Baboon or Buffoon?

A snippet from Alistair Cooke's Letter from America :

And the man, it says here, is highly regarded in countries as far apart as Australia and Nigeria. The man is Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Imagine then the increasing dismay with which our correspondent went along on a tour of Britain.

"Everywhere I go," he said, "Mr Blair is dismissed as President Bush's poodle." An influential paper says his critics see him as a "prime minister who's betrayed his country to a Texas gunslinger", otherwise characterised as "a buffoon".
That's pretty brutal talk from one ally to another. Not as bad, however, as that same paper's constant reference to a "baboon" presiding in the White House during another war.

Abraham Lincoln was the leader so called - most often and witheringly among what the early socialists called 'the ruling classes' in, of course, the South of England.

Whereas Bush is so characterised by the current "ruling classes" - the fashionable left. Just as disconnected from Reality, and just as morally bereft, as the landed Grandees of the 19th century. And just as influential. For every "Rotten Borough" that existed then, there's a Trotskyite Union cadre from the Rust Belt, or a Postmodernist pseudo-Intellectual who still hasn't got the message that Marxist Theory has been a proven failure. They are the new Aristocracy, and just as arrogant and stubborn as the old variety.

Tony Blair is no Winston S. Churchill, and George W Bush Jr. no Abraham Lincoln. But it wouldn't surprise me if history looked kindly on them in the coming years. And very unkindly on their clueless opponents.