Now, it is doubtless the case that the Obama administration, whose response to the crisis has been feckless and (it is true) mired in buck-passing, would like nothing better than to offload responsibility for the crisis on a foreign multinational, be it British or Botswanan. Populism plays, after all. But if the “evidence” of an anti-British crusade consists of the odd reference to British Petroleum, or the lunkheaded Sarah Palin bemoaning the “foreign companies” involved in oil exploration off of American shores, it hardly justifies this massive counteroffensive in the British press. In fact, it could be reasonably argued that this Anglo-American battle is being cooked up in British newsrooms, not the Oval Office.

Having spent large amounts of time in the United Kingdom—most of it greatly pleasurable, excepting the interminable pub conversations about silly Yanks who demand ice in their beverages and don’t properly pronounce aluminum—it strikes me as a little bizarre that this banal bit of political populism has engendered such hurt feelings.

So let me remind my British comrades of what the real thing looks like. A few recent examples: The novelist Dame Margaret Drabble confessed in 2003 that her bouts of anti-Americanism were like reflux, that “fashionable American disease,” causing her great physical discomfort. With the subtlety one would expect from a Dame with a dodgy esophagus, Drabble wrote in The Telegraph, “I detest Disneyfication, I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history. I detest American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn’t even win.”