Weekend Open Thread: In ‘Brexit,’ Brea Votes to Secede from OC. Wait — No, Uh … the United Kingdom Did WHAT???

By
Greg Diamond
– June 24, 2016Posted in: "The OC", Fresh Juice

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British Joker imitating Trump

The one thing from 2016 that will definitely be in the history books (if such still exist) 100 years from now just happened: the United Kingdom has just voted to exit the European Union, reversing the course of transnational cooperation in one of the few places where it seems to have been more or less working.  Scotland — which voted overwhelmingly and uniformly through its territory against leaving the EU– is expected to leave  the UK instead and petition for entry to the EU on its own country.  Many think that Northern Ireland will leave the UK as well, getting automatic entry into the EU as well by voting to reunify with Northern Ireland, which for anyone above 40 is just a jaw-dropping possibility.

Here at home, Bernie Sanders voters are freaking out because Boris Johnson — the quarterback of Team Brexit pictured above and the likely next Prime Minister of the UK now that his main opponent on the issue, Prime Minister David Cameron, is resigning in disgrace — is cut from the very same bolt of cloth as Donald Trump, except for being very smart and actually funny, if you like aggressive put-down humor.  So for us, this is like a huge klaxon alarm going off saying “TRUMP CAN WIN THIS YEAR GODDAMMIT AND IT WON’T EVEN NECESSARILY SHOW UP IN THE POLLS UNTIL AFTER IT’S TOO LATE!”  You can’t beat a charismatic right-wing populist with a centrist milksop like Cameron (or Hillary Clinton); you need someone inspiring like a left-wing populist who can argue that people’s own economic problems aren’t due to poor people being too brown but to rich people being too powerful.

But then again, Trump is not the politician that Boris — the departing Mayor of London — is, so the day of reckoning for Democratic Party centrism may yet not come until we hit an iceberg under Captain Hillary in the 2018 midterms and get crushed in the 2020 general election by, who knows, Ann Coulter or someone like that.

What does this mean for Orange County, you ask?  Two things,

(1) Housing prices will drop as foreign investors instead go buy up the largely evacuated financial district in London, and

(2) Villa Park will become the new capitol of the United States.

This is your Weekend Open Thread.  Talk about that, or anything else you’d like, within reasonable bounds of decency, decorum, discretion, and stiff-upper-lipness.

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About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)