Kaput is the word that best describes Barack Obama’s once torrid love affair with the British media.
And while seventeen months can’t exactly be called a one-night stand, the Telegraph UK reports on President Obama’s walk of shame:
The BBC reports of Barack Obama’s speech last night are about as derisive as it would be possible to be about someone you were describing only a few months ago as the incarnation of Hope and Optimism. Yes indeed, the romance is over. The British media have decided that it was all a cruel deception: Obama is just one more ranting populist president who will do anything to divert attention from his own failure to get a grip. And this is not just about BP and the fate of all those pension funds.
Nor is it simply the demonising of Big Oil – which makes the US president sound as if he were recruiting his speech writers direct from the student union – that has evoked the UK media’s collective sneer. What has been much commented upon – especially by those fastidiously liberal BBC correspondents – is Obama’s pointedly bellicose language: the US is apparently engaged in a “battle” to be waged in very personal, anthropomorphic terms “against an oil spill that is assaulting” its coast. Considering how relentlessly the Bush “war on terror” was ridiculed, how long will it take before the Obama “war on an oil slick” is labelled as absurd? Given the tone of this morning’s coverage, perhaps not very long at all.
Lyndon Johnson famously said, “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”
Barack Obama can now say, “If I’ve lost the British media, I’ve lost something, but I’m not sure what it is because my Teleprompter seems to be on the fritz.”
Source: Telegraph UK
