A guy called Mitt Romney pisses off the British

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I've always considered London Mayor Boris Johnson something of a snotty Tory blowhard, but you've got to admit, he's smart and charismatic and has a way with words.

In response to Mitt Romney's completely inappropriate and unhelpful suggestion that London may not be ready for the Olympics, Johnson had this to say to 60,000 people at the torch-lighting ceremony in Hyde Park:

I hear there is a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know whether we're ready. He wants to know whether we're ready. Are we ready? Are we ready? Yes we are! 

Yup, some guy called Mitt, some pretentious American douchebag who for some reason came over to annoy the shit out of us but who's ended up getting stuck in gaffe after gaffe.

And this after Prime Minister David Cameron had already smacked him down:

We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it's easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.

Take that, Salt Lake City! I've never been to that weird outpost in Utah, but I've been to London many times, for extended periods, and of course Cameron's right.

And who the hell is Romney anyway to be criticizing London, and Londoners, and the British? Is this what he thinks diplomacy is? Is this how he intends to persuade voters back home that he actually has a clue about foreign affairs, about how to conduct himself on the world stage?

He can't even say the right thing about something as non-partisan (and relatively uncontroversial) as the Olympics in a country that is a close friend and ally of his own. After talking up (with ridiculous hyperbole) the "special relationship" to try to score cheap political points against President Obama, in an of itself an inappropriate thing to do (not to mention hypocritical, given his claim that the president apologizes for America), all he had to say was that he wished London the best and knew it would put on a great show. He couldn't even do that.

And once more we see that the more people know of Romney the less they like him -- it's who he is, what he stands for, and what he says.

Pissing off leading British conservatives isn't exactly the best way to start your little foreign tour. But it's hardly surprising. Given what you know of the guy -- he traffics in platitudes and smears mostly, and when he actually says something meaningful it backfires -- did you really expect him to get away unscathed?