George
W. made his bid on Thursday with a claim during
a meeting with a Belfast family to hold the rule
of law above all other virtues.
Dubya has recently been threatening all manner of
mayhem if Serbs, Croats and Kosovans don't hand
over their citizens to the UN War Crimes Tribunal
at the Hague. At the same time, he sends squads
of kidnappers around the world to seize individuals
charged with no offence and transport them to countries
run by thugs who torture for him on a contract basis
(Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Uzbekistan etc.). Alternatively,
he has them quietly (well, screamingly, I suppose,
really) murdered in-house at, for example, the Baghram
air base in Afghanistan.
This is high-quality stuff. In an average year,
Dubya would clearly have hacked up in the hypocrisy
stakes. But this time he takes home only bronze.
In silver medal position comes Cormac of Westminster,
for telling party leaders last week that abortion
must be an issue in the forthcoming British election,
in the interests of the most vulnerable human beings
of all.
Cormac, while Bishop of Arundel and Brighton in
1980s, moved a priest eventually convicted of nine
charges of child sex abuse---including abuse of
a child with severe learning difficulties---from
parish to parish as successive waves of complaint
came in. It never occurred to him to tell social
services, the police or anyone else that the complaints
had been made.
Cormac seems to believe that it's only after children
are born that it's OK to trample on their human
rights. A performance of some, er, eminence, then.
Could well be next year's golden boy. But he was
bested this time by one of the old reliables of
world hypocrisy.
Yes, once again, it's a Brit prime minister who
sets the gold standard for brass neckery, sheer
effrontery and all round Pharisaism.
T. Blair suggested on Paddy's Eve that anyone impeding
inquiries into the politically motivated cover-up
of the murder of Robert McCartney is unfit for government.
He then conferred on himself and his political associates
powers to decide what evidence should be covered
up from the inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane.
After long and arduous discussion, myself and my
fellow judges, Mr. Justice Mailey and Lord Sandino,
decided that while Bush may be a bad-minded mountebank
and O'Connor-Murphy a dissembling double-dealer,
when it comes to lies, fraud and perversion of justice,
they are no match for Tony Blair. All that experience,
I suppose.
(The judges did consider nomination of a number
of local Sinn Feiners who have been muttering about
the justice-seeking McCartney sisters lining up
for a photo-op with Dubya, given Dubya's record
as outlined above. However the nominations were
rejected on the technical ground that Shinners complaining
at this stage about anybody abasing themselves in
the White House amounts not to hypocrisy but to
stupidity.)
