Does anyone say “Color me X” any more? Oh hell, I don’t care: Color me unimpressed with “MAGA Granny” rejecting her pardon from President Trump for her role in the January 6 Capitol riot that was the worst thing to happen to the United States since 9-11. Or Pearl Harbor. Or the Civil War.

She’s the retired 72-year-old drug and alcohol counselor from Boise, Idaho who pleaded guilty in January 2022 to a misdemeanor for entering the Capitol during the riot and was sentenced to 60 days in prison and three years of probation. She was one of those “rioters” who was basically walking around. The Axis media is singing her praises because she announced that she says won’t accept the pardon.

Hemphill said in an interview this week that she was turning President Trump’s gift down. “It’s an insult to the Capitol Police, to the rule of law and to the nation,” she said. “If I accept a pardon, I’m continuing their propaganda, their gaslighting and all their falsehoods they’re putting out there about Jan. 6.” She now says she doesn’t support Trump or (in the words of the New York Times) “believes his lie that the 2020 election was stolen.” (For the thousandth time, that is not a lie but an opinion that cannot be proven or disproven). A therapist had helped her change her view of the episode, you see. Now she realizes, she says, that the “Stop the Steal” movement. “was a cult, and I was in a cult.”

Winston Smith knows just how she feels.

I wonder if that therapist put a cage of hungry rats on her face to prompt Pam’s epiphany?

This is one of the more blatant examples of grandstanding and virtue-signaling that I’ve read about lately. It is almost certain that she can’t reject a Presidential pardon, and that fact of law was recently reinforced. In December, two federal prisoners whose death sentences were commuted by former President Biden (I love writing that) asked a judge to undo the reduction in their sentences. Judge James R. Sweeney II of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana dismissed the requests just last week. He cited a 1927 U.S. Supreme Court ruling holding a prisoner who had been sentenced to death could not reject a commutation from President Taft because it was issued without his consent. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote for the Court that the pardon power does not require a recipient’s consent, writing in his Holmesian way, “Just as the original punishment would be imposed without regard to the prisoner’s consent and in the teeth of his will, whether he liked it or not, the public welfare, not his consent, determines what shall be done.”

Pam’s wayis even better for the pardoned: they can derive all the benefits of a pardon or commutation while protesting that they were bad citizens and deserved what they got. Maybe they might even believe that. Or not.

The current case looks to me like a nice elderly woman fell under the influence of a MAGA fanatic, got involved in the protest that went awry, and now has fallen under the influence of an anti-Trump therapist, or her angry grandchildren, or her Mahjong group, or something. Or maybe she wants 15 more minutes of fame, and jumping from one cult to another is a good way to do it.

This stunt costs her nothing. She gets the pardon anyway. She’s served her sentence. Any septuagenarian who can’t get through three years without violating probation is akin to Ma Barker. Elsewhere in her interview she says that she lost her critical thinking ability. I hate to tell her, but it’s still missing.

The aggressive prosecution and sentencing of the J-6 defendants were a blight on the rule of law as well as those “democratic norms” the Axis is so fond of citing while its favorite party is violating them. These were political show trials, with the main objective of intimidating and punishing Trump supporters. The rigged investigation in Congress made that clear.

Had the George Floyd rioters been punished to the exact same extent and using the same standards I could accept the J-6 prosecutions as at least non-partisan. However, a politicized and biased justice system, in an anti-Trump, nearly exclusively Democratic jurisdiction, with a partisan judge presiding, threw the metaphorical book at the bad (Republican/conservative/white) rioters at the Capitol while in various jurisdictions around the country the good (black, Democratic Party voting, victims of systemic racism) Black Lives Matter rioters mostly went free, got into diversionary programs, and generally faced less harsh sentences. After all, the BLM rioters were only protesting for social justice and to reform a racist society. The J-6 rioters were staging an “insurrection,” as the media insisted on describing it.

Well, I hope Pam’s little show puts her back in the good graces of her family.