Auchtoon!

A brief backstory from a Michigan Public story earlier this week:

Last week, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sent a letter to Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett demanding election materials from 2024, including ballots, receipts, and envelopes. The letter said due to an alleged history of voter fraud in the county, the DOJ needed to ensure no election laws were violated in the last presidential election.

The letter highlighted a 2020 lawsuit against Wayne County and the city of Detroit alleging voter fraud. The lawsuit was dismissed by a Wayne County judge. The letter also highlighted previous allegations of election fraud in the county, which state officials say did not occur during the 2024 election.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel replied with: “Once again, President Trump is weaponizing the Justice Department in an attempt to sabotage our democratic process and turn it into his own personal agency to interfere in state elections.”

In other words, the President is doing the sort of thing (weaponizing the Justice Department) that he specifically campaigned against.

And yet, it’s easy to see the motivation: distraction. From the Epstein files, from the Iran War, from high gas prices, from low poll ratings. And here I am drawing about it, so, alas, it might be working.

Parts of Michigan have experienced an extraordinary amount of rain this week. And this — on top of an already wet spring and high snowfall winter — is causing flooding and stressing infrastructure. As I’m writing this Thursday afternoon, officials are monitoring several dams, including one in Cheboygan that are in danger of overflowing. This is a real-life concern for many Michiganders.

Meanwhile, the President of the United States is presenting himself either as Jesus or his best friend, the Vice President is questioning the Pope’s theology credentials, and the Secretary of Defense is quoting made-up scripture from the movie Pulp Fiction. This is a freakin’ sideshow.

I just finished listening to a series on The Rest Is History podcast, “The Ku Klux Klan.” First, yes, this is not a normal thing healthy people do with their free time. But it was informative and, subject matter notwithstanding, entertaining.

The positive takeaway: The seeming uptick in various hatreds in our country (antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-immigration, racism, etc.)? We’ve been through this before. That’s not good, but it’s not unprecedented. After the Civil War, the first iteration of the KKK grew out of white southerners wanting to keep recently freed Blacks in submission. The second iteration that peaked in the 1920s was focused on oppressing immigrants, primarily Catholics and Jews. The third iteration post-World War II concentrated on vigilante violence against expanding civil rights.

Of course, the negative takeaway is exactly the same: We as a country cannot seem to stop these awful spasms that ruin real people and real people’s lives.

Our political parties don’t seem to help. In fact, they typically make things worse. In Michigan, for example, we have Republicans allowing, if not embracing, hatred toward our Muslim citizens. The Democrats seem to believe it can all be managed with a properly structured public relations plan. I’m not sure what can break the cycle, but I do know it’s not this.

Years ago I hurt a co-worker’s feeling when I loudly opined that I preferred the earlier music of the band Chicago because its later years were dominated by Peter Cetera and I found his power ballads to be whiny and annoying. Of course my exact wording was more colorful, involving many variations of “sucks” and allusions to ear bleeding.

But he was a big fan, so my unsolicited thoughts were unkind and unnecessary. And the fact is that there was (and is) lots of music that I enjoy which is hardly defensible as objectively good. So I’m not here to disparage Kid Rock‘s music. If you like it, you like it. If you don’t, you don’t. Although, the line from his song “Cool, Daddy Cool” — Young ladies, young ladies, I like ’em underage see, Some say that’s statutory (But I say it’s mandatory) — is something I think we can all agree to openly dislike.

And it’s not Rock himself that I necessarily have issues with. I’ve never met him. But he is an artist and a celebrity and lives a very public life freely sharing his opinions. So we are all free to have reactions to those opinions, especially the cruel and entitled ones.

Rock was born and raised in Michigan, a credential he has often burnished (especially when selling concert tickets here). But as demonstrated in the video he posted this past week on social media with a U.S. military helicopter hovering near his hilltop home, he has chosen to live in Tennessee. So I’ll be very happy to have him be associated with Tennessee, not Michigan, from this point forward.