Race-ing to the bottom

You've gotta hand it to Our Only Available Impeached President.  He knows how to play to his base.

Or at least the basest part of his base.

And so here he was on the Magic Twitter Machine yesterday, wrapping himself in the Confederate flag. Saying it was a hell of country when Demon Political Correctness gets in the way of calling your favorite sports team a racial slur. Trashing yet another person of color with yet another sixpack of lies.

Pretty full day of channeling George Wallace there, for OOAIP. Or Lester Maddox or Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman or some other celebrated racist of old.

Look. It's a free country. There's nothing stopping OOAIP from tapping the thick vein of racism that animates the aforementioned basest of his base. If fear-mongering and race-baiting are all you've got to sell, that's what you sell.

But a few words, Mr. President, about going after Bubba Wallace the way you did.

Bubba Wallace drives race cars at cartoon speeds inches away from other race cars moving at cartoon speeds. A rotten tomato flung from the White House isn't gonna scare him any.

Nor will it scare NASCAR, which reacted to OOAIP's load of manure with a reiteration of support for Wallace .

If you missed OOAIP's shot at Wallace, it was straight out of the sheet-and-hood playbook. Basically he wondered when NASCAR's only African-American driver was going to apologize to his white supporters in NASCAR for perpetrating the noose "hoax." Then he threw the Confederate flag in there, too, saying NASCAR's ratings were at an all-time low since it decided the flag of a dead racist nation probably wasn't an appropriate backdrop here in 2020.

As usual, all of this was nonsense. Wallace, to begin with, isn't the one who found and reported the pull rope tied into a noose. Second, it was no "hoax"; the pull rope was, in fact, a noose, though it had been there since last October. And, third, reveling in NASCAR's  plummeting ratings was a big swing and miss since NASCAR viewership actually is up 8 percent since returning May 17.

All of this opened the door for NASCAR's response, which all but implied the President should go (whiz) up a rope. And it opened the door for Wallace's response, which put OOAIP in his customary mean, small, juvenile place.

"Your words and actions will always be held to a higher standard than others," Wallace wrote. "You have to be prepared for that. You don't learn these things in school. You learn them from trails and tribulations, the ups and downs this crazy world provides. You will always have people testing you. Seeing if they can knock you off your pedestal. I encourage you to keep your head high and walk proudly on the path you have chosen. Never let anybody tell you you can't do something! God put us all here for a reason. Find that reason and be proud of it and work your tails off every day towards it! All the haters are doing is elevating your voice and platform to much greater heights!"

Even, he added, "when it's hate from the POTUS."

I believe that's called getting owned, Mr. President.