Rightwingers bite poodle: It had to happen

I've been saying for years that, as soon as Tony the Poodle started differing with Dear Leader Bush on the "war on terror", the Republicans would finally be able to start bashing Britain as just another wimp European democracy.

It looks like finally some of them are starting to unload on that sissy Socialist Blair:

US Right turns on Blair for being 'soft on terror' by Alec Russell Daily Telegraph 07/25/2005.

The American Right, for four years a fount of rapturous praise for Tony Blair, is showing signs of falling out of love with Britain over what it sees as its soft and ineffective record on terrorism. ...

Two prominent articles in the latest edition of The Weekly Standard, the neo-conservative journal with close ties to the Bush administration, have laid into Britain's domestic approach to fighting terrorism.

Under the headline "Letter from Londonistan" Irwin Stelzer concludes that British policy amounts to "easy entry for potential terrorists" and "relative safety from deportation and detention as enemy combatants".

He concludes that Mr Blair is the "prisoner of a dominant political class that is preventing Britain from responding to the threat the nation faces".

Another article suggests President George W Bush's administration take the dramatic step of ending the 1986 visa waiver programme which allows Britons and citizens of most other western European states three months in the US without a visa. ...

The Heritage Foundation, another prominent Right-wing think-tank, last week called on Britain to strengthen its anti-terrorist laws and consider withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights.

It also wants Britain to adopt a policy of zero-tolerance against radical Islamic preachers.

One of the two Weekly Standard articles referenced in that piece is online (08/01/05 issue; accessed 07/24/05): Letter from Londonistan by Irwin Stelzer.  He has things to say like this:

British culture now dictates a confused response to terrorists. Start with the unwillingness of the majority of the British people to recognize that they are indeed in a war. The flak-jacketed, heavily armed men and women lining my road to Heathrow last week were cops, not troops. America is at war, Britain is playing cops and criminals. These are very different things, with important implications for policy. Just as the Clinton administration decided to respond to terror attacks as if they were bank heists--he sent the FBI overseas--Britain has insisted on applying the law and procedures of the criminal justice system to terrorists. The entire panoply of legal procedures that prevent detention, deportation, and arrest of Muslim clerics calling for the blood of Britain's infidels is available to the as-many-as 3,000 terrorists whom the authorities estimate live in Britain, many trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or with actual battle experience in Iraq. Whatever rights U.K. law doesn't confer are available to the fledgling jihadists as a result of Blair's decision to sign on to Europe's Human Rights Act. Britain makes available to terrorists and preachers of mayhem, often at government expense, an entire industry of human rights lawyers and support groups. These resources will remain available to those who challenge the new powers the government will seek to curb the preaching of violence. The government also provides substantial housing and health care benefits to many men who reciprocate by trying to destroy it.

Short version: Brits are cowardly European wimps.  They're almost as bad as Bill Clinton.  They coddle Muslims.  They worry about all that wussy "human rights" stuff.  They have a national health care system. (?!?)

"Where's the love?" the poodle-man must be thinking.

But it's too late, Tony.  You agreed to be the pretty social-democratic face on Bush's preventive war in Iraq.  You've served your purpose.  What,you thought these rightwingers might feel some loyalty to you?