Electoral expediency does not justify purging the ranks of anybody who remembers how to do responsible policy.

Whether electoral expediency justified Tory Bliar and Gerhard Schröder is a debatable point. But electoral expediency never justified internalising the bullshit they were spewing for public consumption, to the extent that they no longer had any real social democrats in the second echelon to replace the third-way flim-flam artists when they became a liability. The fact that the PES parties that they failed to purge the third-wayers around 2006 (when it was obvious to everybody who was paying attention that we were headed for a serious crash) was a political decision for which they are politically responsible.

They were pandering to a public that had gone temporarily insane, and now they have institutionalised the insanity. They deserve everything that's coming to them, and we can only hope that they don't waste too much of their dying breath on disrupting the ascent of real social democrats like Die Linke.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.