Blair Woes Blow for Bush

When the wheels start to fall off the political machine they tend to do it with a vengeance. Bush is fending off growing scandals pressures, but his close ally, Britain’s Tony Blair might not be so lucky.

A string of scandals are numbering the days for Blair, and the effect will be to take another key player off Bush’s global chess board.

The impact this has on Bush’s is in limiting his options for overseas diversions from his worsening domestic position.

An Iran adventure might have been just the trick to stall a drifting support base and leverage the seeing imperative of standing behind a ‘war administration’ regardless of other consequences.

Bush doesn’t need the domestic nod to engineer and launch an attack on Iran, but he does need balancing voices internationally, and particularly in Europe.

As to former golden boy, Tony Blair, the issues now are all domestic. His experiment of reinventing the British Labor Party into a Bush Republican style party was always fraught with problems.

To be sure, he succeeded in winning middle and even a measure of the Conservative’s base support. In the process he has systematically alienated the party’s traditional base.

Sordid scandal is nothing new to Britain’s political scene, but when a sex scandal takes on the destructive power unleashed by his Deputy PM, John Prescott’s revelations; it says a lot about a government on the mat.

That the rough hewn Prescott should be caught out bedding a secretary shouldn’t even register beyond the screaming tabloids. Ministers might be expected to keep their trousers on, but in the end it should only be an issue to those at the epicenter, even if it does display poor judgment.

In a double whammy, less salacious but of a greater social concern, are revelations that Home Secretary Charles Clarke oversaw the release of more than 1,000 foreign criminals, including murderers and rapists, who were set free in Britain instead of being deported.

When law and order rides high on the political agenda, that sort of news cuts off one of the few lines of attack as Blair tries to resurrect an ailing government.