Prat of 2018 – We have a winnah – Theresa May!

Posted by Pointman on December 15, 2018 · 30 Comments 

At the best of times, running the prat of the year is necessarily a hurried affair, as the Christmas rush is bearing down on us and there’s all those easily forgotten tasks to be done and ticked off on the list you’ve carefully written in best on the back of a used envelope, which you’ll misplace within the first 24 hours after its creation. Nothing ever gets truly lost, especially in my house, it merely creeps off to find some protective cover somewhere in the tip. No worries, it’ll turn up as usual either years later or when I’m cleaning away the debris after the New Year’s thrash.

I’ll hold it in my hand. It gives me a cheeky unticked grin and I reflect on the futility of ever trying to organise myself. A quote from Emerson’s essay on self-reliance, which by fortunate accident I tripped over in my youth, springs to mind – “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. It’s not a bad rule of thumb if applied judiciously. Organise the required fundamentals of your life into some uncomplicated sort of solid, unimaginative but above all a minimal-maintenance base, and then your mind is set free to meander through those dark forests of the night. There’s some good stuff in there, and that does include the occasional timber wolf.

My usual writing habit is to lock myself in the study on Sunday, all phones off, drag the spare desk over to barricade the door and having secured the perimeter, knock out the main body of a new piece. I don’t edit or polish – just blast it out. I’ll come back to it on Tuesday, do some editing and rewriting, then leave it alone until Thursday, when I’ll do the same again, but add a final polish. Around Friday or Saturday, if I’m as satisfied with it as I’m going to get, I publish. Enough is enough. Stop bloody dabbing, just put down your brush, this picture is finished.

Events over the last two months have conspired to drive a horse and carriage through that comfortable writing schedule. There have been so many significant events like the mid-terms, election tampering, Brexit betrayal and Macron’s suppression of the French using domestic forces and a nascent EU army, all of which were fast-moving and unfolding in unpredictable ways on an almost hourly basis, I had to abandon one of the few consistencies in my life.

A week is a long time in politics, as Harold Wilson observed, and writing about something on Sunday and guessing what it might mutate into by Friday seemed a fruitless exercise, so I was perforce moved to a write on Friday schedule and publish on that day or Saturday. The main thrust of this blog is politics and these were all major political events which couldn’t be ignored.

Apart from a few rough articles, the biggest casualty of all this winging it has been my beloved prat of the year competition. Instead of the usual kick off piece at the start of November, a week of nominations and then a leisurely six weeks or so of voting, the whole thing has been brutally telescoped into just over three weeks. None the less, it has had the usual types of alarums and excursions associated with the Pratties.

For those reasons, here I am on Friday, writing the Pratties wrap up piece. There is also another contributing factor, which though less compelling, has definitely cooled off my usual alacrity to close off the Pratties before the Christmas break. All the contenders are politicians, and with one and a half exceptions, ones I heartily dislike. I usually try and inject a note of humour into this piece, but when discussing such political scum who’ve spent this year doing nothing more than damaging their countries and the people living in them, while all the time looking down their long patrician noses at such people, that’s a big ask. It really is.

Anyway, here goes. Coming in fifth and therefore last, we have the delightful 27 yo Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez AKA Alexandria Occasional-Cortex by her bent over in stitches admirers. Unlike the rest of the finalists, she’s a pure thoroughbred prat who ticks every box. Passionate about things she actually hasn’t bothered to learn anything about, such a prefixing one of her Youtube rants about something or other by enumerating the three branches of government, but by some miracle realising Trump, though president, didn’t count as a branch of government in a constitutional sense. To be fair, upon realising her mistake, she did go on to correct herself, but lamentably that second guess at the three branches was wrong as well.

In case you’re ever asked Alexandria, the correct answer to that puzzling question is the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, all of which are supposedly kept strictly separate by something called the Separation of Powers, which roughly means they’re not allowed to unduly influence each other, but enough basic civics for one day – your head must be hurting by now. In passing, there’s a New York AG who’s just announced she’s going after President Trump and anyone associated with him, despite the Everest-sized legal problem she’s just presented herself with by making such a public statement of prior bias before even lodging any charges she might dream up.

Alexandria seems to wing it much too often for her own good. A little bit of engage brain before slipping the clutch on your mouth is definitely in order, but in the apparent absence of any restraining influence or one she’ll listen to, I’m confident she’ll lurch from one PR gobshite disaster to the next for the coming four years, which’ll make great headlines for her detractors and do nothing for the people who voted for her.

On social media, she openly threatens congressional subpoenas against people poking fun at her antics on social media. Yes, she has that nasty bullying streak most socialists acquire when given an ounce of power. For starters, that isn’t a superpower she’ll automatically be given when she finally enters the House, but also illustrates the deeper problem she has. Being ignorant is a state that can be easily rectified by some study, but stupidity is an incurable cross to bear for life.

Shooting a selfie video of yourself showing your ignorance of basic civics is bad, but uploading it to Youtube as is, rather than editing or reshooting the whole thing, shows extreme poor judgment. More than in any other field of endeavour, in politics the optics are paramount. Threatening the peons with the wonderful powers you won’t have when you enter congress, again shows poor judgment. Selling herself as a good Hispanic Catholic girl to a NY Catholic audience when you’re shacked up with your boyfriend in their city shows poor judgment, which is nearly as bad as selling yourself to a Jewish audience by declaring out of the blue a Jewish heritage hundreds of years back, which also shows poor judgment.

The unlikely image of the eternal Wandering Jew escaping the rampant pogroms in South America to finally settle in the beautiful, sun-drenched poverty of Costa Rica must have raised a few sniggers in the audience, but that wasn’t the real mistake in getting carried away at that event. Nowadays, it’s almost de rigueur if you’re on the left-wing of politics, to hate Jews and all things Jewish, and that’s true on both sides of the Atlantic. I put that mistake down to her being so young and the attendant desire to be accepted and loved by everybody. Those tender emotions combined with her natural stupidity will prove to be her undoing, I think.

In fourth place we have Angela Merkel. I’ve always regarded her as a malignant, pear-shaped dwarf in a grey trouser suit with all the cut and style of a bottom heavy sack of spuds and a face that could curdle milk at a distance of two hundred paces. Melania, you can rest easy on the fashion front.

She was head of the CDU party for years, but her policies, particularly on emigration, have made her unelectable or to restate that, any party being let by her is now viewed as unelectable. The solution of course was for her to step down and be replaced by an exact but younger version of her good herself, while she retained control of the Chancellorship.

We’re talking a Mini-Me Merkel or a Panzerfraukampfwagen MK II. Stand by for a little bit of back seat driving of the party coming up, wink wink, nod nod, say no more Guv’nor.

I don’t see such an obvious subterfuge stopping the growth of the AfD party, which she thinks can be safely ignored because they’re the Niebelungen’s particular manifestation of the despised wave of “nationalism” sweeping around the world, and threatening to shunt globalism and all its cohorts into the dustbin of failed social experiments. That would be her, Macron, May and various assorted loonies in America.

Her early political opinions were formed in East Germany, where her rabid socialist but patently deranged university lecturer of a father moved the whole family to the East, against the tide of Germans stampeding to the West, and where she quickly rose up the Communist hierarchy.

She’s at heart an authoritarian globalist, a spin-off or new manifestation of the supposed internationalist spirit at the heart of the old Soviet-era communism, and despises any notion of Germany first, as was illustrated by her removing a German flag off the stage when she’d won some election or another. From the look of disdain on her face and the prissy thumb and forefinger hold she had as she removed the distasteful symbol, it was almost as if it smelled of sewage.

That’s the essential difference between her and Trump, and why he’s gone out of his way to publically crush her and the globalist mirage of a United States of Europe potentially encroaching on American power there. She’s made no secret of blaming Trump for the destruction of the globalists dreams, a singularly inadvisable move when dealing with a force of nature like Trump. He never forgets any slight …

On a daily basis, Germans are being killed, raped or suffering from criminal attacks originating from a migrant wave of almost two million foreigners. The German press simply won’t report it and just this week, Merkel dismissed the tragic ambush, rape and murder by drowning of Maria Ladenburger, a 16 yo girl, as an isolated incident. Pretending there’s no problem when there actually is a very big problem, is her problem, and it’s quite distinct from her other big problem of being arrogant. That determined blindness and arrogance will ultimately lead to German politics moving rightwards and becoming predominantly nationalist.

Of the two million migrants well entrenched in Germany’s welfare system and working it expertly for all it’s worth, less than a few hundred have jobs. The German government has now been reduced to offering to pay one year of living costs, if migrants and asylum seekers return to their home countries. Balance that offer off against a lifetime of indolence living high off the hog on German welfare, and you can see why there have been so few takers for the deal. What an incredible disaster for Europe and the EU Merkel’s open border policy has been.

A very popular joke currently doing the rounds in Germany is about a migrant’s first day there. He decides to take a walk around the town and meet some German blokes. The first man he meets, he introduces himself as new to Germany and asks what’s it like here. The man replies he doesn’t know as he’s from Libya himself. He meets another man, but he’s from Syria , and then another who’s from the Lebanon. All day he’s looking for a German but with no success. Finally he asks the last man, who’s from Nigeria, I’ve been walking around this town all day trying to meet a German man, but I can’t find a single one. Where have they all gone to?

They’re all at work to support us, the stranger replies, and they both burst into laughter. That’s the sort of Schadenfreude joke the Jerries tell when they’re reaching boiling point. It’s an anger release valve that Angela, like all globalists who’ve had the mandatory humour bypass operation, simply can’t see. It’s not so much about nationalism, it’s more about protecting Western values, culture, centuries-long Christian traditions, free speech and getting some response other than a disapproving thin-lipped silence from the political elite to everyday concerns.

Dragging his sorry ass into turd place is Emanuelle Macron, soon to be known as the butcher of the fifth republic, if the Yellow Jackets have their way. If some of the salacious or malicious rumours being spread with regard to his past and current furtive exploits are to be believed, he’s not above some rear end Charlie antics when his ever-present Mummy, pretending to be an older wife by 24 years, indulges him and lets him off the leash, though she’s rumoured herself to be a quite racy old biddy when the fancy strikes her. He very definitely has a thing for older women.

As usual in countries being subsumed by globalism, what used to be called the free press is now in reality the propaganda organ of government, censoring, spinning or simply not reporting news items which might be unpalatable to the current administration. As always happens in the absence of honest reporting, the first casualty is rumour control, hence lurid stories like the above flying about all over the place. As there’s no reportage on them, they’re quite naturally taken as the real truth being suppressed as usual.

His arrogance and incompetence in dealing with what started off as relatively small demonstrations against yet another supposedly green tax have so far resulted in six dead, hundreds injured or maimed for life, thousands arrested, and we’re now awaiting the body count of this coming weekend’s demonstrations, the fifth consecutive one where France has been paralysed by the people in mass revolt against a leader and administration that’s totally out of touch.

I thought in the current climate of violent suppression of dissent in France, he’d finish higher, but he didn’t. I take from that a certain modicum of pride in the readership here that they, like myself, probably found precious little humour to be found in the brutal treatment he’s been meting out to the ordinary working men and women of France.

He’s the sort of cowardly leader who ordered the harsh treatment of his own people and then hid in a bunker for the whole weekend, not daring to show his ratty little face until Monday evening, when he appeared on television and offered a meager bribe equivalent to croissant crumbs brushed off the high dining table in the Élysée Palace. Another storming of the Bastille might have to occur to get him off his throne. Like then, the regular army are making disturbing statements about the citizens being in revolt and more topically the deleterious effects of uncontrolled migration. They’re using words like treason.

To a large extent, he brought all his problems on himself and then proceeded through sheer incompetence, to manage them into even bigger problems. LIke Merkel, he’s up against a resurgent nationalism which is in response to people being looked down upon for being traditional French and then swamped by a migrant tidal wave that’s tearing away at the very heart of France. In the space of a couple of years, no go areas have been established in all major towns, and it’s worth your life to venture into any of them.

Like Germany, there’s a wave of migrant-related violent crime; terrorism, murder, rape, assault, robbery and drug dealing. What were at one time pristine monuments to French culture have been vandalised to the point of being almost unrecognisable. Parts of Paris – it might as well be Mogadishu. Even the basic Christian tradition of the country is under violent attack, with elderly priests serving mass to their parishioners getting their heads hacked off in church.

The storm is not coming Monsieur le Président, c’est arrivé.

This year’s runner-up, Justin Trudeau, won Climate Prat of the Year in 2016, and has not rested on his laurels in the two years since. When I remarked we’d one and a half prats in the finals, Occasional-Cortex was the one, and Trudeau was the half. One half of him is incompetent, but he’s so clueless, he doesn’t even realise it. That’s the bit that’s supposed to be in charge of a modern twenty-first century country but that turns out to be him handing out wads of money to people and organisations who know as long as they continue to swoon in his presence, he’ll keep giving them dollars.

Somewhat like Merkel and Macron, he’s basically above any sort of trenchant criticism by the media, in his case by the simple expedient of offering to give them the best part of half a billion dollars to keep printing nice stories about how the sun shines out of his arse. In the meantime, revenue positive industries like oil, regarded by him and his eco-loon cronies as “dirty”, are being regulated out of existence in places like Alberta. How all the guys working in industries like that and now out of work are going to survive is anyone’s guess. Certainly not any concern of his. No Siree Bob.

What always pisses me off about the brainless, shallow, trust-fund offspring of the degenerate rich, which is exactly what he is, who go on to be political leaders, is that they’ve never stared at a utility bill and knew there wasn’t enough cash in the biscuit tin on the shelf in the kitchen to cover it. Your best hope is to string it out until the second and final reminder arrives. You know, the red one warning that things are now about to get cut off unless you cough up some money. That’s a vital bit of life education they’re sorely lacking.

On the foreign relations front, since he’s perceived as being a complete weakling, he’s been shat on from various heights by almost everyone who bothers to join the orderly queue, most recently the Chinese of all people. Canadians in China are getting arrested for various specious reasons. This looks to be a straight tit-for-tat response to the arrest of the CFO of Huawei, the unfortunately named Meng Wanzhou, at Vancouver airport over a covered warrant the Americans had hidden in a trapdoor spider type of ambush for just such a windfall coming through the arrival gate into a country with an extradition treaty. The company had been running a flanker around sanctions against Iran, which is a big no no in this post-Obama era of Realpolitik. The days of flying pallet fulls of cash to tin pot dictators are over. It’s all hardball now.

I think Trudeau might have to yet again take one up his own wazoo to get out of being in between the rock and a hard place that are China and America. Perhaps if he does a bit of Bangra dancing for the Chinese, it’ll melt their inscrutable heart and they’ll let the pawns go, though I wouldn’t bet on it.

Despite all his up-front bluster about Canada going its own way if Trump dumped NAFTA, Trump did exactly that and Canada stayed put. Trudeau had made some very ill-judged and unnecessary remarks in the past round about the time of Trump’s winning the presidency, and Trump has that bad combination a very long memory and a real zest for red meat vengeance, as Obama can attest to.

In the renegotiation, Trump cut off Trudeau’s head, took a big shit down his neck but thoughtfully replaced his head so he can continue to wear silly hats. In response, Trudeau countered in his own unique but devastating fashion by insisting the agreement called the USMCA everywhere else was to be referred to by the acronym USCMA in Canada, thereby putting Canada before Mexico. So there, put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. fancy pants Presidente de México, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Gawd ‘elp Canada.

Apart from his youthful but false eyebrows falling off when he was in the middle of a presser with the tiny but perfectly formed midget Micron, he’s started to do a bit of Indian dancing again, much to the toe-curling embarrassment of a whole nation, and we’re not talking the Sioux nation here, but you can’t keep a good prat down. Youtube has thoughtfully removed most of them in an effort to protect him from himself, and all that’s left are a few desultory shots of him trying to do a bit of attention seeking at various G-7 and G-20 summits and being roundly ignored by everybody as an irritant. The only way he’d have got any attention from the assembled dignitaries was if he was wearing nothing but a G-string.

He did a foreign relations trip to India, where he dressed himself and the entire family up in various traditional Bollywood-style costumes and made so many gaffs, all the poor benighted Indian PM Mr. Modi could do was avoid him like the plague for days, until it was nearly time for him to bugger off home, much to everyone’s relief, and that included the Canadian trade delegation that had the misfortune to accompany him. Never again. As foreign trade related visits go, it was well up there with all the other great biblical disasters of foreign visits like a certain Mr. Meteor visiting the Yucatan at the end of the Cretaceous and giving the dinosaurs around the world a very bad day indeed.

Finally we come to this year’s winner, who is Theresa May by a long chalk. You might be tempted to think that she won so big simply because this blog is in English, therefore a lot of people in the UK voted for her, but that would be a mistake. The demographics of the geographic spread in the readership here have been remarkably consistent over the years. 25% UK, 25% USA, 25% the Antipodes and the remaining 25% scattered over Europe and the rest of the world. She’s also the first person from the UK to win the competition.

I think her winning and pulling it off so handsomely, reflects something new in British politics – a large proportion of the populace actively hate her and with a personal venom that in my experience is unprecedented with a mainstream political leader in Britain. In the face of a parliament that has been deliberately dragging its heels for over two years in implementing the wishes of the British people as expressed in the Brexit referendum, she’s become the focus of their frustration and anger with the whole pack of elitist curs lolling about on the green leather benches in Westminster.

The most charitable interpretation of her results in negotiating the details of the country’s exit from the EU, is that she’s the worst negotiator since some clueless red Indian chief sold the island of Manhattan to Dutch settlers for a handful of coloured beads, but that notion ignores the simple fact that she gave assurances to the electorate again and again about trusting her to manage an honest Brexit, but it turns out she lied time after time. She promised the winners of the referendum that although she’d been a remainer, she’d implement their wish to leave the EU.

Instead, after two years arsing about in secrecy behind closed doors with the unelected coterie of bureaucrats in Brussels, she came back with an exit deal which surprise surprise was only an exit in name – it actually tied the UK even tighter into the EU but with the additional downsides of not only preventing another Brexit type of escape from it, but also enshrining government by a foreign power with not a shred of representation in its ruling bodies. Nobody on either the Brexit or Remainer side, except for her remaining and most ardent fans, can find a decent word to be said for the whole cursed deal.

She postponed a ratification vote of it in parliament last week because she knew full well it would never get through, and then survived a no confidence vote by her own gutless party using the promise that she’d resign the leadership before the next general election. The self-centred cowardice of the Tory party in not getting rid of her will be remembered at the next general election. She’s now gone back to the EU on her knees, begging for some fig leaf concessions she can sell to parliament back home, but has been told to Foxtrot Oscar in no uncertain terms by the likes of the inebriate Jean-Claude Juncker.

She’ll be back in parliament shortly for another dollop of humiliation, trying to push through yet again a vote on exactly the same deal which she implicitly conceded wouldn’t get through a Common’s vote barely a week ago. Just as Obama relieved Jimmy Carter of his crown of being the worst president in American history, Theresa May is relieving Neville Chamberlain of the similar dubious honour of being the worst Prime Minister Britain ever had.

Indeed, in mentioning the latter, I’m reminded of Leopold Amery’s words in 1940 to Chamberlain in a critical vote widely understood to be a confidence vote in him – “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go!” He did, Churchill took over the reins and the rest as the saying goes is history.

She’d be wise to heed those words, originally spoken by Oliver Cromwell to the long parliament nearly three centuries before Amery stood up in that same centre of governance and quoted them. Anyway, she’s won the Prat of the Year 2018 prize, and you can rest assured, it’ll be the only thing she’ll ever win from now on.

There is a war going on in the western democracies and it’s the refusal of electorates to blindly follow ruling elites into the national and cultural oblivion they see as the natural consequence of enforced globalisation. They simply don’t want it, and that cannot help but be reflected in this year’s Prat Award. Every finalist was a politician, with the leading four, globalists to some extent or another. Ocasio-Cortez is operating at full capacity just walking and chewing gum at the same time, a clueless Trudeau is only into it because he thinks it’s the fashionable thing to do, but the rest are a completely different kettle of fish.

The three of them, AKA the three M’s, are all determined, hard-core globalists, who’re quite prepared to sell their country down the river to achieve the higher dream of a merger of nations under the all-seeing umbrella of a beneficent EU, and it’s no coincidence that all three of them are coping with severe political disruption in their own countries. I don’t think globalism is going to succeed, no matter how hard it’s force-fed down people’s throats.

What’s actually happened is that people have looked down into that abyss and decided no, not interested in it. In response, those in power have been steadily piling on the pressure, but all that will achieve is a hardening of resistance, civil disobedience and the type of mass demonstrations that are currently rocking France to its very foundations.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Prat of 2017 – We have a winnah – Hillary Clinton!

Climate Prat of 2016 – We have a winnah – Justin Trudeau!

Climate Prat of 2015 – We have a winnah – Barack Obama!

Climate Prat of 2014 – We have a winnah – Chris Turney!

Climate Prat of 2013 – we have a winnah – Dana Nucitelli!

Climate Prat of 2012 – we have a winnah – Peter Gleick!

Description of a climate prat.

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with Humour, Prat award, Pratties