Weekend of the Libertine

My brother Mike (drainboy - not that he ever posts) is up for the weekend.  I have thus been in a series of shops, three different pubs and on a ghost walk this weekend, which has kept me spectacularly more busy than usual.  And he's here for today too...

We also went to see The Libertine, which was extremely good.  It had a feeling that you tend to only get from plays - that the characters were actually important, and had depth and complexity to them.  Johnny Depp and John Malkovich are both very good, and the rest of the cast likewise.  Warning - contains lots of sex and rude language, and is full of unpleasantly accurate depictions of the results of this.  Depressing in parts, funny in others, and well worth making it to.

Oh, the dissonance

It's great when someone takes the way you feel and writes it well.

It's not so great when that someone is a member of a group you generally despise.

So when Boris Johnson, member of the Conservative Party wrote this, I did, indeed feel a certain amount of cognitive dissonance:

It must be said that subsequent events have not made life easy for those of us who were so optimistic as to support the war in Iraq. There were those who believed the Government's rubbish about Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction. Then the WMD made their historic no-show.

Some of us were so innocent as to suppose that the Pentagon had a well-thought-out plan for the removal of the dictator and the introduction of peace. Then we had the insurgency, in which tens of thousands have died.

Some of us thought it was about ensuring that chemical weapons could never again be used on Iraqi soil. Then we heard about the white phosphorus deployed by the Pentagon. Some people believed that the American liberation would mean the end of torture in Iraqi jails. Then we had Abu Ghraib.

Some of us thought it was all about the dissemination of the institutions of a civil society - above all a free press, in which journalists could work without fear of being murdered. Then we heard about the Bush plan to blow up al-Jazeera.

Some of us feel that we have an abusive relationship with this war.

Read the rest of it here.

Thankfully, Boris isn't a member of the idiot brigade - one of the Conservative MPs who reflexively follows dogma without opinions and thoughts of his own, so I don't feel too bad about occasionally sharing an them  with him