One of the biggest stories of the past few days was that British tabloids are annoyed that President Biden removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office.
I’m like, “fantastic!”
That’s the headline? That’s today’s international incident? I’ll take it! The president didn’t dismiss multiple nations as “shithole countries” or physically push aside a world leader to get better position in a photo-op, or lavish praise on a tyrant, or take children from families fleeing poverty and war and hold them in cages.
He had a bust moved from one place to another.
Stuff like this is the reason the media secretly loved our ex-president. Great meaty stories of abuses of power, corruption and self-dealings. Now they’re back to manufacturing outrage about redecorating choices.
I’ll take it.
There’s a slightly darker aspect to this “controversy.” President Obama also moved the bust, a present from the British Government. When he moved it conservatives were “outraged” since Churchill is a conservative icon of sorts. Boris Johnson, then mayor of London, said Obama had moved it because he was a half-Kenyan anti-colonialist.
No such outrage from Johnson this time:“The Oval Office is the president’s private office and it is up to the president to decorate it as he wishes,” Mr Johnson said during a daily Westminster press briefing.
Maybe he realized that whoever they are, the President of the United States sort of can’t not be a colonialist, what with the colonies we maintain and the virtual economic colonialism we encourage.
Or maybe since President Biden is a White guy then he obviously has no hidden agenda against the old British Empire on which the sun has all but set. Or perhaps it was because everyone has come to their senses over the past four years and realized that the bust looks a little like the charred remains of a honey baked ham.
"manufacturing outrage"--a fine description of the newspapers of the past few days. Interestingly, the reader comment columns have risen to the challenge. OrangeMan--often left out of reporting about the end of the Afghanistan War--has not been forgotten by those who read the manufactured outrage about the way this all-but-endless war has finally run its full course.