The statesmanship is pretty much in tatters after W’s recent “Condie’s going” rejection of Tone’s offer to shuttle to and “talk” in the Middle East.

On a possible Blair volta face, I don’t know. Apparently, he has already lodged an appeal to, as Dave Allen would have it, his God. Case pending.

On Clinton, I find Christopher HItchens’s portrait pretty devastating. I reckon Clinton would have exhibited all of Runciman’s flavours of hypocrisy. And huge self-referential self-delusion. How else could you time bombing attacks with requirements to give testimony, sworn or not?

I heard Slick Bill talk at the World IT Congress here in Adelaide a few years ago. Certainly a brilliant talker, with an intimate and quasi-confessional but ultimately soporiphic style, who seemed to embrace the whole audience and you felt he was just talking to you. He talked and talked and
said pleny o’ nuthin’ and zzzzzzzzz……

I think when he’s older and if he’s come to any greater (real) honesty than he seems to have now, Blair may sigh like LBJ “I blew it. The kids were right”. Another parallel with Vietnam.

I’m not sure Bill Clinton is a particularly eggregious example of the bad kind of hyporcrisy. His worst lying was not to himself, but to others.

I agree that Runciman’s interview was also very stimulating. His book seems to be well worth reading.

I liked his tie ins to Hobbes and Orwell and their explication.

His distinction of the corrosive form of hypocrisy from a more bengin, prosaic flavour is significant. It highlights the importance of being “sincerely” sincere, and not being wilfully blind in order to be able to maintain a claim to sincerity of motive.

Although Hilary was touched on in the interview, Bill Clinton is probably the most egregious total amalgam of the two flavours of hypocrisy.

What do you say Blair is tragic? I think he deserves his masochistic sessions. He can practice his party piece lip quivering, gulping, gesticulating, stuttering sophistry.

By the way, what is the definition of a sadist?

A person who is kind to a masochist.