Well, it’s been a bad time for blonds — LOL, as people say (whoever those people are).
Not to gloat but those of us who are sick onto death of the baloney-swilling strongmen have gotten a bit of our own back this week. And what is particularly sweet is their enemies delivered the coup de grace mob-style: They blindsided them.
For there were British Prime Minister Boris “not Godunov” Johnson and President Donald J. Trumpet stroking each other’s considerable egos at the United Nations in New York, the city of their births where they are most decidedly not favorite sons. Back in their respective capitals, trouble was brewing for each.
The British Supreme Court ruled that Johnson’s suspension of Parliament — so that he could ram through his hard-Brexit agenda — was unlawful. That sent Johnson “strongly objecting” — yeah, you tell ’em, Boris — and scurrying back to London like a truant schoolboy who’s been sent to the headmaster’s office. (Or headmistress as the boom was lowered by the president of the court, Brenda Marjorie Hale, the spider brooch-wearing Baroness Hale of Richmond.) Back in old London town, Boris bent it like Trumpet — doubling down on defiance and throwing rivals like the eternally disgruntled Jeremy Corbyn under the bus.
Meanwhile, the date with destiny that Trump has had with Congress, make that the Democratic Congress, from the moment he took office finally came due, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi — Trump’s own personal Spider- Woman — announced that the House of Representatives had opened an impeachment inquiry over El Presidente’s phone massaging of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to give him dirt on rival Joe Biden and son Hunter’s lucrative work there. Impeachment inquiries are a two-edged sword, offering pitfalls to both Democrats and Republicans.
For the Dems in particular, there is the chance of alienating swing voters. But there is a moment in every life when you have to cast aside political expediency and stand up for principle. Besides, I don’t believe the Republican threat that this will backfire on the Dems the way the Repub impeachment of President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair.imploded. That was a case of a personal relationship and workplace exploitation that Clinton lied about. Whereas Trump’s misstep is a geopolitical debacle. (I guess he’s right when he says globalism isn’t the answer.) And Pelosi — whose expertise in her long Congressional career focused on intelligence — is not the type to go off half-cocked. You figure there’s got to be more to the whistleblower’s complaint than the phone call, and she knows just what it is.
Enabled by the Republicans, Trump thought he could act with impunity. But he and Johnson are discovering than no one is above the law. And perhaps they will discover, too — though I think this will be too subtle for Trump — that Oscar Wilde was wrong when he wrote in the poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” that “each man kills the thing he loves.”
No, each man is killed by the thing he loves. Wouldn’t it be something if the egotism that drives both men brought them down in the end?