For being our country’s chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sure is awfully loosey-goosey with his words! Last week, he referred to the state of Hawaii as “an island in the Pacific” — technically accurate, sure, but politically reprehensible, as the description was part of an effort to discredit the ruling of a federal judge based in Hawaii against the Trump administration’s latest Muslim travel ban. (Sessions' full phrasing referred to a "judge sitting on an island in the Pacific," which is great because it conjures up the image of a robed jurist sprawled in the sand on a Spring Break bender, rum daiquiri in one hand and un-American ruling in the other — do judges ever even work!?)
Because absolutely nothing in the man’s record might suggest racist motivations — save for that time in the 1980's when the Senate rejected him as a federal judge based on evidence that he was racist — it’s clear Sessions was only tweaking the geographical remoteness and Johnny-come-lately entry of Hawaii into our blessed union, and that his choice of words had nothing to do with the fact that Hawaii’s population contains the smallest proportion of whites of any U.S. state. Obviously, he would have directed similar innuendo at distant, frozen, Russia-kissing, second-to-last-state-to-join-the-union Alaska.
On the plus side, though, this means it’s open season on technically accurate but "accidentally" tendentious descriptions of Sessions’ home state of Alabama — which from now on we’ll be referring to (metaphorically, of course) as "a formerly-secessionist island of slavery in the ocean of the Confederate States of America."
And now this weekend Sessions is telling us, without evidence, that “mostly Mexicans” are receiving billions in excess tax credits from the U.S. government. He made this intriguing assertion as part of a possible absurd new argument from the Trump administration that Mexico really IS going to be paying for the border wall. See, we’re going to fund it by taking away tax credits going to “mostly Mexicans” — and because Mexicans are clearly from Mexico (not like that confusing situation where Americans are from Hawaii — still wrapping our heads around that one, sorry!), Mexico is actually gonna pay for the wall, via the transitive property of Mexican-ness!
In the interest of resuming contact with reality: the Wall Street Journal had an article last week describing how zero percent of U.S. senators and representatives from districts and states that would see construction of a border wall actually support it. When even those who are supposed to benefit the most from the wall don’t want it, you know you’ve got problems.
