english surrender-monkeys

I don’t envy whoever’s doing John Howard’s speechwriting at the moment. They must wake up every morning just dreading having to go to the office. Every time the phone rings, they must flinch.

It seems every day the Iraq thing just gets worse for our glorious leader, and I’m not even talking about the actual killing and bombing on the ground. Every day the original justifications get more discredited, and the explanations get more torturous and twisted. What’s more, every other one of the “allies” jumps ship.

It must be hard, selling our “policy”.

The latest ship-jumper is of course Tony Blair, who will shortly pull out a whole heap of soldiers. Howard and co’s response has been to say that:

• the Brits are pulling soldiers out for the same reason we’re sending more. Work that one out.
• we knew it was happening anyway. It’s all part of the plan.

Yeah right, I believe it….

So let’s get this straight - a staged withdrawal is a “staged surrender”. That was last week’s theory. Extending that idea just a bit makes Tony Blair a cheese-eating surrender monkey, just like his colleagues across the channel. But he’s English so does that make him a warm-beer-drinking surrender monkey?

And if the government has known about it for so long, why was Downer on Lateline on Tuesday saying:

it’s not good enough for Australia to say to the Americans and the British and others, you do the job, we’re not going to do it because it’s not polling very well

Isn’t that exactly what Blair is doing?

Running
An improved effort this morning. I did 14k, which counts as this week’s mid-week long run. Probably not race fit, but the strength is coming back to me, bit by bit. The lungs don’t protest as much.

I’m still catching up with this week’s training after the flu early this week. Tomorrow’s rest day will have to wait. I’ll do the 10k hill session instead. The only session I’ll really miss this week is an 8k recovery run. No big deal.