The Beeb’s tribute sours (further).
Tom Carver, familiar to viewers of NewsNight, has a supercillious air about him. There’s a sneer never far from his upper lip. Check out this combination of suggestion and anti-Bush sarcasm in an article which manages to insult former president Reagan as ‘illusory or insubstantial’, while dismissing Bush as nowhere near his equal (what, less even than ‘illusory’?):
‘The president’s biggest problem is that he is no Ronald Reagan, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen’s famous put-down of Dan Quayle.
Can you imagine a website with George Bush’s top 10 speeches?
Though denounced at the time as inflammatory, Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” remains an undeniably influential phrase, whilst George Bush’s “axis of evil” already seems like a cheap rip-off with no coherent logic.
There are more references to Reagan’s phrase than those of Mr Bush on his own website.’
Well, I can imagine such a website, I don’t equate GWB with Dan Quayle, I do consider Bush’s “axis of evil” phrase to have been necessary and resonant, I don’t think it was a ‘cheap rip-off with no coherent logic’, and, finally, I don’t expect a speech made in the last couple of years at the beginning of a conflict to appeal the way one made twenty years earlier does with the benefit of glorious hindsight. Why I should pay for this alienating garbage?