One of the highlights of my year so far was undoubtedly BBC North America Editor Jon Sopel's demeanour as he...
...reported that the 22-month inquiry by former FBI Director Robert Mueller into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election had failed to reveal any collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign. I stopped following the whole Mueller saga early on, because the stench of bullshit that results from a constant diet of sour grapes was overpowering. As with Britain's Remainiacs, many American Democrats simply couldn't bear to admit that they lost a crucial vote because of their own mistakes and the lack of appeal of their candidate/message. Sopel, who has spent Trump's presidency treating the man as if he were a pathetic joke, eagerly trying to convince viewers that every anti-Trump snippet portended the The Donald's enforced departure from the White House within a matter of days, if not hours, looked distinctly green about the gills as he almost angrily admitted that his Democratic Party chums had lost the Russia-collusion battle, and that flogging a dead horse by trying to keep the story running - as many of them seemed determined to do - would simply piss off American voters and help Trump triumph once more in 2020.
Bliss!
The end of the Mueller Inquiry was followed rapidly by the news that Michael Avenatti - the "creepy little porn lawyer" who had represented porn star Stormy Daniels in her lawsuits against Donald Trump - had been arrested for allegedly attempting to extort up to $25m from Nike by threatening to reveal damaging claims about the company.
As if all that wasn't enough to make Trump happy, "Creepy Uncle" Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton's running mate in 2016, dropped a hint that he might be willing to stand against Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Now, Americans - as we all know - are a lot more touchy-feely than most North Europeans, i.e. far more willing to express their feelings towards other people physically. Even as we Yurpeens shrink from hugs and extended hand-clasps and arms slung around our shoulders, we tend to feel as embarrassed by our own inhibitions as we are by the emotional openness of Americans: I, for one, admire Americans' readiness to display affection, and sometimes wish I could be a little less inhibited. I also worry that the MeToo movement and perfectly understandable concerns about adults getting too huggy with other people's children will soon make it impossible for any adult to physically express any affection for anyone other than their own spouse and/or children. But, given all that, I still find myself cringing whenever I see Joe Biden clawing women and children, sniffing their hair, or whispering intimately to them. I make no assumptions regarding his motives - but it just looks and feels wrong, and it evidently creeps out some of the women and kids subjected to his over-warm personality. Trump has said some disgusting things about clutching women's private parts and about wanting to date his own daughter(!) - but just imagine the sort of fun his campaign team would have highlighting Creepy Uncle Joe's seemingly endless displays of inappropriate behaviour:
Uncle Joe's whispered promise of mysterious delight delivered into the shell like ear of the new president during the inauguration "it's all about you" sounded like something one would say to the newly crowned prom queen.
ReplyDeleteI think the Biden narrator must have gone to the Dick van Dyke school of elocution. It's about what you'd expect by way of smear and innuendo from Infowars - you really should have credited them - or from the bozos on the other side who think that they can impeach the President for faking his golf scores. Thank goodness the calm and deliberate way in which we conduct our own politics continues to show the rest of the world a lesson in British restraint and objectivity.
ReplyDeleteI would absolve Mueller from this. The Special Prosecutor is a formidable figure. I suspect that it is only because somebody told Trump that bad bad things happened bigly to some one called Nixon when he fired Archibald Cox that he was persuaded just to stick to trashing the reputation of a distinguished former head of the FBI after sacking his successor.
Whatevs, as the Americans say. It's a welcome distraction.
I would like to see Joe Biden try and pull his shoulder squeezing - hair, smelling routine on Sub-Lieutenant Penny Mordaunt [RNR] or the mysterious Priti Patel. A one-way ticket to the John Wayne Bobbit Ward at the local hospital would probably be the result.
ReplyDeleteEvelyn Waugh said that he appreciated intimacy between old friends and servility in the right context, but enforced familiarity from people you hardly know was unbearable [Gilbert Pinfold].The worst transgressors in this area are Australians.
ReplyDeleteBest Head of the FBI : J. Edgar Dyson