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Blair and Chips

Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, June 3, 1997, at 6:17 PM ET

Adopting yet another Clinton tic, Tony Blair has taken to making stagy apologies.

Yesterday, Blair offered official expressions of regret to the Irish people for the potato famine, echoing Clinton's recent White House apology for the Tuskegee experiment. But that's where the similarity ends. The Tuskegee experiment is worth apologizing for. The potato famine, by contrast, is not Britain's fault. See "Pataki and Potatoes: Half-baked ideas about Irish history" in SLATE.

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Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.
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