Blair Watch Project

Tony Blair had a great on-point opinion piece on Brexit if you can ignore the source and set aside the Iraq war for the moment.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

Blair gets so much right including his main point in the final sentence that "the center must hold". That has been a key argument of this blog - that the center in the U.S. has been failing -  the political center in the form of (1) those moderate Republicans (to the exent they exist) who vote with their party on all issues, thus functioning as conservatives instead of moderates, and (2) those members of the objective press who define objectivity to mean reporting on every issue as if there are always two equal and opposite sides.

NYT opinion:
Tony Blair: Brexit's Stunning Coup

This writer's comment on Blair NYT:
 What's stunning is not the "decision of British voters" to leave the EU but the decision of Cameron to push for this referendum. Voters were given a binary choice with a majority permitted to rule on a decision with incredibly far-reaching consequences. Voters are rarely given the opportunity to express their displeasure so directly. Blair's statement that the center must hold is correct, but misses the point that the center can not hold if threatened by blunders of process. Our system in the U.S requires a 2/3rd majority in both the House and Senate and ratification of 3/4ths of the state legislatures for amendments to the Constitution, for example. Imagine what would happen to the U.S if states could hold plebiscites for withdrawal from the union with the result dependent only upon a majority. Blair's mistake in joining with Bush on the Iraq war will go down as the greater blunder than Cameron's, but they are both whoppers.