The US is to send a surge of troops to Iraq while Britain has effectively decided to withdraw. One can hardly imagine a bigger divergence in the two countries' approach to the war. Incredibly, Bush still refuses to contemplate the reality of Iraq: that the whole adventure has been a bloody catastrophe which has set a flame under a powder keg and has significantly undermined the credibility of any future western intervention in the region.
The report that the Fitness to Practice Committee of the Medical Council has decided not to carry out an enqiry into the treatment of Pat Joe Walsh, who bled to death at Monaghan Hospital, is alarmingly instructive. It is instructive that two surgeons from outside the jurisdiction of the state, who were commissioned to investigate the case by the HSE, stated among other things, that the unwillingness to admit and care for Mr Walsh at Cavan or Drogheda was “unacceptable”.
One of the stranger aspects of the woeful Children's Hospital saga is that the minister currently responsible for our health and our children comes from a political party whose core values include minimal government and maximum transparency. The ruthless unilateralism with which this deeply flawed project has been rammed through by a secret ‘task force', (consisting entirely of servants of the HSE and the department, answerable only to their czar), makes the totalitarian statism of the late Louis XIV of France, (“L'état c'est moi!”), look like Hamletic anarchism.
I don't know about anyone else, but I am already tired of election coverage, especially when it is concentrated on the narrow range of discussion in which we have allowed ourselves to be corralled. The be-all and end-all seems to be who is going to be in power after the election. The fact that we are supporting a system whereby as soon as elected, our representatives will set about pretending that they can confer priveleges on their constituents so that they will be voted in again next time, is largely ignored.
In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Tony Blair asserts that he and US president George Bush chose values over security in their response to 9/11. In so doing, he is re-writing history to fit the fallout from Iraq: security has not been improved, but further threatened. According to Blair's latest version, Iraq wasn't about security, it was about Western values.
The execution of Saddam Hussein has provoked fresh controversy as to the pros and cons of the death sentence; what is logical and what is not.
With three Russian actors now in Fair City, a very false subliminal impression is created that all Russian life is fun, fun, fun. However, with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko and other mysterious events associated with it, we are seeing another side of Russia – a very evil side – being under-ruled by a slimy world that words fail to explain, and mostly associated with the murder of journalists eg Anna Politkovskaya.
Since it is part of the human condition that power corrupts, it makes for a healthy democracy to have an alternative government to the one in power available at each election. The ongoing and relentless campaign of the majority of political correspondents to undermine the possibility of any alternative government to the present one being offered in the next election is, therefore, pathetic. This is a fairly widespread campaign.
The savaging to death of a five-year-old girl in Britain must serve as another reminder of how dangerous pitbulls are and how grossly unsuitable they are as pets. These, and other similar vicious breeds, should be banned completely by law and the breeding of them made a criminal offence.
I can well understand how the release of 30-year-old state papers may be a god-send for those who must continue to provide us with our beloved media while their workers are being tenderly resuscitated from the trauma of the winter solstice. Nevertheless, such understanding does not excuse us from enquiring why we, the citizens of a self-governing republic, allow this pernicious practice of long-term concealment of public information to persist.