Some people, when they retire, stop wearing a tie, stop putting on a suit - unless it is of the jogging variety, stop waking up before dawn, stop worrying about deadlines, and just put their feet up.

Other people go abso-freaking-lutely nuts when they retire.

Guess which one Tony Blair is?

Tony apparently is nostalgic for the time of the Crusades. He might have converted to Catholicism, but his rhetoric is straight up "White Man's Burden" from Victorian "Muscular Christianity."

I mean, he begins with the implicit supposition that the west has always dominated the world and that the East is just recently rising above the level of savage barbarism to "challenge" the Christian West. Then it goes down hill from there!

He actually sounds nostalgic for brutal imperialism. He also sounds frighteningly ignorant. I certainly hope this kind of madness doesn't prefigure Bush's up-coming retirement.