For the Record: Little Red Hen

The Red Hen.

There's been an awful lot of remarkable derp on the Twitter today, starting with the horrors unleashed on Sarah Huckabee Sanders by the 26-seat Red Hen farm-to-table restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, which sent her party away after consultations between the owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, and the staff:

“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.’ ”

Which, naturally, brought out the 101st Keyboard Incivility Combat Troops:

I missed that episode where Tony hung out at the Trump International and got to know the simple, humble customers, and showed us how to get beyond ignorance and exoticism to see them with respect and compassion, as our equals. https://t.co/CWQrNlLrbZ

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) June 24, 2018

Oh wait maybe that's because his focus was always on the small and oppressed, even when the president of the United States was on the show, and he didn't think lobbyists and White House officials needed all his love and attention.

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) June 24, 2018

And eventually old David Axelrod himself:

Everybody has to take a stand in the way they can. This is not a party, or a cricket match. She wasn't shut out because she votes Republican but because she's a notorious liar and abuser of the press, complicit with a murderous, thievish gangster regime.

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) June 24, 2018

I'm glad Senator Schumer is civil. He has stuff that must get done, for the American people as they say. The Red Hen owner is in a different position. She has to make the right choice for her staff (some gay, some immigrants) who are threatened by Trump policy, and customers.

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) June 24, 2018

It was the staff, you know, who decided what to do about the Sanders party that night, and to me that's as it should be. Rather have them handle it that way than spitting in Sanders's salad for their private satisfaction. More dignified, and if not more "civil", maybe more civic.

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) June 24, 2018

And Judge Jeanine Pirro, too! You know how big she is on civility!

Irony Dies As Fox's Flame-Throwing 'Judge' Jeanine Pirro Bemoans The 'Loss Of Civil Discourse' https://t.co/toIcqFZ7oD Heh, Jeanine https://t.co/WqNxDh35eG

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) June 24, 2018

And this guy:

If we're now living in a world where suburban restaurants are as powerful as Senate committees used to be in the 1950s and the White House is as powerless as 1950s screenwriters and folk musicians, I'd say it's a conservative small-government dreamland, if it was true. https://t.co/mDhYM70pdg

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) June 24, 2018

Only the executive keeps distracting us from this by playing the victim like Bruno Maradona working a ref. "Oh, the press was mean to me!" "Oh, a restaurant threw me out!" "Oh, Mueller keeps investigating my beautiful deal-making with my Russian friends--Witch Hunt!"

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) June 24, 2018

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.