In 2018, Jimmy Fallon held up a picture that showed Barack and Michelle Obama giving a last wave before boarding Air Force One after Trump’s inauguration nearly two years earlier. She was there to promote her new book, Becoming, which helped boost her sales to 10 million copies in its first five months of publication.
“This is you,” Fallon said, “this is after the Trump inauguration just waving from Air Force One. Can you just walk me through what …”
“Bye Felicia!” Michelle blurted to Fallon’s boyish guffaws and rapturous applause from the audience. The spurn set the tone for laughter that lingered until Michelle’s slight against Melania Trump’s Tiffany Box gift moment. Which, to me, was extremely un-Becoming of a former first lady and something I could never imagine Melania blurting out in the same circumstance. But I digress.
The dismissive, “Bye Felicia” (correctly spelled Felisha), trickled into a pop obsession in memes, songs, TV shows, and movies after a throwaway scene in Ice Cube’s 1995 stoner comedy, Friday.
Felisha (Angela Means), the neighborhood’s smelly, unkempt, drug-addicted moocher, asked to borrow Smokey’s (Chris Tucker) car, then for marijuana. He gave her an emphatic “Hell, naw!” served with annoyed jesters and crude put-downs.
Not Craig.
“Craig ...” she said, turning to him for support before he quickly interrupted.
“Bye, Felisha,” he said with a lazy wave-off, not bothering to even look at her. She left.
The phrase is “a dismissive send-off, where the recipient is rendered so unimportant that their name is reduced to ‘Felicia,’” according to Wikipedia.
Which is exactly the way I feel about Trump-addicted politicians like New York’s Attorney General Leticia James. These are self-centered, power-hungry political activists who are so cracked out on hatred that they’ve become unbearably unimportant in the issues that really matter.
With all the problems in New York, and having built nothing that adds to the state aside from government work, James has been notoriously obsessed with tearing down Donald Trump and all he’s built in New York over the decades.
On Wednesday, she filed a 220-page civil suit alleging that Trump, his children, and his company inflated the asset values and net worth of the organization’s properties to secure lucrative deals with brokers and insurers.
“This conduct cannot be brushed aside and dismissed as some sort of good faith mistake,” said James. “The statements of financial condition were greatly exaggerated, grossly inflated, objectively false, and therefore fraudulent and illegal. And as a result of that, we are seeking relief … No one, my friend, is above the law.”
Yawn.
Years before Wednesday’s announcement, James vowed to “get Trump” during her 2018 campaign. With no evidence, she accused Trump of money laundering, obstruction of justice, and conspiring with foreign governments.
“I will never be afraid to challenge this illegitimate president,” she said. “I believe that this president is incompetent. I believe that this president is ill-equipped to serve in the highest office of this land. And I believe that he is an embarrassment to all that we stand for.”
Despite crossing the ethical line into naked partisan politics and open hostility, she won, then bragged that her win was about “that man in the White House who can’t go a day without threatening our fundamental rights.”
“As the next attorney general of his [Trump’s] home state,” said James, “I will be shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings, and every dealing, demanding truthfulness at every turn.”
In other words, she was vowing to launch an investigation that would search for crimes in a case that all but guaranteed a preordained outcome. “Trump is guilty, now let’s find the evidence.”
Former assistant U.S. Attorney General Andy McCarthy told Fox News that James’s suit is “penny ante stuff,” and will likely never make it to trial.
“This is not exactly the Bernie Madoff case,” he said. “There’s no victims here … Leticia James does this all the time. She did the same thing with Cuomo. She does this long investigation, she figures out a way to dump the investigation into the public record because she’s got her eyes on his job [and] she dumps out a bunch of stuff that she was never able to prove.”
It’s not only James, but the Democrat party who “does this all the time” – especially when it comes to Trump. The two-year Russian collusion investigation and the two impeachments all crackled with thunder in the beginning, but when the cases couldn’t be proved, all the partisan mess was dumped into the public record. The lopsided Jan. 6 committee seems to be going down the same beaten road.
Take Nancy Pelosi. Knowing from the beginning that the Senate didn’t have the votes to convict Trump in the first impeachment, the hateful Speaker bathed herself in the wicked delight that her frivolous impeachment made history.
“He’s been impeached forever,” she crowed, as COVID-19 was finding its way to America. “They can never erase that.”
As with James, these people mooch on our sacred institutions to choreograph reckless political theater while the country, like New York, goes to hell. They say nothing about James’s egregious disregard for blind justice and legal ethics because, today, Leticia James is the embodiment of the Democrat party: professionally unkempt, Trump-addicted, political moochers who are leaving America exasperated with how unbearably irrelevant they’ve become to our real problems.
It's far past time we make sure these people are voted, as Trump puts it, into political oblivion.
Rather than getting worked up anymore, as Smokey did, New Yorkers need to give the lazy wave-off to their current attorney general on Nov. 8, and simply say, “Bye, Letisha.”
And let’s hope she leaves for good.