I’M WATCHING TONY BLAIR AND JOHN HOWARD right now, talking about the London attacks and the war — Howard’s particularly good at noting that this is a war, not a series of isolated incidents — and their frequent invocation of anglosphere solidarity is almost a commercial for Jim Bennett’s book. I wonder if they’ve read it? They’re certainly living it.

UPDATE: Some idiot correspondent asked Blair if the attacks were his fault because of the Iraq war. And others are taking an equally negative line — one asks if the propaganda war against terror is being lost.

No — but if so, it’s because of people in the media like these. John Howard’s too polite to tell them to read Norm Geras, but he put them in their place with logic, noting that Bin Laden was unhappy about the liberation of East Timor and declared war on that basis long before the Iraq invasion.

Translation: You’re idiots, cowards, and political hacks. Yes! The preening, point-scoring irresponsibility of the press, which is if anything worse in Britain than in America, is one of the most striking things about this war, and it will be decades before it recovers. If it does.