There’s no reason to believe the two men [Blair and Brown] ‘disagree’ about anything fundamental. It would be hard for them to do so because Mr Blair has never suffered from opinions on anything anyway. Insiders assure me that Mr Brown was just as keen on the Iraq war as Mr Blair. Do they differ over schools, tax, the EU, transport, identity cards, anything important?

So why the quarrel? Far more likely, it seems to me, that the two pretend to be bitter rivals to give the political journalists and bored backbenchers something to do. They can spend ages wasting time and space on this pointless Kremlinology, when otherwise they might have to worry about the fact that there is no opposition, that British liberties are vanishing so fast they’ve almost disappeared, or the fact the country is now so far down the plumbing that it will take Dyno-Rod to get us out again. ~Peter Hitchens

Mr. Hitchens’ sage observations on the internal squabbles of the Labour Party might just as well be applied to the entire two-party system in America. Mr. Blair can be the GOP, and Gordon can be the Dems. The respective pairs put on pretty much the same show here as there. Thus every election cycle we are treated to the “deep divisions” in America and the “radical” separation of the two kinds of America (no, not Jon Edwards’ two Americas, thank you very much), when there has never been, for all practical purposes, a moment of greater, more mind-numbing convergence in American electoral politics than right now.

Tom DeLay warns us against massive Democratic tax increases in the event of an end to the GOP majority (is he saying that Mr. Bush will be happily signing a lot of tax increases in 2007?), but seems to have neglected to mention who was responsible for the massive deficits those tax rises would theoretically (and only theoretically) be put towards. Somehow the old shtick of warning against the tax-and-spend liberal isn’t going to fly when you are a spend-spend-and-spend-again “conservative.” But it keeps the crowd amused.