"I personally hold Blair more responsible for this war than I do George Bush. The reason is, Blair knows better, Blair is not an idiot. What is he doing hanging around this guy?"
About this Quote
Moore’s jab lands because it flips the expected villain hierarchy. In the public imagination, George W. Bush is the face of the Iraq War; Moore yanks the camera to Tony Blair and makes complicity feel more damning than authorship. Calling Bush an “idiot” isn’t just insult comedy, it’s a strategic lowering of the bar: if Bush is written off as incurious and swagger-driven, then moral accountability migrates to the person who supposedly had the sophistication to know what he was signing onto.
The line “Blair knows better” is doing the heavy lifting. It invokes a shared assumption about Blair’s brand at the time: polished, technocratic, the “third way” modernizer who spoke in policy briefs rather than bumper stickers. Moore exploits that contrast to suggest betrayal, not error. The subtext is almost parental: you can’t blame the reckless kid as much as the responsible adult who chose to ride shotgun.
“What is he doing hanging around this guy?” weaponizes social language to describe geopolitics. It makes war sound like a bad friendship, which is exactly the point: Moore wants the alliance to read as elective, even needy, rather than inevitable. Context matters here: the early-2000s “special relationship,” the contested WMD claims, and the perception that Blair acted as the war’s eloquent salesman in Europe. Moore’s intent is to shame the respectable enabler, because respectability is the cover power uses when it wants its violence to look like prudence.
The line “Blair knows better” is doing the heavy lifting. It invokes a shared assumption about Blair’s brand at the time: polished, technocratic, the “third way” modernizer who spoke in policy briefs rather than bumper stickers. Moore exploits that contrast to suggest betrayal, not error. The subtext is almost parental: you can’t blame the reckless kid as much as the responsible adult who chose to ride shotgun.
“What is he doing hanging around this guy?” weaponizes social language to describe geopolitics. It makes war sound like a bad friendship, which is exactly the point: Moore wants the alliance to read as elective, even needy, rather than inevitable. Context matters here: the early-2000s “special relationship,” the contested WMD claims, and the perception that Blair acted as the war’s eloquent salesman in Europe. Moore’s intent is to shame the respectable enabler, because respectability is the cover power uses when it wants its violence to look like prudence.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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