I was giving out the other night about one of the lying liars who lie for George Bush for accusing Sinn Fein of not telling the truth when a Shinner friend warned: “You’re not just trying to get at us, are you?”

What had prompted his suspicion was my wondering why they hadn’t told the lying liar to go boil his lie-stuffed head in a bucket of shite.
Bush’s “special envoy” on the North, fanatical pro-warrior Mitchell Reiss, had rubbished a full-page Sinn Fein ad on policing in the New York Times as, “at best enormously misleading and at worst untruthful.” Reports had it that the ad cost £25,000, which is almost as much as Sinn Fein officially spent on their entire Assembly election campaign back in November. It must have been terrifically important to them to get their policing message across to the influential Times readership. In the same measure, I reasoned, they must have been terrifically angered at Reiss for rubbishing their effort.
So, why hadn’t they blasted him back?
The notion of a Bush crony calling anybody to account for untruthfulness is staggering in its effrontery. Bush himself, it will be recalled, has long been lying like a trooper about his military record. How he learnt how troopers lie is, like so much else in his parasite past, a mystery. Drafted into the forces at a time when tens of thousands of other young Americans were dutifully dying or losing their limbs or minds while massacring villagers in Vietnam, Bush turned up for induction, had his teeth examined, then scarpered before sundown to spend the next two years drunk-driving around Texas, harrassing women and generally using his newly-capped teeth to bite every hand which had unknowingly fed him.
Bush has stayed true, so to speak, to form since. His former top counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke is the latest to confirm that he frauded, faked and falsified evidence to procure death and misery for millions and plunge the world into danger by going to war on Iraq. This is an administration blinded by blood-lust, and so twisted in its thinking that corkscrews uncurl in their presence. It isn’t so much that they can’t handle the truth as that when they are contemplating violence they can’t be arsed about the truth.
“If his lips are moving,” observed Jimmy Breslin of Bush, “he’s either reading or lying.” Or, in the event that he’s studying a paper supporting the case for war, both.
(It should be said for the record that the only reason Bin Laden’s lot haven’t killed as many as Bush’s is that (so far) they lack the technology. Call me a soft-centred old liberal if you like, but there’s times I reckon one of them’s as bad as the other.)
So, you’d have thought that some spokesperson for Sinn Feinwould have responded to Reiss by reminding him of pots and kettles, telling him that US forces should get the hell out of Iraq and suggesting that he and the rest of Bush’s troupe of kill-crazy campaigners forget about crossing the Atlantic to use Ireland as a backdrop and Irish people as extras in a propaganda film for next November’s US election. But no. The harshest response I’ve heard from any Sinn Fein spokesperson has been a complaint that the attack was “disappointing.”
Why so? The cynical view, assiduously offered in Indo-ite tracts and on ex-Provo web-sites, is that Adams and co. so adore being included on the Washington-gig guest-list, and would find it so devastating to be dropped, that they accept a slapping around from a well-placed wretch like Reiss as part of the price to be paid.
But there’s something more fundamental going on here, too, which in its own cack-handed way entitles the party to some slack. They are doing what comes naturally to Nationalists. By which I don’t mean Northern Catholics, a disparate lot, but adherents of Nationalist ideology.
Nationalism of the sort espoused by Sinn Fein, as I may have mentioned once or twice in this space, is, essentially, neither left-wing nor right-wing, radical nor reactionary, pro- nor anti-imperialist. It occupies whichever point on such spectra best suits its needs as notional embodiment of the nation at any place or time. As time and place changes, Nationalism shifts. It will express itself rhetorically in anti-imperialist terms when this is the best pitch to make for pulling in votes or keeping a particular element on-side. On a different day, facing a different audience, it will hymn praise for the role and influence of imperialist power. It’s always been thus.

Re-reading Dorothy Macardle’s The Irish Republic a couple of weeks ago, I came across an account of a clandestine June 1920 meeting of the First Dail, then in its pure phase, prior to the Cosgrave sell-out, the de Valera sell-out and all subsequent sell-outs. These were the incorruptibles, or at least the uncorrupted, in the full flush of political youth, unbesmirched by office, careless of personal advancement. Michael Collins and Harry Boland were prominently in attendance.
The delegates voted to empower de Valera, then on a north American tour, to spend a million dollars held in the US to buy friends and influence people in Washington. The US was in its post-World War One anti-Red frenzy, the political class filled with hysteria about Bolshevik Russia, which it wanted the rest of the world to shun.
Making his bid to win US establishment support for the Republican Movement, Dev gave a series of interviews heaping praise on the 1903 Platt Amendment, the arrangement which handed the US permanent sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay, guaranteed that Cuba would never enter into an international agreement without US approval, and allowed the US untrammeled right to intervene in Cuba when if ever it felt threatened by developments on the island. The Platt Amendement has provided the framework for US policy on Cuba ever since.
The New York Globe headlined de Valera’s endorsement of the Platt Amendment as marking the moment when Irish Republicanism, for all its occasionally unnerving rhetoric, spelt it out that it represented no threat to US vital interests: “De Valera opens the door!” Republican traditionalists like John Devoy who bitterly attacked De Valera for compromise were dismissed as “zealots... unrealistic” and pushed out to the margins of the Movement.
The same meeting of the Dail, on June 29, 1920, unanimously passed a motion of Arthur Griffiths’‚ calling for agents to be despatched to the governments of “several countries,” including – the only country specifically mentioned – “the Government of the Russian Socialist Soviet Federal Republic, with a view to establishing diplomatic relations with that Government.”
Part of the anti-imperialist struggle on side of the pond. God Bless America on the other.
Sinn Fein leaders today are not betraying any tradition when they authorise a party speaker out of earshot of Washington to call the liar Bush a liar, and the next day bite their lips rather than repudiate one of the liar’s lying representatives who has accused them of untruth.
As the Strabane man with the gimlet glasses told us, it’s de Valera all over again, nothing but the same old story. And not a story with a happy ending.