Summing up Britain’s rank incompetence and national debasement

Today, the first day of Spring Break, has been a rather chaotic one for me, as I’ve had shifting plans regarding the children and, all the while, two legal deadlines to meet.  As I always say, you know it’s going to be a bad day when you wake up at 5 a.m. worrying about your schedule, and you’re already frazzled and behind by 9 a.m.  As it happens, I’ve got my priorities straight, and my children and my professional obligations have been neatly stowed away (thanks in no small measure to good friends and neighbors). 

What’s suffered, of course, is my blogging, which isn’t a responsibility, but is a great pleasure.  Fortunately for me, others are blogging and, even more fortunately, I have friends to tell me what’s out there.  This time, Danny Lemieux brought a Melanie Phillip’s post to my attention.  She’s the British journalist who wrote the fantastic (and fantastically worrisome and depressing), Londonistan.  She also has a blog which, to my shame, I haven’t yet added to my blogroll.  (I’ll do it now.) 

In a measured, but still furious tirade, Phillips takes on the horrible conduct the British showed, at every level, from start to finish with this entire Iranian debacle, as well as the cost to all of us resulting from British conduct.  Her opening paragraph gives you a good idea about what to expect:

The British marine hostage saga is a debacle of the first order – a grim parable of the degraded state to which Britain has now descended and an alarming portent for the free world in its fight to survive. Relief at the safe return of the 15 sailors, and the fact that we must always bear in mind that none of us knows how we would ourselves behave in such circumstances, cannot nevertheless mitigate the sickening realisation that the hostage fiasco is another terrible milestone in the west’s current suicidal trajectory of decadence and moral collapse.

It seems that, every time one thinks Britain has hit bottom, and is ready to begin lifting itself up again as a nation amongst nations, it goes and does something that reminds us that it may have slid too far down the slippery slope of national decay ever to recover.