For some reason, Black History Month and the corporate pandering to it have really bothered me this year. The streaming services all have special race-segregated categories this month, for example. I just heard a promo on the Sirius MLB channel with an announcer from a vintage game clip (the one where Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s career home run record) screaming that a “black man is now baseball’s all-time home run champion!” What matters is that Henry Aaron broke the record, regardless of his skin shade. Funny, I don’t recall anyone noting, when Barry Bonds broke Aaron’s record aided by illegal drugs, that “a black man is now baseball’s first all-time home run champion to achieve the distinction by cheating!”

Meanwhile, professional organizations felt it necessary to present programs like this one, by the New York City Bar:

The national obsession with race is a sickness, and only perpetuates division and distrust. It has to stop.

1. Ugh! More unethical web list misinformation...I checked out another of those annoying on-line “slideshows,” this one purporting to list the 35 “Best Movies That Are Actually True To History.” Some of the selections were valid (notably “Gettysburg”), but there are too many better choices than most included on the list to count, and one in particular was unforgivable: “Saving Private Ryan.”

My father regarded that film as offensively unrealistic, and wrote the military advisor on the movie to complain in a 20+ page memo. Details aside, however, the entire plot conceit of the “film”Private Ryan” was absurd, and an insult to General George Marshall. There is no way Marshall would have made the welfare of a single GI a higher priority than ensuring a successful post-Normandy invasion campaign, but that is what Spielberg’s film imagines. Furthermore, the letter allegedly written by President Lincoln that inspires Marshall’s crack-brained scheme in the film has been pretty conclusively proven to have been authored by John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary. Not only that, but the object of the letter, the tragic mother who had supposedly lost five sons in Civil War battles, definitely didn’t.

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In a rare burst of semi-competence, Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel said today that any candidate who wants to take part in the GOP’s first primary debate in Milwaukee later must sign a pledge promising to support whoever wins the nomination.

The measure is obviously aimed at presumed Republican front-runner Donald Trump, who has already signaled that he believes the 2024 GOP nomination is his by right. Trump is a threat to run as a third party candidate if Republican voters come to their senses and support a less divisive candidate before next year’s national convention.

In fact, he’s a threat to do that with or without having signed such a pledge. If his status as a human ticking time bomb is to be minimized, the party must also:

• Make such a pledge also a requirement to run in any of the GOP primaries, and
• Require it for Trump to be entered into nomination at the 2024 Convention, and,
• To make the pledge on video, stating that it is being made to the American people as well as the party.

Finally, the Republican Party must bite the metaphorical bullet and arrange to have all primaries include a run-off between the top two candidates. In any herd of aspiring candidates, Trump will end up in front easily. In a two candidate race with a less toxic adversary, he’ll lose.

We are about to see how seriously the Republican Party takes its obligation to do what is in the  best interests of the United States of America.