crusades and creeds descend like fiery flakes of snow
bad mouth on a prayer day, hope no one's listening
roots down in the wet clay, branches glistening
James Doyle at normblog enters the Left's hall of mirrors and comes through unillusioned:
. . . the view seems to be that if one is provoked into doing something awful, the primary responsibility lies with the provoker. Blair is responsible for the bombings, they say, because if he hadn't gone along with the Iraq war the bombings wouldn't have happened. But no one will deny that if the bombers hadn't blown people up in London, there would not have been the appalling recent increase in attacks on mosques. So the same reasoning determines that the primary responsibility for the increase in attacks lies not with the Islamophobic thugs who carry them out, but with the bombers; a proposition Blair's critics are unlikely to concede. Many of them are presumably inclined to hold him responsible for the mosque attacks as well. But then if we are supposed to go back three stages along the chain of provocation, Blair cannot have been responsible for the bombings after all: that honour must belong to whoever provoked him: Saddam Hussein, perhaps? With such critics, one gets the sense not just that Blair (and Bush) are as a matter of fact responsible for nearly everything bad that happens in this arena, which is already implausible enough, but that these leaders have a special metaphysical status: only they can be responsible. Everyone else is just a pawn in their game. Thus the claim that Blair is directly or primarily responsible for the bombings rests on a paranoid fantasy.