the rest of us.

He says that he has wept for those he sent to their deaths and that he was truly upset by those who died. But if he were truly sensible to and authentically sorry for the horrors for which he is personally responsible for inflicting on so many thousands of people he would by now have gone completely mad, leapt naked into a pit of thorns and snakes, covered himself in ashes, and begun flailing himself with chains, because the horrors he has for political expediency visited on – in fact – millions are so awful that it is impossible to grasp their true enormity, ugliness and inhumanity.

Blair’s simpering, smirking, self-congratulatory, self-indulgent, self-promoting self-forgiveness is insufficient. It is as shallow as Lake Eyre in a drought and as intelligent as a dead slug.

Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand

[tags]Blair, Tony Blair, A Journey, jerk, politics, Iraq, Macbeth, Caesar, Shakespeare, politics, religion, political values[/tags]