1. ...Fox News could be just another casualty of the president's campaign to undermine the integrity of the election he lost. As a reminder, Trump declared the Iowa caucuses "rigged" when he lost to Ted Cruz in 2016. Ahead of the general election four years ago, he said it would only be legitimate if he won. When he lost the popular vote, he said that was due to rampant fraud—to the tune of 3 million(!) votes—and appointed a commission to investigate. It disbanded having found nothing. Ahead of the 2020 election, he once again declared his intent to scream fraud if he lost. Now that he's lost, he's screaming fraud while his lawyers get laughed out of court....
Meanwhile, in the real world, the few friends the United States still has are looking on with horror. The American republic's slide into authoritarianism at the hands of the Republican Party is gaining speed, and even our oldest and closest friends in Britain, who have their own problems, have had to swing around and take notice. Here's the staid BBC assessing the current outbreak of fantastical delusion in the world's most powerful country.
....these folks are looking on from outside the roiling cauldron of bubbling bullshit that is American politics in the modern era. The sheer volume of undigestible crap that is now flowing through the body politic here has even poisoned the president's opponents, who are forced to constantly grapple with his hundreds of smaller assaults on reality and, in the process, can lose sight of the whole picture. From the outside, it's just abundantly clear: the president is cynically undermining American democracy because he cannot accept defeat—or views it as to his benefit to refuse to do so—and his many lackeys are too afraid to break with him. Even worse, some of them may actually believe this stuff.
But again, outside the phantasmagorical bubble of American life, none of this is that complicated. It's just fuel for concern or secondhand embarrassment. Even Trump's BFFs around the world, like Boris Johnson, are speaking in the terms of simple reality...
Not that there's much left of American prestige and soft power to project around the world, but how much more are we going to sacrifice on the altar of Donald Trump's narcissistic impulse? The president used to say the world is laughing at us, and now he's made it so. Maybe it will be better for the American empire to recede a bit from world affairs while we (decline to) sort out the deep structural problems we have here at home. But what the end result increasingly looks like is a state of affairs where the United States has lost all moral authority and has only its military might to influence events. It has sadly chosen to go that route far too often before, but the prospect it will be the only option going forward is not heartening. Dictators will laugh, understandably, at our calls to respect the democratic process. Allies now know we cannot be depended on—and that we are, in fact, insane. But we do have a lot of F-35s.
Source: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a34655841/trump-refuse-to-concede-election-bbc-boris-johnson/
2. Moving from the Capitol, British Navy Rear Admiral George Cockburn, Army Major General Robert Ross, and 150 redcoats marched to the White House.
Rocca asked Allman what the Britons' impression of the White House would have been as they walked in the door: "I think that it was a pretty good-sized house, but not a palatial one. No Buckingham Palace. No Versailles. That it was, you know, reasonably well decorated."
The biggest surprise? A dinner set for 40. So the British feasted in the White House dining room before burning the mansion down...
After torching the White House, the redcoats burned the buildings housing the Departments of State, Treasury and War, concluding one of the most devastating days in American history.
Imagine the scene after the British have departed Washington?" said Vogel. "The Capitol and the White House are smoldering shells. The American Army has abandoned the city. Nobody knows where President Madison or the cabinet is. It's really impossible to think of many more despondent, desperate moments in American history."...
Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-1814-burning-of-washington-d-c/2/
3. The only certainty about President Donald Trump’s first visit to the United Kingdom is that it will unloose a fresh torrent of clichés about the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States....
Professor Sir Michael Howard once wrote on wartime attitudes: “It is never very easy for the British to understand that a very large number of Americans, if they think about us at all, do so with various degrees of dislike and contempt… In the 1940s, the Americans had some reason to regard the British as a lot of toffee-nosed bastards who oppressed half the world and had a sinister talent for getting other people to do their fighting for them.” Contemporary opinion polls support his view.
Among the foremost of Winston Churchill’s achievements was creating a legend of Atlantic unity in the face of an anti-Americanism widespread among British people—and especially their ruling class—and mirrored by animosity on the other side of the pond, for reasons suggested by Howard.
Churchill deployed a magnificent edifice of rhetoric, climaxing in his 1946 Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri, in which he called for a “fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples…a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States.”
Yet in private throughout the war, he fumed and railed about the ruthlessness of U.S. policies. Arms and supplies shipped to Britain in 1940-41 required payment on the nail and thus liquidation of British assets in the U.S. at fire-sale prices. The prime minister wrote to Roosevelt on December 7, 1940, warning that if the cash drain persisted, “after the victory was won with our blood and sweat, and civilization saved and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed…we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries.”....
Source: https://www.history.com/news/america-britain-special-relationship-alliance
Addition reference:
en.wikipedia.org
www.pbs.org
4. After the burning of Washington DC in 1814, the bitter geopolitical rivalry between the British Empire and the US lasted for about a century till World War I. The necessary myth of UK-US special relationship was created by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a 1946 speech. The two nations have been close allies during many conflicts in the 20th and 21st centuries, including World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Gulf War and the War on Terror.
If America was ruled by the "con artist" president some decades after 1814, whoever was ruling the British Empire would be laughing in glee and clapping his hands. He would say, "Now the fellow and his decadent party have torn their country apart, isn't it the right time for us to return there to pick up the pieces and get our colony back on its feet? Even if we can't take back the whole colony, at least we can grab back a third of the land and create a new nation called the United Three States of America (U3SA)."
Meanwhile, in the real world, the few friends the United States still has are looking on with horror. The American republic's slide into authoritarianism at the hands of the Republican Party is gaining speed, and even our oldest and closest friends in Britain, who have their own problems, have had to swing around and take notice. Here's the staid BBC assessing the current outbreak of fantastical delusion in the world's most powerful country.
....these folks are looking on from outside the roiling cauldron of bubbling bullshit that is American politics in the modern era. The sheer volume of undigestible crap that is now flowing through the body politic here has even poisoned the president's opponents, who are forced to constantly grapple with his hundreds of smaller assaults on reality and, in the process, can lose sight of the whole picture. From the outside, it's just abundantly clear: the president is cynically undermining American democracy because he cannot accept defeat—or views it as to his benefit to refuse to do so—and his many lackeys are too afraid to break with him. Even worse, some of them may actually believe this stuff.
But again, outside the phantasmagorical bubble of American life, none of this is that complicated. It's just fuel for concern or secondhand embarrassment. Even Trump's BFFs around the world, like Boris Johnson, are speaking in the terms of simple reality...
Not that there's much left of American prestige and soft power to project around the world, but how much more are we going to sacrifice on the altar of Donald Trump's narcissistic impulse? The president used to say the world is laughing at us, and now he's made it so. Maybe it will be better for the American empire to recede a bit from world affairs while we (decline to) sort out the deep structural problems we have here at home. But what the end result increasingly looks like is a state of affairs where the United States has lost all moral authority and has only its military might to influence events. It has sadly chosen to go that route far too often before, but the prospect it will be the only option going forward is not heartening. Dictators will laugh, understandably, at our calls to respect the democratic process. Allies now know we cannot be depended on—and that we are, in fact, insane. But we do have a lot of F-35s.
Source: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a34655841/trump-refuse-to-concede-election-bbc-boris-johnson/
2. Moving from the Capitol, British Navy Rear Admiral George Cockburn, Army Major General Robert Ross, and 150 redcoats marched to the White House.
Rocca asked Allman what the Britons' impression of the White House would have been as they walked in the door: "I think that it was a pretty good-sized house, but not a palatial one. No Buckingham Palace. No Versailles. That it was, you know, reasonably well decorated."
The biggest surprise? A dinner set for 40. So the British feasted in the White House dining room before burning the mansion down...
After torching the White House, the redcoats burned the buildings housing the Departments of State, Treasury and War, concluding one of the most devastating days in American history.
Imagine the scene after the British have departed Washington?" said Vogel. "The Capitol and the White House are smoldering shells. The American Army has abandoned the city. Nobody knows where President Madison or the cabinet is. It's really impossible to think of many more despondent, desperate moments in American history."...
Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-1814-burning-of-washington-d-c/2/
3. The only certainty about President Donald Trump’s first visit to the United Kingdom is that it will unloose a fresh torrent of clichés about the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States....
Professor Sir Michael Howard once wrote on wartime attitudes: “It is never very easy for the British to understand that a very large number of Americans, if they think about us at all, do so with various degrees of dislike and contempt… In the 1940s, the Americans had some reason to regard the British as a lot of toffee-nosed bastards who oppressed half the world and had a sinister talent for getting other people to do their fighting for them.” Contemporary opinion polls support his view.
Among the foremost of Winston Churchill’s achievements was creating a legend of Atlantic unity in the face of an anti-Americanism widespread among British people—and especially their ruling class—and mirrored by animosity on the other side of the pond, for reasons suggested by Howard.
Churchill deployed a magnificent edifice of rhetoric, climaxing in his 1946 Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri, in which he called for a “fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples…a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States.”
Yet in private throughout the war, he fumed and railed about the ruthlessness of U.S. policies. Arms and supplies shipped to Britain in 1940-41 required payment on the nail and thus liquidation of British assets in the U.S. at fire-sale prices. The prime minister wrote to Roosevelt on December 7, 1940, warning that if the cash drain persisted, “after the victory was won with our blood and sweat, and civilization saved and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed…we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries.”....
Source: https://www.history.com/news/america-britain-special-relationship-alliance
Addition reference:
Special Relationship - Wikipedia
Marco Rubio on Super Tuesday: Donald Trump a "con artist"
Despite attacking Donald Trump for the last week, Marco Rubio won just one Super Tuesday state -- Minnesota. He vowed to fight on to Florida in two weeks and continued his attack on Trump as a "con artist." "Just five days ago we began to unmask the true nature of the frontrunner in this...
4. After the burning of Washington DC in 1814, the bitter geopolitical rivalry between the British Empire and the US lasted for about a century till World War I. The necessary myth of UK-US special relationship was created by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a 1946 speech. The two nations have been close allies during many conflicts in the 20th and 21st centuries, including World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Gulf War and the War on Terror.
If America was ruled by the "con artist" president some decades after 1814, whoever was ruling the British Empire would be laughing in glee and clapping his hands. He would say, "Now the fellow and his decadent party have torn their country apart, isn't it the right time for us to return there to pick up the pieces and get our colony back on its feet? Even if we can't take back the whole colony, at least we can grab back a third of the land and create a new nation called the United Three States of America (U3SA)."
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