Lynching in the White House
As you may have seen this week, the House of Representatives passed a bi-partisan bill to make lynching a Federal crime. I must admit, the issue had never occurred to me even though I am told that it has been a controversial issue in Congress for 150 years and has been voted down something like 200 times. This time there were only four holdouts (strangely enough, including Justin Amash of Michigan). The other holdouts were the usual southern suspects (including one from Kentucky) who chose to hang their hats on State-rule rather than suggest that they were against lynching of people of color per se. The bill will now go to the Senate, where all good legislation goes to die under the hand of the Grim Reaper himself, Moscow Mitch. Should it get presented on the floor of the Senate, during an election year when anyone who votes against it will doubtlessly get some bad profiling and lose more black votes than they might otherwise have, there will need to be a reason. I think I have found that reason.
Something we have all noticed about working in the Trump Administration is that it is a dangerous career move no matter how senior the position and how aggrandizing it may seem at the moment. Let’s consider the array of people and what that has meant:
• Rex Tillerson – Quiet and purposeful, but eventually had too big a dose of the “undisciplined moron”. Plenty of ego to sustain him.
• Gary Cohn – Big Wall Street stick – big Costanza-like shrinkage with his tribe when Charlottesville “nice people” supremacists shouted “Jews will not replace us!” Too much money to care.
• Jeff Sessions – The original recuser-in-chief who took more verbal abuse from carrot-top than any righteous segregationist southerner deserves. It took Roy Moore and the Donald to make Sessions look like a hero. Another Senate run?
• Michael Flynn – The first domino to fall in less than a month. Still shucking and jiving about jail time.
• H.R. McMaster – NSA seemed like he was trying hard to make the NSA role better than Michael Flynn was going to make it, but the historian in him had its limits. Stanford’s gain.
• Reince Priebus – A 5-month nod to the Republican National Committee and then on to ignominy in the speakers bureau.
• John Kelly – Trump may have fucked with the wrong Marine here since Kelly is getting vocal.
• Sean Spicer – Dancing with the stars may be the highlight of his life.
• Sarah Huckabee Sanders – May have to change her last name if Bernie gets the nomination and she still wants to be Governor of Arkansas. Lying as a press secretary seems natural to some, but abhorrent to many.
• Anthony Scaramucci – A hot-minute staffer who never got to even move in to the White House before getting axed. Back on the NYC/Dubai dinner circuit.
• John Bolton – Hated Hawk, but had his 15 minutes of fame during the impeachment and then blew it. His book is languishing in limbo, as is his career.
• Jared and Ivanka – Trying to keep a low profile.
• Don Jr. and Eric – Still mouthing off on twitter, but harder and harder to keep themselves from looking like the idiot sons that they are.
• Melania – Who?
• Rudy – Just trying to sneak out of the spotlight since even he is smart enough to know that his day is done.
• Mike Pompeo – Distinguished West Pointer, First in His Class, unlikely to win a Kansas Senate seat and definitely last in line at LaGuardia. First Secretary of State to be anti-State.
• William Barr – The man who made the Justice Department cry and Lady Justice run for cover, dropping the scales as she goes. He would not even make it on Dancing with the Stars at this point.
• Mike Pence – Coronavirus Mike had better hope that summer comes soon and that Donald doesn’t need a last ditch media sizzle something before the election or his toes will get toasted one way or another.
That enough of that, though I could go on and on. The point is that the White House may need something like the Federal lynching law bill on the docket to get behind. Donald may end up calling Mitch and convincing him that its good election spin to pass the bill. The reasoning would go something like this. If it passes, Donald can make a big deal out of signing it and making a feeble play for the Clarence Thomas part of the black community. That sounds like good politics, but its even better executive branch thinking because as a Federal law, anyone who gets strung up for lynching can get a Presidential pardon. Easy-peasey and the election cycle is over anyway so what’s another promise to the masses not kept, especially the masses of color.
This is the depths this president has made me sink to in my thinking. I have to outguess the most diabolical mind known to man. He brings new meaning to the name Evil-Genius. He probably rubs his hands together in his lonely tower room in the White House where he can be alone with his Big Mac and his Fox TV and Adult Pay-per-View. He is probably already scheming about how he can get Adam Schiff, Marie Yovanovich and Nancy Pelosi lynched and then get the perpetrators off on the grounds that the State Department (the home of wayward globalists) and the Justice Department (a.k.a. The Deep State of Billy Barr) are just plain old unfair in their treatment of nice people who have a Deep State gripe. That is when he turns on Mike, Bill and Mike and throws them all under the bus before the election rolls over him and his family as well. That’s when the barricades go up at 1600 and we are in for the final siege to unseat the Torquemada of Democracy. That is when I push for legislation that some lynchings are justified.