© REUTERS/Clodagh KilcoyneFILE PHOTO: US President Joe Biden meets with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at Farmleigh House, in Dublin.
The president is using his Irish identity to bully Brexit Britain.Power often wears the mask of weakness in the 21st century. Think of those strapping, angry 'transwomen' who cry victimhood even as they harass real women. Or privileged students in the luxury surrounds of Oxford or Yale heaping pressure on hapless administrators to decolonise the curriculum so that they might be spared the pain of reading Shakespeare, Chaucer and other long-dead white men. Or Hillary Clinton depicting herself as a victim of sexism even as she wielded her extraordinary power to brand half her compatriots as deplorables. Julie Burchill calls them
'cry-bullies' - a 'hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper'.
Now there's President Biden, the most powerful cry-bully in the world. He's taken the grievance machine global. He speaks of his historic pain even as he impresses his imperial power across the Earth. Witness his
visit to Ireland. He's hyping up his status as a descendent of the poor Irish who fled Famine-era Ireland on
coffin ships (the 'cry' bit) in order that he might add some identitarian weight to his bossing around of Britain and Ireland in the here and now (the 'bully' bit). He poses as a victim of imperialism - his ancestors fled the auld country 'because of what the Brits had been doing', he once
said - even as he engages in imperialism. Behold the weaponisaton of 'Oirishness', the deployment of that self-pitying identity to the cause of fortifying American power in the world.
Comment: If there was something for James to legitimately prosecute - versus suing - it would have been done by now.
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