Theresa May has announced her resignation after three years defined by the impossibility of implementing Brexit. Maybe it’s time to revive the real Obama doctrine.

Reuters

Lisa Van Dusen/For The Hill Times

May 23, 2019

While it may not be the most sensational story about what exiting presidents have left the White House with, Barack Obama sauntering out with the *needlepoint Oval Office throw pillow that bore the motto “Don’t do Stupid Shit” under his arm may be the most consequential.

(Note to readers: While Hill Times style generously allows me to use the word “shit” in this column, I’ve been trying to curb my news-induced swearing — the jars of profanity loonies could pay off the national debt of Azerbaijan — so will grudgingly replace “shit” in the 500 words that follow with “stuff”).

In the absence of that talismanic reminder to the powerful of the world not to do stupid stuff, it seems doing stupid stuff has become a political epidemic. While the purveyors of stupid stuff may not see it that way because they’ve rationalized relentless cascades of stupid stuff as a means to an end — the increasingly brazen corruption, degradation and obliteration of democracy and consolidation of power in unelected hands — it is by any objective, rational measure, most definitely stupid stuff.

One item near the top of any inventory of stupid stuff currently plaguing humanity is Brexit. The entirely avoidable, not utterly inexplicable but certainly unforced error unleashed by David Cameron before he decamped to his un-ironic roll-away shepherd’s hut in the Cotswolds, Brexit has been the second-most spectacular tactical weaponization of the deficiencies of democracy, after the loophole-leveraging, relentless worst-case scenario stuffstorm that is the Trump presidency.

Activated by a divisively slight referendum majority of 51.9 percent after a cynical and corrupt stuffshow of a campaign that produced record Electoral Commission fines for the Leave side fronted by the Falstaffian PM-in-waiting Boris Johnson and the staffian Michael Gove, Brexit has been the United Kingdom’s stupid stuff narrative catalyst that keeps on giving.

Brexit has been the second-most spectacular tactical weaponization of the deficiencies of democracy, after the loophole-leveraging, relentless worst-case scenario stuffstorm that is the Trump presidency

(Fascinatingly, the Leave campaign’s initial response to the investigation of its activities was to repeatedly stonewall and then threaten to judicially review the origins of the investigation. Yes, it is a trans-Atlantic playbook).

Despite all of the above — and epic investigative reporting by the Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr linking the now-defunct democracy-hacking entity Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon and the Leave campaign — Theresa May, who tearfully announced her resignation Friday, consistently justified her refusal to simply end the colossally stuffy own-goal of Brexit by revoking Article 50 on the depraved grounds that it would insult democracy by disrespecting a quite-likely fraudulent referendum result. (May’s denial of any consequence to the truth about that is a hallmark of the industrialized bullstuff — and may I just say how deeply unsatisfying that word is — of the new brand of democracy-discrediting politics. Welcome to the Overgrown Teenager League).

Enter perpetual stuffshow bridesmaid Nigel Farage, now starring as the Trumpian vessel whose mysterious irresistibility to voters will rationalize the ironically pro-Brexit showing in the British section of Thursday’s EU election, a turn of events enabled by the Halloween reprieve that extended this vortex of stupid stuff.

Those results could give May’s successor a fresher and ostensibly less fraudulent (as of this writing) result on which to hang the Brexit argument to Parliament. Or, that successor could revoke Article 50 and end this absolute, total stuffshow. Rule Britannia.

* There is no evidence of an actual Obama Oval Office needlepoint “Don’t do Stupid Shit” pillow. It was conjured solely for an “imaginative reconstruction” in the style of presidential re-enactment-bullstuff perpetrator and post-truth early adopter Edmund Morris. 

Policy Magazine Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.