Rishi Sunak for King of the World
I awoke this morning at what I’ve learned MSNC calls “Way too early”. Having flown back to NYC yesterday for a dinner (actually a grazing gathering) at the Pierre Hotel, my circadian rhythms are all messed up. I should have been able to stay up late on west coast time, but I was too tired. That meant that I had lots of time to sleep in this morning, but I woke up at 2am west coast time and turned on MSNBC to see what the Israelis and Iranians were up to this morning. While Antony Blinken is scheduled to talk later from the G7 gathering regarding events in the Middle East, the early morning press cycle decided that the one world leader who would be at a podium this morning was Rishi Sunak, who was speaking about welfare reform at the British Center for Social Justice. The idea was that the press would brush aside welfare reform and focus on Israeli missile attacks on Iran overnight. What the press expected to hear from Sunak and what they got was a fascinating mix of realities.
Before we discuss Sunak’s comments, it is worthwhile to contrast them against what we have going on here in the U.S. First up, we have a jury empaneled in the Trump Hush Money case in Manhattan. As the American justice system plows forward in proving that no one is above the law, a message that got one prospective juror so slammed on Fox News that she asked to be removed from the jury, Trump stood at a podium looking at his daily printed press rushes and just decided that they were all lies. Next trade. Speaking of trades, DJT, the Truth Social meme stock, got a dead cat bounce as people in the market pondered whether an alternate reality social media service that just missed its 2023 revenue projections ($4 million versus projected $144 million) was worth the billions that the GameStop crowd wants you to believe it’s worth. But meanwhile, back in the House of Representatives, the vaunted American legislative system is busy jumping back and forth across the aisle to move forward funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. While the diminishing Republican caucus (they are dropping out like flies to preserve their reputation for posterity) is less and less able to do anything meaningful, Democrats are drawing straws to lend support as needed to move important legislation like the foreign aid bills forward. The most important issue to Speaker Johnson seems to be to structure the bills to give some small semblance of cover to his caucus members so that they can tell their constituents whatever it is that they need to in order to get re-elected in November. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene is now the poster child for American legislative excellence by proposing that any Congressman who votes for Ukraine aid needs to sign up to fight in the Ukrainian army. Her role as the top Putin press secretary allowed her to make sense of that because it would clearly bring instructive congressional chaos to the Ukrainian military.
Back at the podium in the U.K., the format of the press gathering with Rishi Sunak gave us early morning MSNBC listeners an opportunity to hear what a conservative (Tory) leader in Britain had to say about the world. I was so glad that inadvertently happened because it gave me a stark wake-up call about how the world could be governed if the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene were not in the way. The contrast of styles between a sensible and well-educated conservative leader and a flailing idiot who somehow got a national stage was eye-opening. I do not pretend to be a student of the British welfare state system and the things that plague it, but the Sunak speech gave me a comprehensive and clear sense of what he, as a conservative, thinks is wrong with it and what needs to be done to improve it. While Marjorie Taylor Greene and Trump spout inane comments and insults on humanity, Sunak talked about the moral imperative of work and the need for the welfare system to encourage and promote work as a means of improving impaired citizens’ sense of self-worth and well-being. All the elements that needed to be in such a reform plan, compassion, understanding of the problem, sensible and balanced solutions and a call to action that properly balanced the need for a humane response to a very real problem and an equally important need to unburden tax payers from needless and ineffective payments to people who would be better served by education, training and inducement assistance to get people into work that they could do rather than languish on welfare. It was an impressive display of informed and intelligent response to a real and complex problem, an approach that could help pull the right and left back together on a sensitive issue rather than doubling down on harsh and idiotic notions of leadership that we see from leaders like Trump or Greene.
To his credit, Rishi Sunak pushed off inquiries about his reaction to the Israeli attack, saying that too little was yet known and that he would await evaluation from more informed leaders like Blinken. Imagine that. A politician prepared to admit that he is not in a position to move the needle in a valuable manner on an issue that he really shouldn’t be weighing in on. That’s a lesson that Tump and Greene should also heed.
Meanwhile, back in Tehran, we heard form a well-spoken Iranian academic that Iran was unfazed by the insignificant and ineffective Israeli attacks and that they were also very proud of their amazing ability to inflict a major blow on Israel with their recent attack by a “handful” of strategically directed missiles rather than the reported 300+ ineffective and intercepted drone and missile launches. Israel was, on the other hand, suggesting that they got their proportional response they needed by hitting major Iranian military targets including nuclear preparation locations and that they were amused by the failed Iranian attacks over the week. In other words, the Middle East crisis seems to have faded into competing realities and denigrations like bullies on the playground asking one another if that is the best the other has and that they both hit like a girl. No one in Iran seems concerned and Israelis seem ready to go about their business, so the heat seems to have come down considerably.
The world is in a particularly funny place these days. We seem to have found a way to de-escalate a potentially dangerous situation in the Middle East, both sides seeming to act more reasonably than most of us expected. In Congress, we seem also to have found a way to get Speaker Johnson to a better place to pass foreign aid legislation for the much needed Ukrainian situation as well as aid to Israel (hopefully only for defensive purposes rather than means to continue offensive actions against Palestinians) and to keep Taiwan out of China’s covetous hands. I guess paying the price of listening to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump and their idiocy is worth having the Congress get to the right place or close to it. But the real message for the morning is that the world needs more enlightened leaders like Rishi Sunak (did you ever think you would hear me praise a Tory?) and fewer like Trump and Greene. I wish we could have a global vote for leadership because this morning, my vote would go to Rishi Sunak for King of the World.