Twitter is not being very pacific about Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ insulting dismissal of America’s 50th state. The nation’s top lawman expressed astonishment that a Hawaiian judge “on an island in the Pacific” could dare hold up President Donald Trump’s travel ban.
Sessions was referring to a March 15 order by U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson that blocked parts of Trump’s second travel ban. “I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power,” Sessions said earlier this week.
That “island in the Pacific” Sessions so scorned has been a state since 1959, Twitter was quick to point out, and was the site of the surprise Japanese bomber attack that launched the U.S. into World War II.
One wag wondered if Sessions’ apparent confusion that Hawaii is actually part of America could perhaps explain birthers’ belief that President Barack Obama wasn’t actually born in the U.S. — because he was born on that very same “island in the Pacific.” Hawaii’s Democratic senators blasted the comment, with Sen. Mazie Hirono underscoring the racism of Sessions’ “dog whistle politics.”
The ACLU of Hawaii boasted in a tweet that “civil rights is in our DNA,” and a number of tweets noted that it was Sessions’ state of Alabama that once fought to leave the U.S.
One writer hoped Sessions would take a “three-hour” tour, when he could presumably get lost on “Gilligan’s Island.”
And for one final love tweet to the state: