Tony Blair and the Big Book of Hate

So I got my copy of Tony Blair's memoir,A Journey: My Political Life this morning, and perhaps the only quibble I have about it is the title. A Journey is dumb and doesn't adequately reflect the book's contents. It should've been called The Big Book of Hate or perhaps Gordon Brown Touches Kids In Bad Ways.

According to every media account I've seen, A Journey is a highly documented account of the curses that Blair suffered at the hands of his demonic and incompetent Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. Blair's loathing for Brown is said to actually drip from the pages of A Journey, which is how you know that a political book is going to be good - it should actually leave a stain on your bookshelf.

There are few things that I love more in life than bitterly recriminatory memoirs from retired politicians. Canada seems to produce those in abundance, which might be my home and native land's only redeeming quality. And since Blair compares his battles with Brown to the legendary Canadian feud between Jean Chrtien and Paul Martin, I thought I would write about the hateful memoirs in recent Canadian history.

The links in the titles will take you to Amazon, where you can buy them. Eventually, this will get me free books of my own.

2005 saw the release of Peter Newman's The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister, a tour de force of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's contempt for everyone that isn't Brian Mulroney. The tapes, which were recorded while Mulroney was in office between 1984 and '93, highlight his masterful use of profanity and his total disregard for friends and enemies alike.

Just remembering reading The Secret Mulroney Tapes still brings tears to my eyes in a way that nothing else can. While I'm sure that A Journey is chock full of scorn, there's just no way that it can top the almost classical hatred that actually bleed from the pages of the Newman book. I've actually cuddled with it in my sleep and couldn't recommend that you buy it enough. Your kids should learn to read at some point, right?

In 2008, the trifecta of Canadian recollections of political loathing were released, just in time for Christmas.

The first and the best of them was the aforementioned Mr. Mulroney's Memoirs: 1939-1993. Although far more restrained in its language and tone than The Secret Mulroney Tapes, Memoirs: 1939-1993 is a classic in hateful recrimination. Mulroney could start a page describing going to the bathroom, and all of a sudden it veers off into five or six pages of violent invective against former prime minister Pierre Trudeau or former Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells, all of which were richly deserved. Both Trudeau and Wells were almost classically swinish, and make me regret that I don't believe in the physical existence of Hell.

The antagonism that runs through Memoirs gave me an almost constant erection, which should tell you how powerful it is, given that the book is almost 1,100 pages long.

Next was Jean Chretien's My Years as Prime Minister, which couldn't have been more disappointing. It reads as though it was dictated and ghostwritten, which it was. My Years as Prime Minister is more like those shitty campaign books that American presidential candidates publish every four years than a thoughtful remembrance of anything.

The only worthwhile thing about the book is his telling how Jesus saved his life so that he could start the Sponsorship Program that would ruin his legacy and destroy his successor, Paul Martin's life. Not only was it funny, it serves as further proof that Christianity ruins everything.

The oddest part of My Years as Prime Minister is Chretien's views on Martin, who he has clearly spent 20 years fearing and despising, but he just can't seem to get all that worked up about the issue. I suspect that this is largely because Martin didn't do anything to Chretien that Chretien didn't do to John Turner first. It almost seems as if Liberals are born and raised to do only one thing with any skill: undermine one another.

The last of the three Great Political Memoirs was Paul Martin's Hell or High Water: My Life in and out of Politics. For the record, I like Martin personally, although I never did anything as crazy as actually vote for him. He was the greatest finance minister this country ever had, and might have been a decent prime minister, had Chretien's Sponsorship Scandal time bomb not exploded in his face.

Paul Martin isn't the kind of guy who seems to hate anyone, which might have been his fatal political flaw, but his outrage at Chretien's half-truths and outright lies is palpable on the pages of Hell or High Water.

While Martin devotes great time an care to refuting Chretien's dissembling, the heart of the book deals with Martin's epic battle against Canada's almost apocalyptic deficit in the mid-'90s, which is more than worthwhile reading.

So as you all await your copies of the Tony Blair memoir, you should read the Canadian versions of it. Mulroney's Memoirs is both great history and actually drips with bitterness, which makes it worth twice the cover price. The Secret Mulroney Tapes is so angry that it literally vibrates in your hands, making it one of the greatest political books of all time. Hell or High Water is good history, but depressingly short on bitterness, and My Years as Prime Minister isn't even good toilet paper because the pages are too rough and even your asshole would be shocked by the dishonesty of it's comments.

That should keep you folks entertained, and if you buy those books through my links, I'll get free stuff. And Daddy likes free stuff.