The Red Hen is a restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. Like most of you, I had never heard of them before, until recently. I have visited Virginia a few times, and once lived there while I was in high school. There weren't any Red Hens where I lived and I'm not sure if it's a local chain. Google search results are focussing on what happened there this past weekend and are not geared towards facilitating research to find out what they are really all about.
Anyway, they are in the news......and bigly, I might add. President Trump's press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was told to get the hell out and to not come back by one of the owners....or the owner (I'm not clear on that fine detail). So Sarah got up and left. When someone doesn't want your business, then don't give it to them.
As can be expected, this is all over talk radio today. In addition to this, we have discussion on Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi being bullied at a movie theater over the weekend, and we some very vocal activists calling for more of this behavior. As I am sometimes wont to do, I will ask you to hold that thought, because I am not done with The Red Hen yet, and I haven't even gotten to that most lovable Maxine Waters.
Now what I'm about to say may surprise you. As far as I know I'm going in a different direction than you might expect of me from someone who resides where I do in the political spectrum. I might even be diverging from what talk radio is saying about this.
I think The Red Hen had every right to demand Sarah Sanders to leave. I'm also glad that they did just that.......not because I think it was the right thing to do, which I don't. I have my own reasons for this and I ask that they be given more consideration than The Red Hen gave to Sarah Sanders.
I think a business owner has the right to refuse service for any reason they so choose. A business is a private enterprise. If a business chooses to discriminate, it's their right to discriminate. If they make a business decision that a certain part of their clientele is not welcome, then they should execute that decision.
If they do that, they had better not damn well complain about any repercussions encountered if they make that decision. An upscale eating establishment isn't going to want a bunch of tattooed bikers in there (not that tattooed bikers would want to go there in the first place). Some establishments don't want noisy children on their premises. Many of them didn't want smokers in there (before the state involved itself into the matter of smoking in restaurants).
The Red Hen is already experiencing repercussions. There's an online civil war going on about this on their Yelp page. They have made their decision to discriminate against Trump administration officials. And I want them to go further.
I want them to establish a policy of not serving Republicans. I will even help pay for a sign reading "REPUBLICANS ARE NOT WELCOME HERE". So if any of you Red Hen people end up reading this, please contact me, and advise me of how much this sign would cost. I'll pay for half of it; you pay for the other half. I don't think Republicans will want to eat there anyway, but I will help you let them know that you don't like them.
Now we will move on to Maxine Waters, the honorable member of Congress from southern California. Maxine Waters has called upon her supporters to continue to harass Trump staffers. That really is of no surprise. A member of Congress, who on MLK day praises his nonviolence approach, is agitating her supporters into bullying. That may, or may not, lead to violence. I think the potential for violence is very much there.
There is one thing for her supporters, and for the modern day Brownshirts, to consider. Their targets are those who support the Second Amendment. They may have concealed weapon permits. They may be carrying. Will she call on her supporters to martyr themselves, so that more federal gun control can be enacted? Or will it be one of her supporters to fire the first shot? Is it a matter of if some violence of the gun type happening, or a matter of when?
That said, I have one more thought on Maxine Waters to pass along.
I want the Democrats to appoint Maxine Waters as their spokesperson. I want the major networks to give Maxine Waters thirty minutes of airtime on the eve of the midterm election. I do not want the major networks to allow equal time for a Republican response. Let Maxine Waters address the nation on the eve of the election. She can ask us if we're better off than we were two years ago, or she can lecture us about how the Trump tax cuts are hurting us. Hell, she can even say that Trump should have left things with North Korea well alone, and criticize the efforts to denuclearize the Korean peninsula. I don't care. Just get her on the air, and let her speak for thirty minutes.
Did I say thirty minutes?
Maybe I meant sixty.
Either way, I don't care. As long as she spends most of the time calling Trump and his supporters a bunch of Nazi thugs, especially while his supporters are bullied at restaurants and movie theaters.
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