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Wednesday, December 06, 2017

A Tweet Too Far

Not that Britain (as well as others in Europe) doesn't have a serious problem with radical Moslems in their society. They do. And they know it. But retweeting a post from a far-right group highlighting that real problem should be unacceptable.

The first rule in our diplomacy should be that we don't make trouble for our best ally:

US diplomats have dropped plans for Donald Trump to conduct a visit to Britain in January amid a war of words between the two countries’ leaders.

The war of words waged over the Tweet by the president that in the big picture of the internal Islamist threat is correct on the one hand and on the other hand Prime Minister May who rightfully rejected the source of the Tweet  is ridiculous (although May should remember that when Churchill vowed to fight enemies in the streets, before it got to that he promised to fight them on the beaches and landing grounds as the enemy entered Britain). Trump should fix this friction.

Come on. There wasn't a better source for the same message that the president couldn't have substituted if he gave a White House intern 10 minutes to find?

May has enough political problems trying to engineer Brexit, and we would expect her to let this slide?

A special relationship demands more than what the president gave it.