Walk-back Wednesday

For someone who never apologizes because he is never wrong, Trump devotes a lot of time to damage control, usually under the guise of blaming the media for distorting something he said, did, tweeted or signed.  Still smarting from #BunkerBitch, he called Brian Kilmeade to insist that he did not hide in the basement because of the big scary protesters:  "I was there for a tiny little short period of time.  And it was much more for an inspection.  I've gone down two or three times -- all for inspection.  And you go there, some day you may need it...I went down, I looked at it."  Because the help will steal your Pop Tarts and Snickers if you don't check up on them all the time.  Also there could be spiders and Princess thinks they're icky, and he turned off the lights to save money.

It's going to be harder to deny what happened at St. John's, especially since he stood there and held up a Bible like a big foam finger at a ball game.  The campaign wants it known that the peaceful protesters were not tear-gassed to make way for America's Best Christian and his court.  The Centers for Disease Control says yeah, they were.  It's a generic term that covers whatever was deployed there.

The Bible stunt was a predictable hit with the target audience of evangelicals.  One man in Tallahassee says his mother began speaking in tongues, which is their equivalent of orgasm.  But not everyone was thrilled, the negative response of Pat Robertson being one example.  Hope Hicks was initially blamed for the stunt, but the New York Times says that not only was it an Ivanka inspiration, she even supplied the Bible.  I don't see why Princess shouldn't replace Brad Parscale as director of  Daddy's campaign.  You can't teach instincts like that.

It wasn't Ivanka's idea to militarize Washington, and it wasn't Mark Esper's either.  He wants that clearly understood.  Just because he is the Secretary of Defense doesn't mean he knows where the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is every minute of the day or what he's doing with his Apache helicopters.  Also he was told they were going to march over to St. John's but he had nothing to do with the photo-op.  Also he tries to stay "apolitical," and when he called on governors to "mass and dominate the battle space" he was absolutely not recommending military action.  Also he does not agree with invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act, in case there was some confusion about generals in battle dress walking American streets.  In short, not his mess, and he hasn't really thought about where he will be working next month.  Then Esper tried to find his way back to his office.

To give an idea of what he may have fantasized about doing, the Independent pulled out a 1990 interview in which failed businessman Trump praised the Chinese government for the "power of strength" it demonstrated in crushing the Tienanmen Square "riots" (his word).  By 2016 he was already doing the walk-back, but his infantile personality still craves "domination" and dreads being perceived as "weak."  I can't help wondering what American tank drivers will do when "Antifa anarchists" block their progress.

Ready for more history?  In 1971 anti-Vietnam War protesters in Washington were held in a cage next to Robert F. Kennedy Stadium.  In 2020, curfew violators in Los Angeles protesting the police murder of African Americans were held at Jackie Robinson Stadium, home of the Bruins.  UCLA
is not pleased.  There is no cure for tone deafness.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue Lindsey Graham and His Red Hot Peckerwoods, featuring Marsha Blackburn on triangle, are doing their best to walk back the entire Russia investigation in time for the next round of election manipulation.  As Charlie Pierce observes, the only feature of interest is the chairman's new "palomino" hair color.  This is why the salons had to re-open, covid be  damned.  (108,000 dead as of today, if anybody cares.)  Why don't Lindsey and John Kennedy produce a show where they read the Page-Strzok emails as if they were the correspondence of George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell?

In Birmingham, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument has been dismantled.  In Philadelphia, the statue of Frank Rizzo is gone.  In Richmond the United Daughters of the Confederacy headquarters was set on fire.  Other monuments to treason were defaced all over the South, including the Ole Miss campus.  It took nine dead people to remove the Confederate flag from the capitol in Columbia, South Carolina.  This time, one dead man was enough.  History may not be an arc bending toward justice but arithmetic is on our side.