Say what you want about
David Duke Without The Baggage, but David Duke Without The Baggage
isn't dumb.
Instead of joining the 50th-anniversary civil rights event in Selma this month, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise chose to attend a posh conference funded by the American Enterprise Institute. [...]
[A]ccording to a disclosure report filed by Scalise, he and his wife, Jennifer Scalise, attended the AEI “World Forum” in Sea Island, Georgia, which happened on the same weekend as the march.
The American Enterprise Institute is most known as the think-tank that brought us the Iraq War. No, they didn't shutter their doors afterward, their reputation in tatters and their funders outraged at their astonishing incompetence. Why do you ask?
Politico presents this as a semi-scandal, since it does indeed look rotten that a member of the Republican leadership team chose to jet off to a cushy right-wing conference rather than attend the 50th anniversary celebration of a key point in American civil rights history. On the other hand, and I mean this sincerely, are there any attendees of the civil rights celebration that would want to rub shoulders with Steve Scalise as he feigned a momentary give-a-damn about the events in Selma in 1965? Not a chance. He'd be a pariah; people would be fleeing from him lest they get caught in the same photograph.
Scalise says he'll be attending next year's Selma celebration. That and a bag of breadcrumbs will get you surrounded by ducks.