February 21

February 21. Facebook friends, The Jourmudgeon apologizes for this week’s post being a day late, but The Jourmudgeon wanted to wait so he could include the results of yesterday’s All-Important South Carolina Republican Primary. (The Democrats will hold their primary in a week, to give everyone enough time to stop laughing.) But as it happened, one event preempted even South Carolina in importance. Here we go:
1. In the week’s most shocking and significant news, Paul McCartney was turned away from an after-Grammys party. There was no word on why he wanted to party with such a bunch of losers anyway.
2. In news from the Developing World, Donald Trump won a convincing 7 votes in the South Carolina Republican Primary. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio each got 4. The remaining 347,982 votes went to write-in candidate Edmund Ruffin. Trump was declared the winner after Ruffin’s votes were disqualified, not because he fired the first shot in an insurrection against the United States at Fort Sumter, but because he was dead, having killed himself in 1865 because the South lost. Ruffin supporters cried foul, alleging their man had really been smothered with a pillow by liberals, just like Antonin Scalia. Jeb Bush quit the race after finishing out of sight of the leaders. Both Bush and John Kasich were ordered to return votes that they had allegedly smuggled out of New Hampshire. Nobody could figure out any other way the two could have wound up with any votes in South Carolina. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, won a crapshoot in Las Vegas.
3. As part of an obvious initiative to silence criticism that his character wasn’t presidential enough, Trump publicly called Cruz a pussy. Honest. Then he lit into Pope Francis. People who keep score noted that Trump admires Vladimir Putin and Saddam Hussein. But he thinks the pontiff is endangering Americans with his namby views on immigration.
4. In a Cruz campaign development that The Jourmudgeon is sure was entirely unrelated to the slur by Trump, it was revealed that producers had hired soft-core porn actress Amy Lindsay to appear in a Cruz campaign ad, apparently inadvertently. Among Lindsay’s screen credits were an episode of the Cinemax series “Black Tie Nights” called “Whose Thong Is It, Anyway?” The Cruz ad was pulled amid worries over how the actress would have gone down in South Carolina. Sorry.
5. In other candidate news, Marco Rubio won the coveted endorsement of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Haley explained that her endorsement was based solely on the fact that Rubio’s last name was not Trump, Cruz, Bush, Kasich or Carson. Haley told a raucous rally of Rubio’s supporter: “He’s a senator, right? From, like, Florida or Cuba or someplace? Now do I get to be vice president?” And Bush, who inexplicably has not publicly been called the same thing by Trump that Trump called Cruz, sought to cement his tough-guy bona fides by Tweeting a photo of a handgun with his name stamped on it. The fears of some of his advisors that the message was too subtle for South Carolina primary voters were apparently confirmed on Saturday.
6. At The Jourmudgeon’s alma mater, Washington and Lee University, student delegates at a mock convention predicted that Trump would be the eventual Republican nominee. Trump got 1,320 delegate votes, more than doubling Cruz’s 652. Rubio got 399. Since 1908, the quadrennial event at W&L has accurately chosen the nominee of the party out of the White House 19 of 25 times. Its record for picking Republican nominees has been spotless since 1948. Observers wondered if Cruz would have had a better chance this year had more students known about his campaign ad featuring Amy Lindsay. Speakers during the two-day event included Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist and Ann Coulter. But not Lindsay. Event organizers apparently figured there was room for only so much porn on the podium.
7. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died at a Texas hunting resort, apparently in his sleep. In the aftermath of his death, Scalia supporters criticized people who dared to say uncivil things about a man who considered the Voting Rights Act “a perpetuation of racial entitlement,” believed some minority students were better off at “a slower track school,” acknowledged that for him the Constitution was a dead rather than a living document, wrote that if he ever voted to allow same-sex couples to marry “I would hide my head in a bag,” and was known to characterize his colleagues’ opinions as “irrational,” “idiotic,” “totally perverse” and “incoherent.” In 30 years on the bench, Scalia showed a persistent misunderstanding of his job title. One of his former clerks fondly recalled Scalia’s admonition to them: “The law came to the court as an is, not an ought.” In other words, people deserve only the law, not justice; the purpose of the law is not to serve justice; the purpose of a justice is to serve the law. And the law was created to serve a highly partisan agenda. http://www.nytimes.com/…/resetting-the-post-scalia-supreme-… Supporters praised Scalia as a Constitutional “Originalist,” a term they define as: “No matter how original – not to say fictitious — my notion of what the Constitution says might be, I’m right. Also, what the Constitution said was just for blacks, Indians, women and people without property in 1790 is still just for blacks, Indians, women and people without property.”
8. An unseemly fight over Scalia’s successor broke out immediately in Washington, with Originalists in Congress including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell explaining that the Constitution makes clear that only Republican presidents are allowed to appoint Supreme Court justices during their final year in office, and that by blocking any attempt by President Obama to appoint a successor until after the November election, they will give the people a voice in the new appointment. The president’s supporters pointed out that the people had already had a voice – by 9.5 million votes in 2008 and 5 million in 2012. Republicans shot back that nominating a Supreme Court justice in a president’s final year in office was unprecedented, having happened only, uh, okay, eight times since 1900, but never by a black Democrat. Meanwhile, the prospect of a long confirmation battle and a series of 4-4 rulings by the divided court in the interim had everyone worried, particularly in light of the unusual number of crucial cases coming up, including one in which the justices will be asked to rule on whether there really are ground up worms in Big Macs. Other landmark cases before the court include Leiningen v. The Ants, Kramer v. Kramer, Goode v. Evel, and Row v. Wade, a watershed immigration issue involving the legality of various methods of crossing the Rio Grande.
9. Finally this week, the National Park Service announced that the Lincoln Memorial will be getting a multimillion dollar renovation. Like the beloved president’s Republican Party, the memorial in recent years has suffered damage clear to its foundations. The Memorial renovations and the modern Party of Lincoln have something else in common: Both are being paid for almost entirely by a rich guy. Unlike the memorial, though, the Republican Party apparently has no plans to fix its damaged underpinnings.