Johnson, Trump: "Odious, graceless, self-serving"

Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the New Republic: The Odious, Graceless, Self-Serving Exit of an Odious, Graceless, Self-Serving Man

....Wednesday July 6, 2022 began with Boris Johnson still, as he believed, secure at 10 Downing Street even after two of his most senior ministers had resigned the evening before, and it ended with an almost universal recognition that the game was up. 

“Almost,” since a delusional Johnson apparently went to bed believing he could bluff it out and get away with it yet again, as he has bluffed and gotten away with scandal, outrage, and betrayal all his life. 

Only on waking early on Thursday did he accept the inevitable and begin drafting his odious, graceless, and self-serving resignation speech, boasting about the “incredible mandate” he had won in the December 2019 election, bleating that it was “eccentric to change governments when we’re delivering so much,” and blaming his fall on the “herd” instinct of his former followers who had abandoned him.

By now you will likely have read something about the reasons for that abandonment. One member of Parliament departed when he was imprisoned for sexual assault on a minor, another when he was seen looking at pornography on his iPhone while in the chamber of the House of Commons. (Really, where do the Tories find them?) 

The Conservatives devastatingly lost the two ensuing by-elections, making clear that Johnson’s supposed electoral magic worked no more. Then another M.P., one of the government whips, drunkenly groped two other men at the highly respectable Carlton Club (where do the Tories…), and Johnson’s response displayed all his faults—the bravado and bluster, the shiftiness and mendacity....

He is something quite unusual among politicians, or indeed among everyone: a man who has never seriously believed in anything all his life apart from self-advancement and self-gratification. In 2016, Johnson betrayed David Cameron, the prime minister, by coming out in support of Leave in the referendum on British membership of the European Union and then playing a prominent and maybe decisive part in the campaign. 

And yet the right-wing, Europhobic, but intelligent columnist Dominic Lawson has said what everyone knows: “Johnson was never in favor of Brexit, until he found it necessary to further his ambition to become Conservative leader.”

What that meant in turn was that Johnson’s relationship with the Tories, and certainly with the Europhobic M.P.s, was always transactional. From the beginning they could see for themselves what he was like. They were prepared to support him as long as he was useful in their desire to “Take back control,” the Leave slogan in 2016, and “Get Brexit done,” the slogan in 2019. 

With both referendum and election won, Johnson had served his purpose and was disposable. A succession of people who worked for him had already resigned in despair. One of them was Lord Geidt, the name of whose position, “ethics advisor to Boris Johnson,” put one in mind of what Oliver St. John Gogarty called the Royal Irish Academy: a treble contradiction in terms....

Rob's comment:

"Odious, graceless, and self-serving." What American politician also fits that description? Yes, of course, The Donald. With the polls showing that President Biden is unpopular, people forget why he was elected in the first place: His opponent was Donald Trump. 

Even many Democrats never cared much for Joe Biden, but in 2020 he was clearly preferable to four more years of  an "odious, graceless, and self-serving" Trump.

This on Johnson also describes Donald Trump: "a man who has never seriously believed in anything all his life apart from self-advancement and self-gratification.'

A week of looking

Death of a star

What the James Webb Space Telescope has seen in a week of looking:

A quintet of galaxies. A nursery of infant stars. A weather report for an exoplanet. And a preview of our own sun’s demise.

After years of delays, a 930,000-mile trip into space and months of speculation over what James Webb Space Telelescope’s  first pictures might reveal, NASA on Tuesday released the first complete set of images captured by its $10-billion observatory.

They show stars in their infancy and in their final gasps, along with sweeping views of the cosmos and the majestic objects in it.

“Every dot of light we see here is an individual star, not unlike our sun. And many of these likely also have planets,” NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn said while introducing an image of the Carina Nebula, a multihued landscape of gas and nascent stars.

“It just reminds me that our sun and our planets and, ultimately, us were formed out of the same kind of stuff that we see here,” she said. “We humans really are connected to the universe. We’re made of the same stuff in this beautiful landscape”....

Rob's comment:

"Us[sic] were formed"? We should have evolved beyond that by now, though Amber gets a pass, since this was spoken not written English. But couldn't a copy editor have intervened without misquoting her?

My takeaway from these remarkable images: the creation myth in our major religious superstitions is even less plausible than before, unless you think god is still at work creating the universe. The ongoing cosmic process is a lot more impressive without assuming any divine involvement.