The British Response To Obama "Why Should We Take Advice From A President Who Has Surrendered The World To Chaos?"
By Tyler Durden
Following Obama’s stunning foray into UK politics with his anti-Brexit oped (which surprised both the pro and anti-Brexit camp as there was little to be gained from Obama’s gracious entrance of an elephant in a UK political China store) on Thursday evening, one person who had a rather visceral reaction was London Mayor Boris Johnson who slammed Obama’s “hypocritical” Brexit diatribe and accused Obama “ancestral dislike of the British empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender” on being part-Kenyan.
Needless to say at this point any rational dialog ended, and even though Johnson had many valid points, they all got lost in the quasi ad hominem din.
However, a far more tempered op-ed appeared in The Telegraph by Janet Daley, one in which she does not invoke Obama’s African heritage, but rather his achievements, or lack thereof, in the global arena, and asks point blank:”Why should we take advice from a president who has surrendered the world to chaos?“
Why indeed?
I wonder who in Downing Street briefed Barack Obama’s team on the wording of his friendly warning to the British. Somebody obviously pointed out that the population of this country retained a quaint obsession with the Second World War, and would therefore treat any reference to the glorious dead as irreproachable. So the President invoked the European graves of those American servicemen who died to protect – well, what exactly?
I thought it was the democratic values and reverence for national independence that Britain shared with the US. Did Mr Obama have any sense at all that what he was now urging the British electorate to accept was precisely the surrender of those sacred principles of democratically accountable government and self-determination for which the combined American and British forces had made their ultimate sacrifice?
Could this bizarre intervention have been more cynical or wilfully misinformed? In the end, it seemed to come down to trade advantages – to what might once, back in the day, have been called the global interests of US corporate capitalism. Mr Obama even made specific reference in his article in Friday’s Daily Telegraph to the importance of current negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which would reduce barriers to US business interests in the European Union.
On the same day, 38 Degrees – a front group for the more proactive elements in the public sector unions – took out full-page newspaper adverts campaigning against the adoption of TTIP (“…no trade deal should give corporations more power than people”). If the Labour Left were not in such disingenuous disarray, they could be making a meal of this. In any event, unnamed US trade officials were being ominously quoted as saying that, in the event of Brexit, the UK would come very low on America’s list of priorities for new trade agreements.
Then Mr Obama himself abandoned such subtlety in his joint press conference with the Prime Minister. Should the UK go its own way, he said, there would be …read more
