NI Peace + Spew, House Money, SarKrazy, etc.

I'm old school like Happy Shopper,
I fight old school, bring your bat and your chopper
--Dizzee Rascal

Ok, so some people are spewing at the fact that Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams are together at the table making peace and as tribal chiefs often do, are divvying up what they can for their own people. Typically, the people most upset by this are the ones who are partly responsible for the Troubles - the British. Yes, its the Brits rightly detest Paisley for his neo-Nazi-esque hatred and Adams even more so for the reign of terror he participated in, that saw London brought to its knees several times. Even the Economist has lost its cool at the sight of these dinosaurs making peace, and not even bothering to analyze the single most important fact that has led the peace process to this critical point.

No one else could have brought the extremists to the centre.

I don't like Paisley (and I think its well documented on this site) and I certainly have no love for the IRA (ditto), but let's be clear: Without these two hardliners, with infinite amounts of street credibility (do a Wikipedia search on these two monsters) how would you get the rabid dogs of the protestant militias and an already fractured IRA to the middle?

David Trimble, on the Protestant side, simply did not have enough pull with the extremists to bring them onside. And the SDLP was in no shape to tell Sinn Fein voters to ante up.

Yes, sometimes it takes a someone from the other side of the political spectrum to flip the script. Clinton reformed welfare because he had to and if the Republicans did that it would have been class warfare. If the Conservatives take a stand on the strong stand on the environment in Canada, right wing voters will know that they did it because the leadership realized it was necessary, not because it was party policy. And that's the way it is working in N.I.

So be it. This is necessity. Nobody wants to fight, and the only people who could completely destroy the peace in a second are the only people with the credibility to end it with some dignity.

If you don't like the peace, tell it to the families of the newly dead when war returns.

In other news...

BC throws money at an old problem... Hard to tell if things are getting better, although anecdotally (sp?) I think they are.

Sarkozy goes right...again...

Pelosi shows the White House what pragmatism is made of..seriously, now, the West spoke to the USSR all the time to make the conflict manageable...and that was when we were really threatened.

And da boy in da corner is back. Dizzee Rascal, for those who don't know.