Monday 5 December 2016

The Americans are winning at political farce


Politics in the United Kingdom is becoming ever more absurd. There's the leaked Tory memo demanding an end to leaks, there's the absolute fiasco of Brexit and Theresa May's "Brexit means Brexit" drivel when confronted with the evidence she doesn't have a clue what she's doing; there's Nigel Farage quitting British politics and desperately trying to set himself up as Donald Trump's butler; there's Theresa May's decision to give a massive big up to a disgusting Twitter troll by quoting him at Prime Minister's Questions; there's about half of Labour MPs still spending far more time and effort bitterly attacking their own leader than they do criticising the Tory government; there's the delusional Lib-Dems talking about "revival" because they've increased their cohort of MPs from eight to nine; and there's Theresa May's inexplicable decision to appoint Boris Johnson (a man who has insulted nearly every nation on the planet) as her foreign secretary.

But no matter how lame and ludicrous politics in the UK gets, us British folk can always cheer ourselves up by laughing at the antics of our American cousins.

Of course millions of British people used the EU referendum to send an utterly self-destructive "fuck you" to the political establishment, but us Brits really have been completely outdone in the Incoherent Political Anger Stakes by the election of the billionaire narcissist Donald Trump as President of the United States.


One of Donald Trump's early picks to work in his government is a guy called Mike Flynn who is to serve as his national security adviser.

Back in November 2016 Flynn took the extraordinary step of Tweeting a ludicrous fake news story about a Hillary Clinton paedophile ring based out of a pizza restaurant in Washington. He described the fake news item as "MUST READ!" to his Twitter followers, then thousands upon thousands of people retweeted Flynn's fake news tweet.

Eventually the inevitable happened. On Sunday December the 4th 2016 someone decided to shoot up the restaurant named in General Flynn's  "MUST READ!"  fake news story. A gunman entered the crowded restaurant, threatened staff and then began shooting the place up. After his arrest the gunman told police that he was "self-investigating" the Hillary Clinton paedophile ring.

So when Donald Trump is sworn in as President, the United States is going to have a national security adviser who spreads ludicrous fake news stories that inspire crackpot conspiracy-theory believers to go and shoot up American restaurants. America is sure going to be safe and secure with a reckless idiot like that in charge of national security!

Meanwhile Donald Trump has blundered from one display of incompetence to another before he's even been sworn in. Trump has been bragging about his Carrier deal as if it was some magnificently brilliant intervention to offer tax breaks to a company that was threatening to export American jobs to Mexico.

What Trump's actually done is sent a signal to every corporation in America that if they threaten to scrap American jobs then the Trump administration will give them a load of taxpayer funded bribes to make them stop. He's basically said that American corporations can now hold the government hostage for handouts by threatening to destroy American jobs.

Then there's the diplomatic war that Trump has started with China. Talking with the Taiwanese President was always going to rile the Chinese, but instead of admitting his diplomatic blunder, Trump has doubled down by slinging a tirade of insults and criticism at the Chinese.

Trump is clearly the kind of dangerously belligerent hothead who can never admit that they've made a mistake. He's not even been sworn in as President yet but he's determined to trigger World War Three with his loose cannon diplomatic blundering.

In 2017 us Brits have the farcical unravelling of Brexit to look forward to, but our American cousins always have to outdo us by doing things bigger and better, and when it comes to political farce, whatever lunacy and incompetence Theresa May and her Brexiteer charlatans can come up with, Donald Trump and his cronies are certain to go much further.


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