Yankee Gov. Stalemate Meets Royal Hypocrisy

When it comes to the decorum of Anglo-American relations, America simply can’t win. We’re always the illiterate, ill-mannered losers, while they’re always the literate, courteous, witty ones. Nowhere is our defeat more pronounced than when any member of the British royal family decides to land in the colonies and visit the U.S. President. Their royal presence doesn’t happen that often, but when it does we’re all put in our places as embarrassed commoners.

Suddenly, we’re all apologetic because we don’t have that British accent and can’t keep track of all the unspoken courtesies that must be given because Great Britain has decided anyone with royal blood is better than any old American citizen.

Suddenly, “our country, our rules” no longer applies to these entitled visitors.

Such was the case during the recent presence of King Charles, along with Queen Camilla.

Almost immediately, the British press and diehard royal watchers began keeping track of our “walking violations.” This time the guilty party was The Donald, who actually walked in front of Queen Camilla!(gasp!) Then, as if not be upstaged by any visiting monarch, he also positioned himself so that King Charles could not easily shake hands with the adoring American crowds. OMG! Is there no respect at all for royalty here?

Well, in this writer’s opinion, there was way too much respect and abject admiration gushing from Anglophiles and the media — and from Trump — in these United States.

Of course, with The Donald in the Oval Office, such favorable bias was mandatory. If the reporting and analysis hadn’t been ultra positive, Trump would have punished the press. He would have retaliated by banning the media upstarts from attending future White House briefings and news conferences. Still, the lavish praise for Charles that a lot of news hounds were scooping out also unfairly slammed our own democracy.

Almost as though we couldn’t say anything positive about the King without criticizing our own government and way of life?

Now consider the love letter disguised as a column from Maureen Dowd that appeared in The New York Times on Sunday, May 3rd:

“In a country rife with the No Kings protests, this King was a tonic. He presented himself with elegance, intelligence and wit — everything that has been wanting in Washington during the Trump era.”

She also praised his lecture to Congress with “A real King delivers royal lesson on democracy.” And “It was lovely to hear the King’s English, devoid of the vengeance, blasphemy and vulgarity common in our leader’s language.”

Okay, point well taken. POTUS 47 thinks he’s a king, behaves like a tyrant, and believes he’s above every law he dislikes. And yet, the headline of this column is “His Majesty and Our Travesty.” It can’t really be a collective travesty, though, when nearly half the voters in both elections didn’t elect or re-elect him to the Presidency. Besides, Congress HAS been trying to get rid of Trump by impeaching him — not once but twice. Unfortunately, those efforts failed. Why?

Because the senators and representatives in Congress do know and respect our nation’s laws. They know how our Constitution is supposed to work, and they’ve been honoring it by abiding by it. Unlike Trump, they have been following the laws.

That’s why the King’s scripted lecture to Congress was more ironic than helpful to our governing body. Trump has remained in office because he found the loophole that our founding fathers prayed no authoritarian would ever notice. Trump realized that if he installed(or helped to position) just a few diehard, loyal supporters in every branch of the government, he would be able to ignore laws that otherwise would have restrained or abolished his tyranny.

That’s why this lauded Congressional address Charles delivered was never the warning or witty reminder that Maureen Dowd thought it was, either.

In fact, Michael D. Shear, news analyst for The New York Times,
came closer to understanding what this historic speech really was. He believed it to be more of a carefully disguised rebuke that we were to stupid to realize:

“To many Americans, the sharp edges of the King’s seemingly tactful message may not have been apparent. And even Mr. Trump seems to have been oblivious to the fact that Charles was gently taking him to task…

“The King is, of course, British, and like his fellow countrymen, can be famously indirect. Americans looking for blunt or obvious statements were always going to be disappointed.”

Like, being British is some kind of superpower that mere commoners like us could not direct?

NEWSFLASH: Americans weren’t looking for any blunt or obvious statements about this visit by Charles and Camilla. That’s because their appearance had been promoted as a good will tour to affirm the friendship between the U.K and U.S.A.

Apparently, the King and his handlers lied.

Needless to say, this writer picked up on the disingenuous p.r. right away, before Shear’s news analysis was even published, before I’d even read “King Sent a Message Trump May Have Missed”(published on Friday, May 1st). I didn’t have to read and rely on his viewpoint to understand that this hands-across-the-water tour was a sham. Wasn’t that obvious?

Charles came to get even.

Coming to the White House and delivering homogenized snarkiness to Trump in that oh-so-eloquent, refined manner was still payback. He was actually rebuking The Donald for criticizing the British Prime Minister weeks earlier. Then he was scolding Congress, albeit it in a passive-aggressive manner, for not following the laws and standards that had been bestowed to us by our forefathers. For this royal instruction, King Charles received rave reviews — even thanks for his theatrical words of wisdom that he obviously did not write all by himself.

Amid all our gracious approval, the obvious hypocrisy of Charles was discounted, then forgotten entirely. It shouldn’t have been.

Remember, his primary focus here was on our nation’s inability to abide by laws that had been specifically designed for our democracy. But now, nearly 2 and one-half centuries later, this King believes our Congress and our President are not abiding by these laws…And yet, as Prince Charles, and now as King Charles, this Brit did the same thing that he had deftly criticized Trump and our Congress for doing!

For someone that obsessed with laws, Charles has a significant track record of ignoring, then outright disobeying, laws that members of the British royal family were supposed to follow. And oh, such silly, emotionally self-destructive choices!

Pardon my snark, but this is what happens when cousins keep marrying cousins. After a few generations, there’s a royal genetic line of privileged, indecisive, goofy kids with 6 toes.
So Charles might still have 5 toes on each foot, but his brain still made a lot of abnormally inexplicable, dumb-ass life decisions.

Consider this course of action he made for himself.

He married the beautiful young Lady Diana in a royal wedding for the ages and had two sons with her. But he cheated on her with Camilla, an older, homelier woman who was a married Catholic. Then he said he’d never really loved Diana. He just married her because he thought his father wanted him to wed her. Then when his poor wife became distraught and depressed by his admission, he and his p.r. team claimed she was “mentally ill.” He and Diana divorced. After Camilla divorced her husband, he and Camilla lived “in sin”… until he later married her. Because of these circumstances Camilla couldn’t be “Queen.” She was supposed to be some sort of “consort” to him, but not officially the “Queen”.

So how did Charles get away with his “inappropriate activities?”

He got the rules changed to personally suit his wants and needs. In other words, he became the exception to these rules, thanks to his royal mum.

As head of the Church of England, reigning monarch Queen Elizabeth II gave special permission to Charles to divorce, marry Camilla, and allow her the title of Queen Camilla. Rules are rules, and yet Charles, along with sister Princess Anne and brother Prince Edward, were given “special permission” to divorce and remarry. (Not so with Princess Margaret. When Elizabeth was still Princess Elizabeth, the powers-that-be wouldn’t allow Edward VIII to marry Wallis Simpson, either.)

What’s most surprising here is that royal lawbreaker Charles feels no compassion, not even any empathy, for other royals in similar situations — namely his younger son Harry(A.K.A. “The Spare”). Although Prince Harry was allowed to marry divorcee Meghan Markle, Charles didn’t like her because she was an actress, a divorcee, an American — and her mother was black. But he went through the pageantry of another royal wedding, even walking Meghan down the aisle. Then after he thought she was getting more attention than he and Camilla were, out came the racism he’d half-heartedly tried to hide but couldn’t.

And yet, after this blatant ignoring of his own country’s royal laws, after the mistreatment of his first wife, and then daughter-in-law, he has the nerve to come to our shores and lecture us on the importance of obeying laws?

Americans might be dumb, but we’re not stupid. We don’t appreciate the hypocrisy behind this “instruction” from King Charles nor his “gifting” of that brass bell to a President he evidently despises. So we leave Charles with these parting words:

DO FEEL FREE TO EXERCISE FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN THIS COUNTRY. DO SOAK UP ADULATION GIVEN BY ROMANTIC AMERICANS WHO HAVE NEVER SEEN A REAL KING BEFORE. BUT BEFORE YOU START TELLING US HOW TO LIVE, ATTEND TO THE COBWEBS AND SKELETONS IN YOUR OWN CASTLE.