Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Hairbrained blonds brush aside decency
WHAT a special week this has been in the long and Special Relationship between Britain and America.
First we had news that a US actress was heading over here to become the mother of royal babies, followed by a campaign to stop a former US reality TV star-turned-president coming – in case it triggered the mother of all protests.
Like most stories though, it ended up being all about the curious workings of Donald J Trump’s tiny mind.
Here was a half-scottish president failing to congratulate a US citizen on her daughter entering the British Royal Family, yet 24 hours later was publicly endorsing the racist views of a far-right British party.
Mind you, Meghan Markle’s mother is the same colour as the five Africanamerican teenagers wrongly jailed for raping a white woman in Central Park in 1989, which inspired Trump to take out full-page ads in four newspapers following their unsafe conviction, calling for the death penalty in New York state.
And Britain First does sing from the same Islamophobic, fake news song sheet as Trump, who claimed thousands of Arab-americans in New Jersey celebrated 9/11, despite no reports.
Many Brits have expressed sympathy for the millions of Americans whose necks aren’t red, who loathe Trump as much as we do.
But isn’t there an irony here? Do those Tory MPS expressing disgust at Trump’s brutal slapdown of Theresa May not feel a tinge of shame at the face of their government abroad?
They say Trump shouldn’t come here because he’s a walking diplomatic disaster, deaf to the noises emanating from Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who diminishes this country’s stock whenever he opens his mouth.
In recent months our most senior-ranked diplomat made a joke about “dead bodies” in Libya, insulted people in Myanmar by reciting an “inappropriate” colonialist poem, and wrongly called imprisoned Britishiranian mother Nazanin Zaghariratcliffe a journalist, which could lead to her jail sentence being prolonged.
Before Johnson was Foreign Secretary, he warned that if Turkey entered the EU 78 million people would flee its borders, but now backs that country joining it.
His maiden speech urged people to march on Russia’s London Embassy in protest at Syrian air strikes. Moscow called him a clown.
And he’s accused EU leaders of sharing Hitler’s dream of creating a European superstate.
Talking of which, he was the chief peddler of the lie that Britain would be £350million a week better off once we left the EU. Now that it turns out we’ll have to pay a £50billion divorce bill, not a peep is heard from him.
A bill not helped by Johnson telling Brussels he wanted to have his cake and eat it in a trade deal, and they could “go whistle” for their billions.
Most damning of all were claims this week that Foreign Office officials told the Irish Government “not to listen to whatever he had to say” ahead of a recent visit to Dublin. This is the UK’S Foreign Secretary we’re talking about.
And don’t forget, as much as we see Trump as a racist, Johnson once called the people of Congo “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles” and referred to Barack Obama’s “part-kenyan ancestry” as some sort of stigma.
Sadly, folks, Americans have every right to tell us they’re not alone in being disgraced and misrepresented on the world stage.
Or, in the words of the book they’re so fond of quoting: “Let he who is without a fake blond narcissistic abomination cast the first stone.”
Sadly, folks, Americans aren’t alone in being disgraced