Guy W. Farmer: Brexit hits political elite — sound familiar?

In last Sunday’s column I wrote many Donald Trump supporters identify with his call to “take our country back.” That same populist, nationalist sentiment prevailed in Great Britain 10 days ago when British voters decided by a 52-48 margin their country should withdraw from the European Union (EU).

Leaders of the “Brexit” movement urged the Brits to take their country back . . . and they did, much to the consternation of the British political establishment, self-serving EU politicians and faceless bureaucrats in Brussels and Strasburg. British voters decided they were sick and tired of being told how to live their lives by a faraway international bureaucracy and they rejected the EU’s dangerous “open borders” immigration policies. Does any of this sound familiar?

Here in the U.S. millions of voters on both sides of the political divide are fed up with business as usual in Washington, D.C., a federal enclave frequently out of touch with the rest of our country, especially those of us out here in Flyover Country. I base that opinion on the millions of primary votes received by Trump and Democrat/Socialist dissident Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont. About 25 percent of Sanders voters say they can’t vote for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton because she’s the embodiment of the entrenched Washington establishment Sanders fought against.

How can someone who thinks Wall Street is the root of all evil vote for a candidate who collected more than $20 million worth of speaking fees from Wall Street right after she resigned as Secretary of State? Not to mention additional millions of dollars flowing to Mrs. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, from speaking fees and questionable donations to the Clinton Foundation. “Questionable” donations because some of them came from repressive regimes that discriminate against LGBT people and women. Some call it Clinton, Inc., the definition of cashing in on public service.

So even as Mrs. Clinton presents herself as a champion of LGBT communities and women, her family foundation rakes in millions of dollars from regimes who abuse the human rights of gays and women. And of course she’s married to an impeached and disbarred former president who is, or was, a serial abuser of women. But when President Clinton was abusing those women, his enablers dismissed them as “trailer trash.”

All of this deception and nastiness is business as usual in Washington among career bureaucrats and politicians who scratch each others’ backs in order to remain in power. They live the good life in Washington while hard-working people outside the Beltway struggle to make ends meet. President Obama and Mrs. Clinton seem to care more about promoting their social engineering agenda than fixing a weak economy, and are much more focused on gun control than on defeating radical Islamic terrorists.

If you like President Obama’s “progressive” political agenda, you’ll love Mrs. Clinton’s agenda, which would result in a third term for the president. If she wins the presidency, privileged Washington insiders will tell us how to live our lives, what to eat, what kind of cars to drive etc. etc. And they’ll invite tens of thousands more Middle Eastern refugees — people who have no intention of learning our language or adapting to our way of life — to emigrate to the U.S. As CIA Director John Brennan said recently, some of those people would be terrorists posing as refugees.

Unfortunately, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, a rude, crude bully, would be as bad as Mrs. Clinton, or worse. At this point, I can’t vote for either one of them. The next three months is crucial; stay tuned.

Guy W. Farmer is the Appeal’s longtime political columnist.