Just when I thought that ex-BritPM Tony “Oily Little Shit” Blair had disappeared from public view, he steps forward with yet another Nanny-State idea:
Tony Blair has urged ministers to tax junk food so it is too expensive for the poor in a bit to tackle obesity. The former Labour prime minister urged an interventionist policy on public health, with an expansion of the sugar tax, new levies on foods high in fat and salt, and advertising bans.
He said ministers needed to help ‘create the circumstances’ in which poorer families choose healthy food, and likened the situation to the fight against smoking when he was in No10 — which included a ban on publicly lighting up indoors.
…which did fuck-all except drive people outdoors to get their nicotine fix. It certainly didn’t stop poorer people from buying cigarettes. There’s no reason to suspect that his jihad against “junk” food will perform any differently.
I also love the “create the circumstances” line — a classic piece of unctuous Blairite pablum which covers the intrusive governmental bossiness of what he’s suggesting. “We know better than you what you should do.” (cf. Hillary Clinton.) And speaking of this bitch…
This, by the way, is the real problem with electing leaders when they’re young: they carry on with their bullshit after leaving office (e.g. the Clintons, the Obamas and even Jimmy fucking Carter). As much as I detest the late Harry S(hitbrain) Truman, when he left the Oval Office he retired to Bumfuck MO and we never heard from him again.
Would that his political descendants would follow his example.
I’m just curious, Kim: there is ample reason to hate most any politician, in fact, just politicians in ;general. But just what is it about Harry Truman in particular that gets under your skin?
Look up “Truman”, “abrupt Lend-Lease cancellation”, “British post-war bankruptcy”.
That should do, for starters.
So you’re upset that we ended the war-time aid to the UK after the war was over? Perhaps we should have let a few more free food shipments go on while Great Britain released the farmers from the army and got the agriculture and food sector of their economy back to normal, but I see no reason whatsoever that we should have supplied military aid for the UK to attempt to reclaim its colonial empire.
Especially considering that the British voters had fired Churchill and brought in the Labour Party – a leadership even worse than the fools that set up the conditions for WWII when they allowed Hitler to rebuild Germany’s military and add Austria, the Rhineland, and Czechoslovakia to his possessions. Sending subsidies to the Labour Party in 1945 would have been subsidizing small-print communism, and would only have delayed the economic ruin that always comes from socialist policies.
I’m not Kim, but I’ll give it a go.
First, I am eternally grateful to Truman for dropping the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My dad finished 25 missions over Europe, as a tailgunner and was back home retraining for the long thrash in the Pacific. Truman may have saved his life, and thus my very existance.
Having said that, remember that post-war Truman continued the infiltration of all American institutions by Soviet influence that started during the FDR years, eventually killing education at all levels, newspapers, movies, radio, and television. Unabated. Truman also cut the military “to the bone, and beyond”, leaving us desparate when Korea eventually hit. If it wasn’t Korea, it would have been somewhere else, and we were not prepared.
Blair can fuck right off. And when he’s finished fucking off someone will give him a boot to the behind to tell him to fuck off even farther.
Attaboy, Q.
Like Obama, TonyB needs to sit down and STFU.
I understand that obesity is an issue. I am not convinced that it is an issue that the government is likely to be any good at addressing. Furthermore, I would like to say, could we take a week before panicking about an ‘obesity epidemic’ (what, they think people are catching fat germs?) and celebrate that we have, as a civilization, gotten to the point that the major dietary issue of our poor is that they are too fat?
That hasn’t happened too much.
Regarding Truman “going away” after leaving office: that’s not exactly true. In fact, he popped back up in 1957 or so to claim that he was struggling financially because he wasn’t exploiting his status as a former president and got the Former Presidents Act passed in 1958. This abomination is why we have the likes of the Clinton Memorial Double Wide, er, Presidential Library in Little Rock. And, of course, he was lying thru his teeth: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3895116.
I looked up Bumfuck MO online and the first thing that came up included “Not to be confused with every town in Missouri. and “You think Detroit is rough? Try growing up in Bumfuck, Missouri.”
Must have been tough on Elizabeth Virginia ( née Wallace).