Dream deterred

It's one day a year, Martin Luther King Day, but the white supremacists can't shut up for twenty-four hours.  They have to step it up.

Surely Trump should be designated #2 instead of #45 -- we've had plenty of racist presidents but he is clearly the successor to Jefferson Davis.  On Saturday he kicked off the holiday weekend in Arizona by amplifying one of Baby Tuckoo's stretchers about white people being denied treatment for covid, which originated on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal.   New York State guidelines for dispensing antiviral drugs are based on the higher death rates of Latino and Black patients, which in medical circles is called triage.  In racist circles, however, it's called "If you're white you don't get the vaccine."  Actually everyone who wants it gets the vaccine, free.  It's the Trump lobby who warn constantly that it's untested, toxic, makes you sterile and is a big plot to make Anthony Fauci rich.  If you opted to get de-wormed instead...  Forget it, he's rolling:  "The left is now rationing life-saving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating white people to determine who lives and who dies.  It's unbelievable to think this."  The left?  Maybe all doctors and hospitals are now "the left," not at all "very fine people."  I wouldn't be surprised to read that some subsidiary of The Trump Organization was marketing kerosene-soaked crosses and designer lighters from the Ivanka Collection.

Alveda King, MLK's niece, is a Trump supporter and habitue of Fox News, so she can't have been surprised when Rachel Campos-Duffy decided today was the right day to address "the civil rights issue of our time," fatherlessness.  You know, all those Black women having babies without getting a ring put on it first.  Campos-Duffy glided over the question of whether seeing the pregnancy to its conclusion was entirely the woman's choice, and admitted that it might also be a problem for white people.  Timing, however, is everything.

It was left to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to remind us that economics was always at the heart of King's work.  The 1963 March on Washington (yeah, the Dream speech) was foremost about jobs.  When King died he was in Memphis marching with sanitation workers and planning the Poor People's Campaign that Ralph Abernathy would lead.  "Dr. King knew that economic injustice was bound up in the larger injustice he fought against."  With the help of Kristen Sinema and her beloved filibuster, the racists hope to stave off voting rights at least for another year.  The Travis County, Texas, clerk is rejecting applications for mail ballots as fast as they come in, and Virginia's new closet-Trumpanzee governor is hard at work pursuing the usual suspects, covid restrictions and critical race theory.  

No. 2 had a little more venom to spit and he hocked it at MSNBC, whose ratings continue to obsess him.  He wonders if apostate Republican Joe Scarborough's early morning show will be cancelled (did you know Mika once hemorrhaged all over his marble floors?) and he has created the witty nickname "Unjoy Reid" for the host of The Reid-Out.  When a racist calls you a racist, how should you respond?  "Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was open and honest about his deep disapproval of White revisionist history and willful ignorance."  If only he knew what "revisionist" means.

But it wasn't all gloom.  We're dealing with prime idiots here, the kind who livestream themselves committing felonies.  Jamie Raskin told Business Insider about another seam of stupid in the January 6 insurrectionists.  Burdened with lecterns and laptops, they left personal items behind (you have to take off your mittens to paw through a senator's desk).  Then they called the Speaker's office and asked for the number of the lost and found.  Someone took their information and promised to get back to them, which the police did.  Raskin has identified the problem -- they thought Trump had the right to send them to stop the certification.  "They didn't have any kind of subtle understanding of the separation of powers," he added, in the understatement of the month.  Which is hardly surprising when you remember that the newly arrived Senator from Alabama identified the three branches of the federal government as "the House, the Senate and the executive" and believes World War II was fought against "socialism."  Fools will elect fools.

Like Wren Williams, freshly minted member of the Virginia House of Delegates, who decided to impress us with his grasp of American history by introducing HB 781, banning the teaching of "divisive concepts" and requiring that young Virginians study the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist papers, excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville and of course "the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass."  He's a Trumper.  I'm astonished.  Point and laugh, everyone.  No "birdbrain" jokes about his name, he can't help it.

Speaking of debates, plucky RNC chairgirl Ronna McDaniel has informed the Commission on Presidential Debates that in view of the KO Biden scored against Trump in 2020, she and her party are afraid to participate in more.  Or maybe it was Uncle Mitt kissing the canvas in 2012.  Anyway, end of an era, so sad, what time is dinner?