Strange Politics

For Donald Trump's Cabinet . . . Dr. Who?

Not the TV character - a question.

Dr. Carson - Ben Carson - for Housing and Urban Development Secretary?

Because he grew up in Detroit?

Then why don't we just make him Transportation Secretary because he grew up in a town where they make Chevrolets?

Maybe I'm the wrong person to criticize this choice, because I voted for an M.D. for President, but what does a neurosurgeon know about housing and urban development?  And, apart from neurosurgery, what does Ben Carson know about anything?

Apparently, Trump thinks Carson is qualified in urban affairs because Carson is black. You can't blame Trump, really. The United States is pretty much the only English-speaking country where "urban" is a synonym for "black."  A black circus bills itself as "urban family entertainment."  Black radio stations are called "urban" radio stations.  We have a black-oriented public-affairs organization called the National Urban League, once known as the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes; maybe a name like the National League on Black Urban Issues would have been a better name.  We've become acclimated to thinking of black America as urban America, and white America as rural and suburban America, thanks to transportation policies and housing policies that encouraged the white middle class to leave the cities - and blacks - behind.  But not all blacks live in cities, and not all whites live in the country or the suburbs.  Dr. Carson himself lived in semi-rural Maryland while at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore - where a white guy (Martin O'Malley) served as mayor in the two thousand zeroes.    

Meanwhile, the ordeal in North Carolina is finally over.  Pat McCrory, the Republican governor who made defending the civil rights of people afraid of transgendered individuals by preserving the sanctity of bathrooms and making girls who were born guys use the men's room and guys who were born girls use the women's room (I don't get it either), formally conceded to Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper in the general election.  Cooper is a light in an otherwise dark tunnel for the Democrats, the second Democrat elected governor in a state south of the 36' 30" parallel line since 2008.  Maybe Democrat Foster Campbell will win the Louisiana U.S. Senate general election this Saturday.  

And while all this has been going on, Al Gore stopped by Trump Tower to talk to the presumptive President-elect about climate change at Ivanka Trump's invitation.  This is getting really weird . . ..