Racial Rope-a-Dope

      I don't know what Trump's sudden obsession with dead black heavyweight boxing champions is all about. Maybe he's just cynically flexing his pardoning muscles to show the world that he can do what he's been saying for days now- That, if push comes to shove, he can and will pardon himself.
     Although there's nothing in the Constitution that says that. Richard Nixon, a former attorney himself, probably would've tried that if it was feasible. But he resigned before he could be impeached much less convicted of anything. That's why he installed Jerry Ford to do it for him after Agnew's own fall from grace.
     Of course, there's one problem with pardoning Muhammad Ali:

 

     That, plus President Carter already pardoned all convicted draft evaders.

     But this tale is about more than yet another little Trump pratfall, another in an ever-lengthening skein of ignorance on the part of Il Douche. It's the hypocrisy behind it all.

     Months after trying to institute one Muslim ban after another, Trump decides he wants to pardon a Muslim athlete.

     And, most tellingly, just months after calling Colin Kaepernick a "son of a bitch" for kneeling during the national anthem to protest police violence on black people, Trump wants to pardon another black athlete for evading the draft and refusing to fight in Vietnam. It's impossible to see how Trump can consider Ali more patriotic than Kaepernick, despite the fact that both athletes held strongly-felt and valid convictions. But one can drive themselves as crazy as Trump now is trying to make sense out of what passes for his cognitive thought processes. It's like asking yourself over and over again why an elephant can't write an opera and why hyenas can't learn to sing in them.

     Then there's the racist angle. Trump is famously racist. He and his father refused to rent to African Americans until HUD put a stop to that in 1973. He once called blacks "inherently lazy" and blamed them for his cash flow problems at his New Jersey casino that went belly up. He took out full-page ads in eight New York papers calling for the execution of the Central Park Five before they were even (wrongly) convicted. 

     He has a willful blind spot that prevents him from recognizing that police violence against unarmed black people are at an alltime high and that people of all colors just might have a problem in the Land of the Free with white supremacists and the KKK (aka "very fine people") openly marching in the streets of Charlottesville to protect monuments erected for traitors who fought for the right to own black people.

     But blacks, in Trump's mind, only become harmless when they're dead, whether or not they're killed by police.