Sessions's aloha-baiting could bring attention to the real problem - By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Imagine if I began a column about Attorney General Jeff Sessions this way: “I really am amazed that an attorney general who hails from a former Confederate state in the Deep South can issue a series of orders wrecking efforts to reform police practices, cutting back on voting rights and restarting the war on drugs.”
The specifics of what Sessions is up to are accurate, but that knock on the land of cotton would leave my inbox bulging with rebukes to bigotry against Dixie, and I’d probably get many YouTube links to Lynyrd Skynyrd singing “Sweet Home Alabama.” (Don’t go to the trouble. I already have the song on my iPhone.)
Yet the man whose job is to be the top lawyer for all of us said something very similar about a federal judge in Hawaii who blocked President Trump’s travel ban. For the record, here is Sessions’s islophobic sentence:
“I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power.”
The obvious problem in Sessions’s comments, made to conservative talk-show host Mark Levin (and unearthed by CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski), is that Hawaii is a state like every other and has been in the union for 58?years, as Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) helpfully pointed out. Are newer states inferior to older ones?
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sessionss-aloha-baiting-could-bring-attention-to-the-real-problem/2017/04/23/7f5e6e40-26d2-11e7-b503-9d616bd5a305_story.html?utm_term=.15f82278d952&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1
