The insufferably honest chap who cajoled Great Britain into the Iraq War based on “intelligence” not even Buzzfeed would credit, thinks his countrymen’s historic vote to leave his beloved European Union was “riddled with lies.”
Tony Blair, who touted a “sexed-up” dossier to jump into bed with president George W. Bush before ablazing Iraq and ushering the deaths of 1 million people, has emerged from his noisome sludge to tell Brexiters how silly we are.
Even better, he is now offering us—us?!—a confessional, the good Catholic that he is, to redeem ourselves and steady our giddy ways.
Blair and his billionaire pals aren’t too keen on democratic elections that produce the wrong outcomes. He’s more “Davoisie” than “democracy.” Like his American coastal pals, Blair believes he is born to rule.
Finagling a crisp $71 million from, I trust, entirely and wholeheartedly honest and grounded philanthropists, British elites are booting up a brand new “centrist” party to “break the mould” of British politics. By that, they mean warp time back to 2015 when Brexit and Donald Trump were rube jokes.
Blair, of course, officially has nothing to do with this dastardly little caper. He couldn’t. Among Britons, late-stage syphilis garners more affection than this cause will do.
What is infectious is the elite-held belief that all this naughty “populism” is just a spasm that will pass through the body politic before settling into their preferred lucidity.
But Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency are entwined tightly. Stop the former and President Trump will soon be scrubbed from the cortex of polite society, goes the comfort-blanket thinking of the fashionably “oppressed.”
They are entirely wrong. And their increasingly bizarre attempts to rewind time shows their own time is up.
After all, what caused this populist insurgency to erupt so beautifully is glaringly obvious to anyone outside of a select handful of ZIP codes. And it keeps burning, to the utter bemusement of those who insist they’re smarter than everyone else.
It’s hardly rocket surgery.
Most voters judged open borders corrosive to their own diminishing living standards; most thought unfettered globalization hurt more than helped; most saw the 2008 financial crash and decided the greedheads responsible deserved a shoeing. Most voters remembered the ruinous escapades of Blair and Bush, too.
Why else would anyone vote for a reality TV star and gaudy tabloid billionaire with no experience in office, in lieu of someone apparently more qualified than the saint she was destined to succeed?
More important: why would they vote for more of the same vomitus they’d wiped off their shoes in 2016?
Look at Europe. Since the populist “wave” was declared over by Resistance-types fawning Emmanuel Macron last year, populist-inspired conservatives have run the table in Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, Italy, and now, Hungary. Victor Orbán won a two-thirds majority last weekend. The media call him a “fascist.”
These days, anyone to the right of President Bill Clinton is a “fascist.” The reality is that populists… are popular. Especially with the working-class voters abandoned by the intellectual Left. Are you listening, GOP?
Perhaps, Paul Ryan was. The House Speaker’s decision to call it a day invoked predictably mawkish doggerel on the pages of the New York Times. Except here, where Christopher Buskirk called for a Republican Party reform built upon “pro-citizen immigration policies, pro-worker economic policies and an America First national security policy. . . ”
The point shouldn’t need belaboring. President Trump scorched through the Rust Belt after breaking with the tired orthodoxy chirped by 16 other Republicans, and Hillary Clinton, who, in a fair fight would have lost to Bernie Sanders—handily.
Having jettisoned their traditional base, Democrats have left behind scores of voters. The catch? Those voters are not too keen on Ayn Rand, either. Who can blame them? Shuttered factories scarify landscapes. They haven’t had a real pay raise in decades.
Better yet, they’re told they should make ends meet by working for Uber. On top of their other jobs. It’s called being “dynamic,” or something. And they should applaud their enlightened masters. After all, this is as good as it’ll get.
Except, it isn’t. Despite what the bovarists insist, most people realize something is stupendously wrong with how things are. They want homes of their own, decent pay and benefits, security, and prospects for their children. Conditions which the “outdated” nation-state managed with relative aplomb until the “enlightenment” of the 1990s.
Trump knew this. That’s why he is president. The Tony Blairs of this world never will.
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