Tuesday, July 5, 2016

This is an insult to rats

First Boris Johnson bailed off the crippled ship that is post-Brexit England, and now the most punch-worthy face in British government is right behind him:
Another British politician is stepping aside because of the vote to exit the European Union. This time it's Nigel Farage, one of the chief proponents of the Brexit vote, who is resigning as head of the U.K. Independence Party because the country is getting out of the European Union. His goal is achieved, he says.

Lauren Frayer reports from London for our Newscast desk that Farage says his work is done. "I've done my bit," he says, "I couldn't possibly achieve more than we managed to get in that referendum."
(More via Balloon Juice, here.)

Oh, what complete horseshit. This is an insult to rats because the rats never set fire to the ship themselves.

On the other hand, it does call to mind the many attempts to draw parallels between the Brexit people  -- with the bad faith, faulty math, and xenophobia that goaded them forward -- and Trump and his supporters on this side of the pond.  I never thought the numbers work for that scenario: The xenophobes over here don't outnumber the Others the way they do in GB, so there's less chance -- not zero, but certainly not enough -- of tipping an election into the lap of the slo-mo exploding citrus this fall.

What this suggests to me is the possibility -- although obviously not the certainty -- of Trump following the lead of Johnson and Farage, realizing that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. (It is not logical, but it is often so.)

If Trump does bail out, I'd expect him to justify it much like Farage did: He's accomplished everything he set out to do (of course he has! he always does!), so why waste his time actually being President of the United States -- which he could easily do, if he wanted, and he'd be so good at it you wouldn't believe it -- when it's so obviously a step down from being Himself?

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