Far East Cynic

The first draft of history…

Yes the markets went back up today. I did my bit to help and bought stock in Match.Com. ( Because you never know when you’ll need to fire up that Tinder App).

But Britain kept taking one hit after another. A labor No Confidence vote that Jeremy Corbyn lost, and additional credit downgrades. These are lighting the fuse for the recession of 2017.

So is there time to point out how utterly stupid Brexit was? There is always time to point out how fucked in the head the Brexit vote was.

Assuming I’m not dead from alcohol poisoning on November 9th, which is a very real possibility if Trump wins, Laurie Penny at The New Statesman has written the first draft of what will be many posts calling the American people stupid. Just take the British names and substitute American ones-and you feel her (and my) pain:

I want my country back

This was never a referendum on the EU. It was a referendum on the modern world.

There’s not enough tea in the entire nation to help us Keep Calm and Carry On today. Not on a day when prejudice, propaganda, naked xenophobia and callous fear-mongering have won out over the common sense we British like to pride ourselves on. Not on a day when we’re being congratulated by Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and nobody else. Well done, turkeys. Santa’s on his way.

Nigel Farage, the rich, racist cartoon demagogue, boasts that this victory was won “without a single shot being fired”. Tell that to the grieving family of Jo Cox, the campaigning Labour MP gunned down last week. Farage promised that unless something was done to halt immigration, “violence will be the next step”. It looks like we’ve got a two-for-one deal on that one.

So, here’s the thing. This was never a referendum on the EU. It was a referendum on the modern world, and yesterday the frightened, parochial lizard-brain of Britain voted out, out, out, and today we’ve all woken up still strapped onto this ghost-train as it hurtles off the tracks. Leave voters are finding they care less about immigration now that their pension pots are under threat. Maybe one of the gurning pundits promising them pride and sovereignty should have mentioned that, but they were too busy lying about the NHS. The curtain has been torn away and now we all have to look at the men behind it. They are not good men.

Anyone feel like they’ve got their country back yet? No? That, after all, was the rallying cry of the Leave campaign – the transatlantic echo of “Make America Great Again”. There’s a precedent for what happens when svengalis with aggressively terrible haircuts are allowed to appeal to parochialism and fear in the teeth of a global recession, and it isn’t pretty.

Read the rest of the article here. It speaks to me-and should to you, Because I guarantee, whatever your political beef is with the USA today, I can assure you Donald Trump is not the answer to it. He will kill you and your country in your sleep.

I now yield the floor to Mr. Oliver again: