THE SMUGS DON'T WORK

Bill Maher, patron saint of smug

We love language here at British Intelligence, and we often discuss the semantic nuance of certain words here at our modeish new quarantine centre. It took us a while to get it finished, actually, because the feng shui woman said we couldn’t have the bar facing away from the moonlit heron’s path, or some such village wise-woman blather. She wasn’t Chinese either. All very well having feng shui, but not if you come down with a bad case of ah-chooey! No, she’s Belgian, from Pont Street, just off Sloane Square. But I digress.

‘Smug’ is a funny little word, and should, we believe, have been the eighth dwarf. It summons up a look, more than anything else, the slappable face, the look of condescension and minor triumph, the, well, smugness of the smug.

Possibly the smuggest people in the world, the super-smug, the hyper-smug, übersmuggen, are American talk show hosts. They have taken their smug pills, pulled on their smug-branded T-shirts, and will be appearing on a smugscreen very near you soon.

A Nijinsky of smugness is Bill Maher, the one who looks as though he has had his nose broken not as a cosmetic procedure, but as though he had called our security man, Barry Shand, a nonce. Maher hosts something called ‘HBO’s Real Time’, and is the kind of weaselly Leftist modern music-hall man who occasionally goes all faux conservative, just to keep the pot hot. He is a sort of American Piers Morgan although, to be fair, Maher is not a complete c (I am almost certain there were particular words we agreed we would not use. Correct me if I’m wrong. Ed.).

Anyway, when Americans want political opinion and wisdom, they tend to treat their talk-show hosts as though they were The Old Man of the Mountain, and Maher is no exception. He is now of the opinion that the impeachment carnival that came to town with a rooty-toot-toot and left with its pants – I’m not talking about trousers, I’m talking about pants – round its ankles was a bad idea. Trump has been emboldened, quoth Maher, and can now continue his war on accountability. Orange man bad and getting badder.

The American entertainment industry still does not even begin to get Donald Trump, and there is a psychologically straightforward reason for this genuine bafflement. The Americans are used, not to genuine statesmen and governors, but rather to actors playing those parts. Reagan and Schwarzenegger are rather literal applications of this principle, but the rest of the political class who are non-thesps are still actors, they just went to a different type of drama school.

Now, actors showbiz gets. One of their own. But Trump came from the wrong side of the tracks. He wasn’t groomed by the finishing schools of American politics and he didn’t kiss anybody’s arse – it’s not ass, that’s what Jesus mosied into town on. It’s arse – to get the gig. Hollywood doesn’t get Trump because they can’t see the script and the lighting and the key grip.

‘Impeachment’ would have scared the crap out of most presidents because it is the Room 101 of a presidency. With Trump, it was a case of, Room 101? Let’s go. Rats? Love ‘em! Bring ‘em on. Got any special sauce? It didn’t faze him because he knew he could beat the deep state, and he did. The fading taunts of Skeletor – aka Nancy Pelosi – as their hopes died were genuinely pathetic. ‘We will just keep on impeaching’, has the same ring as a kid with a bloody nose tearfully shouting, ‘I’m going to get my brother on you’.

The Democrats seem determined to give Trump a second term, as I imagine they think he will be left holding the baby when the depression hits and the dustbowl yawns. How else can one explain Joe Biden? If you had Biden and Pelosi in your wardrobe, what would you have? Skeletons in the closet. Boom and, indeed, boom, but there has to be an explanation for grave-robbing just to put up a nominee. Imagine how well the smart, sassy and non-conformist (she champions free speech!) Tulsi Gabbard would be doing now!

Impeachment was a ruse to make it look as though the Dems were not just sitting on their tushes while the Donald swanked and stalked about like Spider-Man’s old foe, the Kingpin. Pelosi, Mueller, Waters, Schiff – who always looks as though someone is squeezing his testicles very hard indeed – were all a sideshow, the people throwing wet sponges at some poor Swiss girl on a bicycle on It’s a Knockout!

Never forget that in the land of the fundamentally stupid, the one frontally lobed man is king. But Americans, particularly the American Left, can’t see that, as they are a particularly smug people, and nothing guarantees smugness like being told what you want to believe by smug famous people. For the Left, Trump is situated somewhere between cretin and retard.

Maher laments that ‘we may not have the old country we once had’. Well, that represents a level of hypocrisy we had hitherto suspected but never seen displayed so brazenly, to misquote Withnail (see the excellent revisit of Withnail and I, incidentally, in this very issue of British Intelligence). What, Maher wants to go all Norman Rockwell, Mom and apple pie? Right. And if the Queen had balls she’d be the King. What Maher means is that things were going so nicely under Obama. Cultural Marxism was this season’s colour, the great replacement was well underway, the end of America – equivalent to the Rapture for the Left – was approaching. And then Trump has to spoil it all by doing something stupid like win the election.

Maybe that’s why Donald Trump looks so… so… Y’all know what kinda look he got!

Photo credit: David Shankbone