It's a busy holiday season, from a new coach down to presidential impeachment, and a good time to fire the fickle arrows of conventional wisdom.
⬆ Sam Pittman--It's like Tony Soprano and Junior Samples had a baby and abandoned the infant on the side of the road in eastern Oklahoma.
He's the anti-Chad. (That's Chad Morris, a brief and forgettable interloper in University of Arkansas football lore.)
Pittman says he's not much for slogans. No left lane and hammer-down for this big lug. "Git 'er done" might work for him, but it's taken.
He says he's blue-collar, all about toughness at the line of scrimmage. He says he promises nothing other than to work hard.
He was so emotional upon taking the Razorback head football coaching job that he wept. "I'm a wreck," he said.
Bubba McCoy, who tells me he's started crying at Geico commercials in his dotage, was charmed.
Meantime, there is never anything so exciting in Arkansas as a head football coach who has never lost.
⬆ Eric Musselman--Quick, let's get this arrow fired while he is still the only Razorback basketball coach never to have lost a conference game.
⬇ Impeachment--In this climate, it's a non-event.
⬆ Sarah Huckabee Sanders--She writes her White House memoir. She strolls into the TV studio in her new home and talks to the nation via Fox. People line up to see her at Republican events across Arkansas. She will be the next governor if she wants, which she may.
To the dear liberal woman who wrote me the other day pleading with me to stop writing about Sanders in which case she might go away, I can only say it does not work that way. If only it did.
It works this way: The next governor will be chosen in the Republican primary, and, right now, conventional wisdom has Sanders winning that for the asking, maybe with a couple of stadium rallies with Donald Trump ranting and her daddy playing bass.
Alas, that's the soundtrack of the current Arkansas movie.
⬇ Daddy--Mike Huckabee, I mean. It turns out there's trouble in Redneck Paradise.
Local government agencies are fighting to keep 26 miles of Florida's Gulf Coast beach property public while private property owners including Huckabee most prominently are asserting property rights to try to close the beaches to the high-water line.
Huckabee says he saw extended copulation going on down there and wants those kids off his lawn.
A local lawyer fighting for open beaches has assailed him so effectively on Twitter that Huckabee has filed a whine--it's more formerly called a complaint--with the Florida Bar Association asking the Bar to make the lawyer stop hurting his feelings.
⬆ Asa Hutchinson--I continue to suspect that John Boozman--he's a U.S. senator from Arkansas--will not run again in 2022, and that Asa, term-limited at that time as governor, will ease comfortably into that office to spend his 70s doing what Mitch McConnell tells him to do to keep President Bloomberg from having any success.
⬆ Mike Bloomberg--He said the other day that he understands people's concern about having to choose between two New York billionaires for their next president. But he said he wondered: Who is the other one?
⬇ Mike Pompeo--The secretary of state was host of a dinner the other night for this year's Kennedy Center honorees, including the ailing singing icon of the '70s, Linda Ronstadt. In speaking of her, Pompeo quipped that he, too, sometimes wondered "when will I be loved." When it came her time to speak, Ronstadt looked at the secretary of state and said, "Maybe when you quit enabling Donald Trump." Poor, poor, pitiful Pompeo.
⬆ Hillary Clinton--A few people always insisted over the years that, if you could catch her with her hair down, she could be real and charming.
So, last week she had her hair down as she sat on the interviewee sofa for Howard Stern, who asked her everything, including sexual orientation, to which she replied, "Believe it or not, I like men."
Her best story was about standing in the cold for Donald Trump's inaugural address, during which the preposterous second-place and Russia-endorsed president talked of carnage in a dystopian America, and of having George W. Bush turn to her at the end of the speech and say, "Well, that was some weird sh**."
⬆ George W. Bush--See immediately preceding item.
⬇ Marianne Williamson--Speaking of weird ... you know.
She's still supposedly running for the Democratic presidential nomination, and she put on Twitter the other midnight that she was outraged by the sinister dog whistles of Donald Trump's posthumous pardoning of Charles Manson.
Trump may be a disgrace, but he never did that.
The utterly bogus assertion has been traced to a piece of satire from something called the Moron Majority, which, it turns out, is not the official website of the Arkansas General Assembly.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/12/2019