Britain's useful idiots

Tony Blair's exit from 10 Downing Street left the UK with a power vacuum at the Prime Minister post and a reality vacuum in dealing with current affairs. New Prime Minister Gordon Brown has directly rejected honestly describing the terrorists who sought to firebomb London's entertainment district and Glasgow's airport by refusing to identify their religion. They're Muslim. Islamists, to be more precise.

Worse yet, the Conservative Party. Instead of following the footpath of Disraeli, Churchill, Eden and Thatcher, David Cameron's pantywaists have proven themselves to be the heirs of the weak and feckless Stanley Baldwin, the Jimmy Carter of the 1930s, and the misdirected Neville Chamberlain. This explains the Tories' appointment of Sayeeda Warsi as Shadow Community Cohesion Minister (whatever that means). And this lovely description of Ms. Warsi from the Tories' own website, as detailed by Melanie Phillips:

Warsi [ ] dismissed the idea that pressure should be placed upon British Muslims to root out extremists within their midst, commenting that ‘when you say this is something that the Muslim community needs to weed out, or deal with, that is a very dangerous step to take.’… Sayeeda Warsi has been highly critical of the war in Iraq, and called upon former Prime Minister Tony Blair to apologise for the war, an extraordinary statement at a time when thousands of British soldiers are putting their lives on the line every day… In a January 2006 BBC Any Questions? debate, Warsi welcomed the election of Iranian-backed terrorist organization Hamas, a brutal movement officially proscribed as a terrorist group by the British Government. Hamas murdered 377 Israelis in 425 terrorist attacks between September 2000 and March 2004, including 52 suicide attacks. Despite Hamas’s track record, as part of the BBC panel Warsi told her audience:

‘I think what’s happened in the Middle East with the election of Hamas is actually an opportunity and I think that’s the way we’ve got to see it. When groups that practice violence are suddenly propelled into power through a democratic process they get responsibility and responsibility can be a tremendously taming factor. And I think that Hamas, when it realizes that it wants a safe and stable and prosperous Palestine for its people, will realize that the way to deal with that is through dialogue and democracy and not through violence… I actually think that Hamas has been given a mandate and I think it will now hopefully adopt a responsible position because that is the only way.’

Robert Conquest's third law of politics applies here: The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.