Barack Obama. Still making friends and influencing people. Just not the way that he thinks he is. Especially when he tosses out economic threats and political bullying.
U.S. President Barack Obama warned Britain on Friday that it would find itself "at the back of the queue" for a trade deal with the United States if it voted to leave the European Union in a referendum in June.
Great plan. Threaten Brits and get them to hate you at the same time.
Campaigners for Britain to leave the E.U. are seething over President Barack Obama’s visit to the country this week, as he is expected to weigh in on the looming referendum by supporting “a strong United Kingdom in the European Union.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Conservative MP, said “perhaps Obama just doesn’t like Britain” in a letter to the Daily Mirror.
"I am looking forward to the visit of Barack Obama in April to help the campaign for Britain to remain in the European Union.
I can think of no better advocate for Brexit .
It is wonderfully arrogant and presumptuous of a foreign leader to think that he can lay down the law for the United Kingdom, as if we were a colony of the United States.
And he has undiplomatically attacked Britain for our role in Libya , blaming David Cameron for being “distracted”.
Perhaps Obama just doesn’t like Britain.
When he first became President there were stories, now discredited, that his grandfather was tortured by the British in Kenya.
This was meant to explain Obama’s broad antipathy to the United Kingdom. In a symbolic move, one of his first acts was to remove a bust of Churchill from his office.
No self-respecting Briton will be told what to do by such a man. His condescension will inspire our wish for liberty."
And there's Boris Johnson
New York-born London Mayor Boris Johnson, a leader of the "Out" campaign who is widely seen as a frontrunner to succeed Cameron, said Obama's advice was "incoherent, inconsistent and downright hypocritical".
He said Obama was urging Britain to pool its sovereignty with other nations in a way that the United States itself would never countenance for itself.
He also referred to "the part-Kenyan President's ancestral dislike of the British empire", a comment that was widely criticized as demeaning the EU debate.
And here's from UKIP's Farage.
“President Obama should butt out,” Nigel Farage, another prominent opponent of EU membership, told Reuters in an emailed statement.
“This is an unwelcome interference from the most anti-British American president there has ever been. Mercifully, he won’t be in office for much longer.”