I do so wish I was kidding.

First, this is all nonsense, and just something Trump spun up to distract us from the Russian investigations. And to mollify the racist wing of his base.  And maybe it speaks to Trump’s own deep-seated fear of brown people.  But I’m still voting that his main motive was to distract us from Robert Mueller’s increasingly serious criminal investigation.

But.  Watching the train wreck of Wednesday’s White House press conference, I had to be impressed when White House Senior Advisor Stephen Miller denied that the words on the base of the Statue of Liberty were really American.  You know, that little thing about

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Yeah, that little ditty?  When pressed, Stephen Miller’s answer was that the words on the base of the Statue of Liberty weren’t really American:

MILLER: Secondly, I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty and lighting the world. It’s a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty.

Technically, he’s right.  France gave America this really big statue, but America didn’t have a free table to put it on.  So we passed the hat for a nice pedestal.  They even got the famous poet Emma  Lazarus to write a nifty new poem to raffle off.  The poem wasn’t part of the pedestal, but everyone liked it, and we decided to inscribe “The New Colossus” in the base about 17 years later.  So Miller has the sequence of events right.

And Miller is absolutely, miserably, horrifically wrong about it anyway.  This poem is essentially American.  For more than a century, we’ve embraced the poem as the American ideal.  We inscribed the poem into our embodiment of liberty, the Statue of Liberty.  We’ve been teaching that poem to every school kid, as a clear statement of our uniquely immigrant nation (and pissing off native Americans in the process).

Stephen Miller just waved all that other history aside, implying the hundred-year-old bronze plaque of our ideals on the Statue of Liberty was just ‘fake news’, and not really American enough for him, or for Donald Trump.

(Yes, he spoke for our Fearful Leader.  Don’t hear Donnie denying any of that, do you?)

So, are we distracted yet?  The Orange Don just made a huge fuss about a bill that has zero chance of passing the Senate.

The questions are unchanged:

• Has Trump colluded with Russia against the interests of the United States?
• Has Trump conspired with Russia?
• Has Trump has violated his oath of office?

The rest is noise.  (And Trump’s obvious fear of all brown people.)