Jeremy Clarkson — the ubercool star of one of Britain’s most beloved exports, Top Gear — did not take kindly to Mitt Romney’s oafish, disastrous showing at the Olympics in London.
In case you missed it, Mittens — who has apparently been debriefed in foreign policy mainly by action movies and has subsequently earned the nickname “American Borat” for his tone-deaf behavior in a country in which he was a guest representing America — embarrassed the hell out of everyone for basically being Relatable Romney as he stumbled about England — earning the ire of Jeremy Clarkson.
Romney managed to best some of George W. Bush’s best “hey, did I do that?” moments during his visit when he first dissed the country’s Olympic preparations in an interview. He continued, doubting the country could pull together a proper Olympic brouhaha, and said the people might not “come together” to celebrate the games.
Then he revealed a supposedly secret meeting with Britain’s intelligence agency MI6 to press, further being a general doofus. Amid all the scrutiny, it came to light that Romney cast Britain in an unflattering light in his book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness — a bit of a riff on Mittens’ continued and erroneous assertion that the current POTUS likes to spend his free time apologizing for America in all corners of the globe, a fib that appeals to a certain segment of voters.
In the book, Romney sneers of England:
“England [sic] is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn’t make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadn’t been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler’s ambitions. Yet only two lifetimes ago, Britain ruled the largest and wealthiest empire in the history of humankind. Britain controlled a quarter of the earth’s land and a quarter of the earth’s population.”
Burn. Jeremy Clarkson expressed his distaste for Romney in general on Twitter after the series of insults, saying of the presumptive GOP candidate:
My ideas for the opening ceremony were rejected. I suggested we should crash a burning Jag into Mitt Romney.
— Jeremy Clarkson (@jcrclarksonesq) July 27, 2012
And pardons for language in this embedded Tweet, Clarkson added:
Mitt Romney. Go fuck yourself. We are better than you
— Jeremy Clarkson (@jcrclarksonesq) July 27, 2012
We couldn’t agree more with Jalopnik , who wrote that Romney really was unwise to make such remarks about the UK, “a cluster of islands filled with people who have turned derision into an art form over the past several centuries.”