It was the Day Of Jubilee on Squint And The Meat Puppet Tuesday morning. Everybody was congratulating Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina, and Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, and Renowned World Leader Mitt Romney, for their bold stance against the flag of treason -- revived in 1962 as the emblem of "massive resistance" -- 150 years after the seditious cause for which it waved was crushed, Squint was particularly bumfuzzled, reminiscing vaguely about how he used to put up the flag in his dorm room just to be an asshole to the "Yankees, as we called them." But they all agreed that the Day Of Jubilee had arrived. Mike Barnicle even on board, even though he had to form his own original opinion, Mike Royko having died in 1997. We have passed now, as we inevitably were going to, into the self-congratulatory phase of this whole awful episode.

For example, look at the photo of Haley during her press conference yesterday. If you look closely, in the background, you can see obvious anagram Reince Priebus, the emptiest suit in American politics, who was in attendance to represent the Republican party's long-standing opposition to the display of symbols of treason, a solid principle since at least last Wednesday. Of course, he was there because most of the candidates for his party's presidential nomination have been flopping around like fish in a boat on this issue for a week now, and Haley was doing Priebus and the rest of those political giants the inestimable favor of letting them off the hook, at least for the moment. Priebus was probably there to thank her.

Now, of course, we will hear a lot of ahistorical braggadocio about how it was Republicans who freed the slaves, and passed the civil rights acts in the 1960s, Party Of Lincoln and all that. And we will hear about how great we are in general because we have all come together to agree that, in 2015, we decline to further glorify the symbol of a bloody insurrection launched in defense of chattel slavery. We rock. We are so very awesome. I give it a couple of weeks before the conventional wisdom congeals that we have "moved past the controversy" and we can all get back to gutting the Fair Housing Act and undermining voting rights and performing all the rites and rituals that have come to mark the Day of Jubilee.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io