The Outrage du Jour hasn’t happened yet. But we have some interesting news from Lexington, VA where the owner of the Red Hen restaurant asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her party to leave after the cheese course.
Now, I’m not necessarily a fan of denying people good food to make a political point. But it’s like, POTUS and his administration are awful corrupt people and no one is holding them accountable for the way they treat anyone who isn’t a straight white male.
We have to wait another 5 months before we can even attempt to get some of our power back. We are very impatient. And the actions of Trump have gone too far.
It’s like, would you want a pedaphile or drug dealer or murderer as a neighbor or customer? No, you wouldn’t. Being a Trumper ranks right up there with the worst people. Until they get it, I think it’s perfectly ok to tell them you don’t want to be associated or occupy the same public space. Please leave.
And to those who complain, let’s recall the doctors and staff that perform legal abortions who every single day worry about risking their lives to help desperate women because anti-choice zealots think it’s ok to harass, shoot and bomb them.
We’re being the polite ones at this point. Stop whining.
Tom Watson says the media are reaching for their smelling salts because:
I could see this happening, especially to the Maggie Habermans, Chris Cilizzas and anyone at any media outlet who went on about Hillary’s emails for two years. Yep. They definitely deserve public shaming. You know how they could avoid that?
1.) Repent, acknowledge it and apologize.
2.) Stop doing articles about snooty spoiled conservative women and the aggrieved white male Trump supporter while ignoring everyone else.
3.) Stop acting like a high school clique. Oh, I know everyone went to the same schools but, please, spare us the attitude and the gossipy reporting. And do 2 again. And again. And maybe stay out of Mexican restaurants.
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Walter Shaub sums up why we are disgusted:
https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1011017131356401664?s=21
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I had so much fun seeing Keith Urban Saturday night. The weather was kinda sketchy but you know you’re having a good time when you ditch your poncho and dance in the rain when everyone is singing:
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
SHUN them all! The rallies, their t-shirts, the chants, his tweets, his policies. his goddamm lies, … and we are not allowed to protest with the little power we have? I am very disappointed with all the pearl clutchers including WAPO editorial where they went as far as suggesting ridiculously ‘what if abortion opponents did the same to all of us’ and to RD’s point, have not these pro-lifers (what a joke!) been harassing women who are already in distress seeking their legal options and their doctors and clinics?
{I wonder what else happened during the cheese course that compelled the owner to boot her out.}
The article about the Red Hen said the restaurant called the owner. They’re a diverse group of people and some of them are gay. The owner asked them what they wanted her to do and they said that wanted her to ask sanders to leave. So she called Sarah into another area and told her that her presence was upsetting the staff for a litany of reasons could she please leave. So sanders and her entourage left. The owner didn’t charge them for wha they ordered.
It sounds like there was no public shaming or chants or anything. They were just asked to leave and they did. In fact, no one would have been the wiser except sanders tweeted about it.
Here he is, the ultimate uncivil mfer that is their president.
LOL!!!! the irony is lost on his ignorant mfers of supporters.
I didn’t read the Wapo article because I don’t want to pay. Bezos, the richest man in the world and he has to make little people pay. No way. But I saw this tweet from one of the wait staff which seemed to indicate nothing was served which is why I wondered what else might have happened. I didn’t think there were any chants or shaming but may be she was an entitled bitch to the wait staff.
https://twitter.com/Politidope/status/1010512831442247680
Gut America, destroy America, those are his orders from Putin. He is on track.
All Putin needed to do was find a charismatic stooge desperate enough for money, and amoral enough, that he could be bought, then dust off the old Soviet subversion strategies from his youth, remove Communism as the operating ideology, and replace Communism with “traditionalist” white (and male) supremacism, and weaponize social media. This makes me wonder if the Soviets would have been more successful here, if social media had existed in the 1930s-60s or so.
The Soviets were just fishing with the wrong bait.
Madoka knows why Trump is charismatic, though. I’m his target audience, in a way–white, male, live in “flyover country”–but he means nothing to me. I feel like a deaf rat in Hamelin, wondering why my peers are so excited about this “Pied Piper” fellow.
“amoral enough”
“Madoka knows why Trump is charismatic, though. ”
Agree. I was watching a clip yesterday and he is/was a good looking fella and combine that with his bombastic and belligerent rambling (which sounds like he is his supporters own ignorant self), his chutzpah at being nasty and hateful to people they also hate is what makes them happy. He is their guy to stick it to the rest of the people they hate (the poor, the black/brown, the wemen, the Democrats,…)
IBW, watch out. She could be your awful nasty neighbor!
Apparently the Right’s aversion to Russia for all those decades was only due to their hatred of any non-capitalistic economic system. Once Russia became a nation of oligarchs who make billions off the backs of the rest of the people, our oligarchs, who have been doing that here for around 200 years, have no problem with them now, and we are having a “summit” to see if we can get more suggestions from them of how to turn our country into the kind of totalitarian state which our oligarchs are fine with, as long as they get to profit from it.
Oh, I am so glad that the motorcycle driving libertarians who hate “big guv’mint” are going to have to pay a lot more because of their idol Trump “putting America first.” I do hope that the news stations cover this story today; maybe a few of the motorcycle men will actually learn the truth; while Fox will ignore it, and Trump will blame it on Hillary, Obama, and Social Security. BTW, Heidi Przbyla is one of my favorites; smart, intense, and (well) a classic beauty.
The WaPo piece by Avi Selk and Sarah Murray was excellent. I’m going to paste most of it here —
Stephanie Wilkinson was at home Friday evening — nearly 200 miles from the White House — when the choice presented itself.
Her phone rang about 8 p.m. It was the chef at the Red Hen, the tiny farm-to-table restaurant that she co-owned just off Main Street in the small city of Lexington, in the western part of Virginia.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders had just walked in and sat down, the chef informed her.
“He said the staff is a little concerned. What should we do?” Wilkinson told The Washington Post. “I said I’d be down to see if it’s true.”
It seemed unlikely to her that President Trump’s press secretary should be dining at a 26-seat restaurant in rural Virginia. But then, it was unlikely that her entire staff would have misidentified Sanders, who had arrived last to a table of eight booked under her husband’s name.
As she made the short drive to the Red Hen, Wilkinson knew only this:
She knew Lexington, population 7,000, had voted overwhelmingly against Trump in a county that voted overwhelmingly for him. She knew the community was deeply divided over such issues as Confederate flags. She knew, she said, that her restaurant and its half-dozen servers and cooks had managed to stay in business for 10 years by keeping politics off the menu.
And she knew — she believed — that Sarah Huckabee Sanders worked in the service of an “inhumane and unethical” administration. That she publicly defended the president’s cruelest policies, and that that could not stand.
“I’m not a huge fan of confrontation,” Wilkinson said. “I have a business, and I want the business to thrive. This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”
When she walked into the restaurant, Wilkinson saw that there had been no mistake. The Red Hen is no bigger than some apartments, and the group table was impossible to miss: Sanders in a black dress, her husband, three or four men and women of roughly similar ages, and an older couple.
“They had cheese boards in front of them,” Wilkinson said. Like any other family. The kitchen was already preparing the party’s main course. Wilkinson interrupted to huddle with her workers.
Several Red Hen employees are gay, she said. They knew Sanders had defended Trump’s desire to bar transgender people from the military. This month, they had all watched her evade questions and defend a Trump policy that caused migrant children to be separated from their parents.
“Tell me what you want me to do. I can ask her to leave,” Wilkinson told her staff, she said. “They said ‘yes.’ ”
It was important to Wilkinson, she said, that Sanders had already been served — that her staff had not simply refused her on sight. And it was important to her that Sanders was a public official, not just a customer with whom she disagreed, many of whom were included in her regular clientele.
All the same, she was tense as she walked up to the press secretary’s chair.
“I said, ‘I’m the owner,’ ” she recalled, ” ‘I’d like you to come out to the patio with me for a word.’ ”
They stepped outside, into another small enclosure, but at least out of the crowded restaurant.
“I was babbling a little, but I got my point across in a polite and direct fashion,” Wilkinson said. “I explained that the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation.
“I said, ‘I’d like to ask you to leave.’ ”
Wilkinson didn’t know how Sanders would react, or whether Trump’s chief spokeswoman had been called out in a restaurant before — as the president’s homeland security secretary had been days earlier.
Sanders’s response was immediate, Wilkinson said: “ ‘ That’s fine. I’ll go.’ ”
Sanders went back to the table, picked up her things and walked out. The others at her table had been welcome to stay, Wilkinson said. But they didn’t, so the servers cleared away the cheese plates and glasses.
“They offered to pay,” Wilkinson said. “I said, ‘No. It’s on the house.’ ”
At the end of the shift, Wilkinson said, staff members left the usual overnight note in the kitchen for the morning manager: a problem with the credit card machine. Restock vodka and tequila.
If you’ve ever heard the term “to 86 someone,” it comes from the restaurant industry — code to refuse service, or alternatively to take an item off the menu.
“86 – Sara Huckabee Sanders,” read the note, below the reminder to buy more Pellegrino.
One of the servers photographed the whiteboard before going home Friday. He had posted it to his public Facebook wall by the time Wilkinson woke up Saturday.
For all the angst that evening, Wilkinson said, everything had taken place with decorum. She had been polite; Sanders had been polite; the press secretary’s family had been polite as they followed her out the door.
Not so much the rest of the world, as it discovered Red Hen waiter Jaike Foley-Schultz’s Facebook post: “I just served Sarah huckabee sanders for a total of 2 minutes before my owner asked her to leave.”
A fountain of alternately celebratory and outraged comments gushed from Foley-Schultz’s Facebook wall into the Red Hen’s social media accounts, then its Yelp review page. — END
That’s about as civil as it can get, I’d say.
By the way, this is [cheesywestern] in Roanoke VA, an hour from Lexington. Learned to fly gliders near Lexington in the 70’s.
Hi there! I love that part of Virginia. I lived in Norfolk when I was a kid and My parents had a house in Staunton.
We used to go to Mrs. Rowe’s restaurant in Staunton all the time for their grilled cheese sandwich with sauteed onions, (yes!). Oh, good memories.
Hi!! I lived in Charlottesville for couple of years and Roanoke was part of our driving circuit. Thanks for the WAPO article!!
Tom Watson is right! On Saturday, I walk into a Dunkin Donuts on our walking route and lo and behold I see the disgraced David Gregory. As I walk in, he looked in the direction of the door with ‘that’ face. All these ‘famous’ people have this expectant look on their face as they look at others — ‘oh recognize me! recognize me! Do you know who I am?’ One time, we were at a Mexican restaurant in Vienna, VA and the only other party in the restaurant was this Republican Congressman, Black guy and has since retired (I forget his name) and his family(?) and he kept looking in our direction as if we would recognize him and talk to him. I/We knew who he was but ignored him.
wow, I anticipated this tweet from someone at some point and here it is. How stupid is this guy at drawing this equivalence. One was a discriminatory practice that was racially motivated and unjust at its core to dehumanize a whole group of people. The other is a form of protest targeted at individuals complicit and enabling at perpetrating injustice.
It is an interesting issue in theory, at least. In reality, it is another example of how the Fascist Right tries to play the role of victims, to create a narrative in their favor. And the non-Fascist Right is full of people who want to do the right thing, who want to be gentlemanly, and who always feel guilty when one of their side says a bad word, or insults someone’s looks, or makes it difficult for one of the Fascist Right to enjoy a meal. So we see various people tut-tutting about this, and saying that “this will help Trump,” just like they said that Michelle Wolff’s comedy helped Trump, and Robert DeNiro’s vulgar word helped Trump. And the media told us over and over that Hillary saying that maybe 25% of Trump’s supporters were deplorable people, was simply outrageous;. that while the number is actually around 90%, and those people attack every institution of our government, calling the FBI Nazis, and Mueller a traitor, and saying that Hillary should be locked up or shot, etc.. “That’s just how they roll, those charismatic bad boys; but our side must be civil and respectful at all times, for us to possibly deserve any votes in the next election. This is nothing new in the morality play which the media loves to create on their own terms, and which is always used against Democrats. The First Lady deliberately had “I don’t care, do you?” written on her jacket which would be photographed and videoed all over the country and world, while she was purportedly trying to give emotional support to children separated from their parents by a deliberate act of horrific cruelty executed by her husband, the President. But by all means, do not tell the Press Secretary that she should go somewhere else for a meal!
Now, I think that people should be allowed to eat wherever they want, assuming reasonable dress codes are followed, and they don’t disrupt things. “We reserve the right to refuse service…” But it should certainly not be based on who you are. However, I do agree with you, RD, that so many millions of good people are at their wits’ end with fear, depression, anger, at what is literally a fascist takeover of our government. And I can well understand the motivations for what the one Red Hen restaurant did regarding Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is a daily shill for fascism, as well as a proven repetitive liar to the public. And the Supreme Court apparently did say that a baker can refuse to make a cake for someone because they don’t like their lifestyle, so where does that leave us? Rest assured that the fascists and racists want to go back to “Colored Only” facilities, and loyalty oaths for every worker. So I wouldn’t lift a finger in support or even sympathy for Sanders, who is using herself and being used in another effort to evoke sympathy for the fascists, something that the media falls for every time..
I saw this at Sky Dancing, works for me! Sanders “achieved” her “unwanted “status and deserves to be shunned.
“Sara Sanders complained on Twitter about not being served at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. WaPo reports that the owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, insisted that patrons uphold standards of honesty and compassion, and that Sanders flacks for an “inhumane and unethical” administration, defending Trump’s “cruelest policies.”
Wilkinson’s grounds for not serving the White House spokesperson amounted to personal indecency. It is important to underline that this is what social scientists call an “achieved” status. The grounds had to do with Sanders’ own record of behavior and character, not with anything arbitrary about her.
In contrast, to achieved status, you have ascribed status. The latter is determined by things people think about your inherited characteristics. Being Black or Latino is an ascribed status. Or your family religion as a Catholic or Jew would be in this category of ascribed. It has to do not with your personal standards of character but with what prejudices people might have toward a whole group, of which you are part by virtue typically of inheritance. Even if you converted to Catholicism, e.g., you are not responsible for what all Catholics might have done or for what fanatic Protestants think about Catholicism.
It is wrong to shun people because of their ascribed status. It isn’t wrong to refuse to associate people because of their achieved status.
Sanders achieved her status as pariah in many quarters by lying assiduously on television for a living– by saying things she knew were wrong and/or untrue.
In contrast, Sanders is an advocate for allowing restaurateurs to discriminate on truly objectionable grounds, of ascribed status.”
Ah, Trump calls for immediate deportation without due process rights. Does that remind anybody of….could it be…Nazi Germany? After that, what would stop the government from deporting any American citizen without a hearing? Once due process is gone, you are at the mercy of the totalitarians. Be sure that Sanders gets her dinner, though.
I wish Maxine Waters was smarter in using language and should have said protests come in all forms and that we protest his behavior and policies and of his enablers. I think she as an elected official went a bit too far. But then again, here is the president of the country, president to all people, threatening her with even more vile language. Civility, my foot! Provocation requires a reaction and he and his minions are always provoking.
Tom Watson said this too, see RD’s post.
https://twitter.com/AmandaMarcotte/status/1011218916230815744
Good stuff
https://twitter.com/drvox/status/1010965890404216832
On an elementary school playground two groups of kids are there. One group continually pummels, kicks, throws things at, insults, belittles the kids in the other group, who are just trying to play nicely. Finally, a couple of the nice kids get upset and tell the bad kids to stop what they are doing. The teacher comes along and chastises the nice kids for speaking up, and says that both sides need to be more civil; and that if the nice kids do not stop complaining, this will give the bad kids more reason to kick and pummel them.
Ha, I wonder what does the civility mafia in the media elite have to say about this tweet from 2012. And, remember there was no vile trump nor his supporters making parts of the country toxic.
The present crop of media, especially the 30 somethings (esp. in NYT and some in WaPo) lack seriousness, intellect, breadth of experience and analysis, research and investigative skills and most of all, empathy and idealism. They are masking their mediocrity and hiding their insecurity by arguing for dispassionate discourse, aka both sides.
Me, on The Daily Banter, where I’m “Cletus Safari”.
Oh, what are Spammy’s knickers twisted about NOW? 🙄
From “Big Onion” on The Daily Banter.
More Banter:
https://thedailybanter.com/issues/2018/06/25/anti-trumpers-scolded-for-being-mean-while-trump-carpet-bombs-american-values/
Takeaway lines (emphasis mine):
Never forget who our greatest enemy is in all this:
Just as after Michelle Wolfe roasted Sanders, media rescued her, they are doing the same now in the name of civility. Fuck them!
But WE’RE the uncivil ones. Oooookayyyy.
Please someone explain to me why it’s okay for a Kentucky baker to refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple but it’s wrong for a Virginia restaurant owner to refuse service to Sanders? Trump’s policies offend my religious beliefs every single day.
I hope restaurants put a sign that reads “raci$&@, sexists, neo Nazis, white supremacists are NOT allowed inside. “
As I used to say decades ago, “right on!”
Still all too relevant.