I've been quite taken aback by the level of adulation for George Galloway in threads over the last 24 hours. Maybe, in the cold light of day, it's time to look at him with more sober eyes.
Undoubtably Galloway is a first-rate orator, but, without sounding too taoist about this, a man's strength can also be his weakness. Give him a microphone, a spotlight and it will eventually proove to be his undoing.
A way of identifying this is to compare his visit to Washington with his visit to Saddam in Baghdad. Both 'regimes' he claims to be fiercely critical of and in Washington he clearly made his feelings known. Yet in Baghdad all he did was, well, grovel. Hardly a fearless brandishing of the sword of truth.
No matter what reasons or excuses he has for this, nor no matter how much a sugar rush you get from his beating up the neocons, he will never be able to escape the fact that he was grandstanding in Washington and grovelling in Baghdad.