And the Democrats don’t even have the common decency to do it in public.

The Obama administration has warned British officials that if the UK leaves Europe it will exclude itself from a US-EU trade and investment partnership potentially worth hundreds of billions of pounds a year, and that it was very unlikely that Washington would make a separate deal with Britain.

The warning comes in the wake of David Cameron’s visit to Washington, which was primarily intended as a joint promotion of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Barack Obama, which the prime minister said could bring £10bn a year to the UK alone, but which was overshadowed by a cabinet rebellion back in London.

Or the basic bravery. Of course, saying in public (i.e., using your name) that you prefer to work with the French or – God help us, the Belgians* – instead of the British when it comes to trade deals, to the point where you’d discriminate against the latter, is a pretty good way to end a political career in this country. Which doesn’t make the cowardice any better; merely more explicable.

The short version of what’s happening, by the way, is that the USA and the EU are preparing to try to work out a mutual trade deal; only, there are a steadily-growing number of people in the UK who have come to decide that being linked to the EU is like being shackled to the galley just after it’s been holed beneath the waterline. They want out, in other words; and as the movement that has resulted is threatening to eat into the current ruling coalition’s control of the government, there are Tories in England that are now seriously talking about having a referendum on this entire EU thing. The Obama administration is responding to this by not-subtly-at-all pointing out that they want to make a deal with the EU, not a deal with the EU & the UK. As threats go, this is of course pointless; as the Guardian itself notes, trying to push a trade treaty through Congress is not an automatic exercise. Trying to push a trade treaty that will be seen as attempting to punish Great Britain will be entertaining, in a very Platonic Ideal of Dark Humor sort of way**.

Anyway… Barack Obama just doesn’t like the United Kingdom, huh? – Because I’ve never seen a President so visibly offended at the idea that they have to play nice with the Brits. Heck, I’ve never seen a President that needed to be told that they have to play nice with a crucial ally; most of ’em had the mother-wit to figure it out on their own. And, by the way? If the Democrats don’t like being lumped in like this with the President, they have an excellent opportunity here to correct matters.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Via Hot Air Headlines.

*I stopped caring what a jumped-up Brussels bureaucrat has to say to me about human rights violations – or anything else, really – on or about the time that I got fully caught up on the history of the Belgian Congo. Give me a call when they dig up Emperor Leopold’s corpse and burn it at the stake, and he should consider himself lucky at suffering such a fate, the creature.

**Note that I make no observations about the trade deal itself; I have no idea what is in it, it could be marvelous and wonderful and spontaneously generate kittens every thirty seconds. I do, however, know who my country’s friends are. Some of them belong to the European Union. The people who run the EU? …Not so much.