Time is not on your side

First US President to go on the air and make anti-American statements right before the Super Bowl. - Andy Borowitz

Timing is a bitch, and not only for comedians.  These people have an almost supernatural ability to get it wrong.  First Newt Gingrich chose the seventy-fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor to praise the  brilliance of the Imperial Japanese military.  This is a topic which could fruitfully be debated at a military affairs forum or a conference of historians (Neuter fancies himself one), but perhaps not as the last handful of veterans gathered for the last time at the USS Arizona.  The impulse to punch the fat draft-dodger's face must have been strong in them.

The weekend of the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday was selected by another fat draft-dodger to engage in a Twitter-war with Rep. John Lewis, one of the last living heroes of the 1960's civil rights effort.  Lewis's crime was to criticize the then-idiot elect, and for that his district, the Georgia Fifth, was described in near-apocalyptic terms.  Actually, it's a suburb of Atlanta with a multi-ethnic population above the national average in both education and income, home to Georgia Tech, Emory University, and the Centers for Disease Control (unless that has been abolished by decree since last night).  According to Trump, though, anyplace black people live must be a hellhole.  I can imagine Fred dinning that into little Donnie as they drove home from a Klan meeting, along with "Women are only good for one thing" and "Jews are real clever with money."

Speaking of Jews, the official proclamation of Holocaust Memorial Day didn't speak of them at all.  This struck some people as an astonishing oversight, and others as evidence that it was scribbled on the back of a paper placemat by Deputy Fuhrer Bannon.  There once was a Louisiana governor known as "O.K. Allen" because he would sign whatever was put in front of him.  Once, the story goes, a leaf blew across his desk and he signed it.  But I'll bet 1930s cash money that he didn't hold it up proudly to show everyone how big he could write, like Charlton Heston holding up the Ten Commandments.  There might have been less confusion around the Muslim travel ban --- no point in calling it anything else -- had it been written by a lawyer or a career civil servant in the Justice Department instead of some random blogger.  I myself am a random blogger and I wouldn't presume to craft a law, a regulation or an executive order even if it wasn't absurdly unconstitutional.  If O.K. Trump means to rule by decree (and he has yet to sign a bill passed by either chamber of Congress because they're so slow and he doesn't trust them), he needs a lawyer.  Even if it means looking outside the imperial family.

Well, not to flog the obvious, but these people just aren't very smart.  There is a delightful story in today's New York Times about members of the kakiocracy meeting in the dark because they can't work the light switch in the Cabinet Room.  Generally, guys, up is on and down is off.  But I would rather think of you groping in the gloom, lighting matches and eventually setting the house on fire.  I love a good metaphor.