Bobby-Joe, yer flannel's showing.

FORMER WHITE SUPREMACIST WON’T OPEN CLUB AFTER ALL.

This is a true, for real, fo’-sho’  headline in the local section of the online edition of our newspaper here in Springfield. Don’t believe me? Here’s the link. Just when you thought things were getting all crazy with Arizona and their immigration-law enforcement trainwreck, here in good ol’ Missouri we have ignorant morons trying to open up a nightclub while trying to assure town leaders, “no, really, it’s just a club. That’s all. No affiliations to idiocy. I promise.” ( I made that quote up, yes.) The town in question is Odessa, Mo, on the outskirts of Kansas City.

According to Google Maps, Odessa is located 159 miles northwest of my house and touts itself as “a community rich in history and inspired by the spirit of the Midwest. A family oriented city, providing its citizens and businesses with great services and opportunities” on its official website. I’ll give the city alderman this much: they successfully ran this ass-clown’s attempts to open a “social club” on the 65th anniversary of Hitler’s death into the dirt. I applaud them for this. And I wonder about Charles Juba.

Juba (I think it rhymes with rube-uh), was a “former self-proclaimed leader of the Aryan Nations”, and was attempting to recruit kids from area high schools to attend the opening of The Black Flag Club, the black flag representing, in his words “people who don’t surrender”. He has said he’s abandoned his racist and anti-Semitic past, but, you know, opening on the anniversary of Hitler’s suicide wasn’t exactly PR at its finest. Still, Juba has his defenders willing to come out in public to support him.  Said Monica Loges, who identified herself as a friend of Juba’s: “he’s got a past, yes, but who doesn’t?” Listen, lady, I’ve made plenty of crappy choices in my checkered past, but being the leader of a racist nation never even entered my mind as an option. My bad choices were mostly limited to personal self-destructive tendencies, not spouting, and worse, BELIEVING IN, that kind of bullshit.

And then? In the coup de grace that was supposed to make it all better? She states this: “he goes to church twice a week and is a fine family man.”

Oh. Well….my bad. That makes it all better. Church and family. How could you go wrong with such a winning combo? Again, kudos to the City Aldermen of Odessa for not swallowing the excuses; I applaud the citizens for showing up and angrily shouting his ass down. For once, I can back mob-rule. If that fool wants to practice his ignorance in the comfort of his own trailer, hell, that’s his business. But the last thing the Missouri, and the Midwest in general, needs, is to give license to ugly relics of our nations’ past like this to operate hives of hatred. Church or not, Juba, Odessa ain’t buying what you’re preaching.