Sadly Hilarious

 Liz Truss was outlasted by the lettuce. In what is now the shortest tenured prime ministership in history, Luz Truss managed to screw up in just about every possible way a "leader" can. Truss was always a rank opportunist, but the thing about being a PM, is you actually have to be good at your job, or your party will sack you.

One of the funnier Tweets I saw this morning was Anthony Scaramucci himself saying that Truss lasted 4.5 Scaramucci units. (In case, you forgot, the Mooch was brought on board Trump's White House to solidify their communications department and lasted 10 days.) The thing is: Trump's manifest dysfunction and incompetence was visible to everyone close to him. The number of McMasters and Kellys and even Barrs with "tell all" memoirs about what a shitshow Trump was are thick on the ground. 

But we were stuck with him.  And if Republicans do as well as I fear in a couple of weeks, we may set up his return to power.

In Britain, if the PM becomes a liability...well, ask Liz Truss.

All of this - every last bit of it - is a byproduct of the Brexit fiasco. Brexit was absolute shite policy that the wiser heads in Parliament wouldn't touch. But David Cameron thought he could puncture the anti-EU bubble with a referendum. Instead, he has damned near wrecked his country and certainly his party. Brexit gave us the clownish farce of Boris Johnson and now the complete erosion of basic competence of Truss.

Brexit also was the bellwether of Trump. Based on nativist and racist assumptions about immigrants and the non-English, Brexit was a populist pack of lies pushed by cynical assholes like Nigel Farage, for whom racism was both a deeply held belief and a ploy for power. 

The Conservative Party - at least its Parliamentary members - mostly knows that Brexit was a terrible idea and is destroying their country's economy and place of standing in the world. Still, in much the same way the GOP catered to Trump (Mitch McConnell after the election of 2020: "What does it hurt to humor him?") the Tories catered to the whims of the rural Britons who don't like seeing someone wearing a hijab on High Street. The GOP can't cross Trumpists; the Tories can't cross Brexiteers.

In a democracy, ideally the electorate looks at how a party intends to govern, they look at how they have governed in the past and they make a reasoned decision based on that evidence. 

Britain is supposed to avoid this sort of farcical incompetence, but Brexit forced them to "make a cheese submarine." In America, the "thermostatic elections" means that we are about to give a party that has manifestly no idea how to govern and no real desire to learn how to govern control of at least the lower house of our legislature. To the degree that they have ideas, they are unpopular and awful (cutting Social Security and Medicare). Once in power, they will cut off aid to Ukraine and force a sovereign debt crisis. And it just won't matter.

To the degree that "conservatism" consisted of ideas about economic "freedom" and empowering the entrepreneurial class...OK, it was mostly bullshit, but it was coherent bullshit. 

Now "conservatism" is no more than some angry old White Dude and his angrier wife standing in the middle of the road screaming at his imagined enemies while he lights the world on fire around him.

Ugh.