Geoffrey Wheatcroft
This item saddens me. Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a savvy commentator. He’s aware of the New World Order and has opposed it for years.
Whereas Wheatcroft can spot a “fawning Tory” who allies himself with NWO interests, I would have hoped that he himself might have stayed connected to Obama. But Wheatcroft has written a column drawing a major dividing line between himself and the President and I’m really sad to see that happen. (I hope it proves temporary.)
He accuses President Obama of being Anglophobic and having an issue with the British since his childhood. He points to the President’s use of the term “kicking ass” and his inappropriate repetition of the phrase “British Petroleum,” when the legal term for the company is “BP,” as indicating the President’s leanings.
BP features in the portfolio of many British pension funds, etc., and so the British take a significantly different view of the company than Americans do – and they seem to be now becoming concerned for their holdings. How you feel about the company really does seem to depend on where you sit.
But Wheatcroft is no right-wing hack. His dissent represents a significant argument arising among people whom I wish were allies.
To be sure, the President’s use of the term “kick ass” is unfortunate. I deeply sympathize with what happens when one uses an inadvisable term. The President doesn’t get to revise what he says as you do on a WordPress blog, for instance.
So Wheatcroft’s column should be read as more than just a news report. It’s a statement of the fraying of nerves as the economic situation worsens and possibly a parting of the ways, which I deeply lament.
Just in passing, President Obama in the accompanying photo looks really worn. Again I sympathize.
If it proves possible, I hope he takes note and mends whatever fences may need mending here, without abandoning what he feels it’s right to do.
America’s ALWAYS tried to do down Britain
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Mail Online
Last updated at 10:40 AM on 11th June 2010
https://tinyurl.com/2a2x22z
Barack Obama Friend or foe? As the oil continues to gush in the Gulf of Mexico, angry rhetoric has gushed from President Barack Obama’s lips
Has the worm turned at last? As the oil continues to gush in the Gulf of Mexico, angry rhetoric has gushed from President Barack Obama’s lips. His rabid denunciations of BP have damaged the interests not only of that company but of most British people, in a way that must make us wonder whether he leads a friendly 
country.
Vince Cable, the new Business Secretary, calls Obama’s rhetoric ‘extreme and unhelpful’; London mayor Boris Johnson says it’s ‘anti-British’, adding that ‘BP is paying a very, very heavy price indeed’.
Bemusingly, David Cameron says only that he understands the U.S. administration’s ‘frustration’, although he promises to take up the matter with Obama, after the Prime Minister returns from Afghanistan – where British troops are fighting and dying on behalf of the United States, it may be recalled.
‘Extreme and unhelpful’ is no exaggeration. Obama has played to the gallery by saying that he would like to sack Tony Hayward, head of BP; the president talks in a cheap way about ‘kicking ass’. Whether or not the American president can kick our asses, he can certainly hurt our wallets and purses.
As BP’s share price has plummeted, it has lost £55billion of its market value, and the company’s entire outlook is very bleak, which affects most of us. Every British insurance company, building society and pension fund has large holdings of BP shares in its portfolio.
If you have a pension, at present or in prospect, your income falls with every sour word Obama speaks. It’s a fine way for a friend to behave, if indeed we should regard the president as a friend.
His rhetoric is repellently hypocritical as well as demagogic. Quite apart from the fact that Hayward and his colleagues have every interest in plugging the spill, for years past BP has filled Washington’s coffers with tax revenue, and fed the American people’s unquenchable thirst for cheap petrol.
(Steve: Ordinarily I’d delete the “more” section, but you can see from it that more reporters at the Mail than just Wheatcroft are getting restless, perhaps even the Mail itself.)
More…
* MICHAEL HANLON: When disaster strikes, the U.S. will NEVER take the blame
* MARY ELLEN SYNON: Why is Cameron surprised at Obama’s views on ‘British Petroleum’?
* ALEX BRUMMER: This great British company faces death by a thousand cuts
* MAIL COMMENT: Time for Mr Cameron to speak up for BP
* CHRIS LEADBEATER: Don’t let compassion fatigue disguise how much stands to be lost to this oil
When Obama continually refers to BP as ‘British Petroleum’, which is no longer its formal name, he is saying something revealing about himself, and his Anglophobic spite will come as no surprise to those who have followed his career, and read his memoir Dreams From my Father.
He seems to have made up the part about his father being tortured by the British in Kenya, but there’s no question that Obama nurses a disdain for and even dislike of this country.
Pelicans fly over a small island off the coast of Louisiana surrounded by a boom to protect it from the oil spill
Safety measures: Pelicans fly over a small island off the coast of Louisiana which has been surrounded by a boom to protect it from the oil spill. The disaster has wiped billions off BP’s value
Instead of reciprocating his feelings, we should maybe take the opportunity to look harder at our connection with the United States, and at that ridiculous phrase ‘special relationship’. On the whole Englishmen have used the phrase much more than Americans, although one exception was the affable if inept Senator John McCain.
A few years before he was defeated for the presidency by Obama, he visited England, and was interviewed. ‘The special relationship between our two countries will endure throughout the 21st century,’ McCain said. ‘I say that with total confidence because it’s lasted for 200 years.’
It has what? The senator’s ‘200 years’ would take us back to the beginning of the 19th century, or let’s say to 1812. What was special about the relationship that year was that the two countries were at war.
Shortly after he had taken us into the appalling Iraq war, by way of telling a pack of porkies with Alastair Campbell’s sordid help, Tony Blair visited Washington to be greeted by President Bush – ‘Thank you, friend’ – and cheered to the echo by Congress for services rendered. In his smarmy speech, Blair mentioned the burning of Washington by the British in 1814 and obsequiously said: ‘I know it’s kinda late, but sorry.’
Had he known more history, he might have been aware that this was only one episode in a very fraught story. For most of the 19th century a large part of the British Army had to be stationed in Canada to protect it from its southern neighbour, and at one point Sir Robert Peel warned Parliament about the grave danger of a war with the United States.
Barack Obama
Environmental disaster: President Obama and National Incident Commander Thad Allen make a statement after being briefed on the BP oil spill. Obama has been accused of handling the crisis in an ‘anti-British’ way
In 1895 the two countries nearly went to war again over an incomprehensible border dispute in South America, and bloodshed was avoided only by the forbearance of Lord Salisbury, the prime minister.
A certain kind of fawning Tory likes to talk about the way the Americans have generously rescued us in the past century. This is historical claptrap. When the Great War began in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson worried that he might need to intervene – on the German side.
In 1917, the United States did at last enter the war, after the British had suffered hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded. Even then the Americans sustained very few casualties by European standards, as they did in the next war.
This time they waited from September 1939 until December 1941, and then they went to war only because the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on the United States (not the other way round). And before that, the supposedly generous Lend-Lease agreement had stripped us of overseas assets and destroyed the British exporting economy for decades to come.
Any idea of a special relationship should have been ended in 1956 when Washington pulled the rug from under the British and French when their troops had gone to Suez. That didn’t stop President Johnson from subsequently demanding British troops to serve in Vietnam. Mercifully, Harold Wilson, in his one good deed as prime minister, politely declined.
Since then we have been taken into another terrible war in which we had no reason to fight by Tony Blair, who throughout his career assiduously served the interests of another country. Our rewards from Washington have ranged from a tariff likely to destroy what’s left of the British steel industry, to studied American neutrality over the Falklands, to Obama’s grandstanding attacks on BP.
A year ago Gordon Brown visited Washington to be publicly humiliated by Obama (remember the exchange of gifts: thoughtful presents for the president and his children, trashy DVDs and toys for the Browns in return).
If a dark cloud of oil can now have a silver lining, then it might at least lead us to reassess our ignoble relationship with Washington. If the American president is going to ignore or even damage British interests, then let him.
But might not our own government stand up for those interests? For a start, some of the money we’ve all lost through the BP debacle, and presidential venom, could at least be recouped by bringing our troops home from a hopeless American war in Afghanistan.
Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1285716/Obamas-BP-oil-spill-ire-Americas-ALWAYS-tried-Britain.html#ixzz0uMkC4mDF