This travesty will not sta—ooh, pretty.
I don't know if Republican operative Karl Rove is getting dumber or
we're just noticing it more.
Rove, former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush who is working on a book about President McKinley, told Time that he'd expect Obama to be "more gracious" to the man "who made it possible for him to be President."
"In a serious vein, I would hope that he would find a gracious way to honor McKinley, who is an important figure in American history. And I’m not certain he has the authority to have done what he did; the designation was granted by law of Congress in 1917," Rove told the magazine. "In a more jocular way, the guy ought to be more gracious to the guy who made it possible for him to be President."
Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii, which was annexed in 1898 during McKinley's presidency.
That's right, kids, we're going to be freaking out about a mountain reverting to its Alaskan name for a
long time yet. Sure, Alaska has been asking for the name reversal for many decades now, and sure, the
McKinley name was basically the result of a practical joke gone viral, and sure, conservatives are all about the rights of states to decide these things rather than the federal government, and sure, the reason the name change has been held up for forty years is
the usual conservative gimmickry in fudging House rules, gimmickry which was overcome simply by observing that forty years is
long past the usual charitable time given for these things and that the Secretary of the Interior could thus be tasked with breaking the deadlock, but someone in the Obama administration did a
thing so we'll be having hearings and fundraising drives for at least a decade. Mount another Confederate flag in the back of your pickup, boys, we'll be rollin' coal for this one.
Sure, maybe "McKinley was president during the period when the state you would eventually be born in was granted that statehood" is a damn long way to go to get in a half-hearted attack line, but he said jocular, so give him some slack. That's code for even I myself admit I've gone off the trail on this one, but by gum I'm not letting this reporter leave without giving him at least one thing I can get in the papers for.
You know, people, it's not like the Interior secretary renamed the actual president named McKinley. Though come to think of it, that's a pretty good idea too. Mind if we call you Reagan, Mr. McKinley? Everyone likes being called Reagan.