Oh, ‘ello there mates. The Mouse is in the House, and in a mood to grouse. And to rhyme—little-known fact: I’m descended from mice that lived in the Globe Theatre.
I ken many of you have already heard the story summarized in the following doggerel. If not, fear not; I will tell it in prose below the poem. So, with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore, here goes:
‘twas the night before Christmas, when all through the church,
not a creature was stirring, save me on my perch.
I fired up my ipad, dialed up Daily Mail,
Expecting to read of Yuletide and Wassail,
When what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a story from Texas of a flier most queer.
The issue it seems was an overbooked flight,
And a parliamentarian’s entitled spite.
This woman of Congress demanded a spot,
that a mere citizen had already bought.
‘twas the ultimate berth in the first-class section;
Should Sheila not get it, beware the invection.
To defy Queen Sheila, the airline well knew,
Would condemn them to charges of racism, too.
So they did what they had to, perhaps with regret,
And assigned Jean-Marie to a steerage couchette.
At the back of the plane (Jean-Marie’s new position),
Her neighbor, she learned, was one more politician.
“Do you know what happened, and who stole your seat?
Why ‘twas Sheila Jackson Lee, a notorious cheat.”
“She’s up to old tricks, you’re at least number four,
I’ve witnessed her unseat three travelers before.
Don’t blame it on Texas, we’re not all like her,
Merry Christmas! Think Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh.”
So I turned off my tablet, some wiser but sad,
And spied through the window a jolly grandad,
Above the sleigh-noise I heard, wafting, his dictum,
“stay clear of Queen Sheila, the perpetual victim.”
Last December 18, Jean-Marie Simon was about to board a flight from Houston to Washington D.C., the final leg of her journey home from Guatamala, when the gate attendant told her that her ticket was not in the system. She was told the first-class seat she had purchased, 1A, had been taken by another passenger. The gate attendant re-ticketed her to Economy Class and gave her a $500.00 voucher toward a future purchase.
As she boarded the plane, Simon did not recognize the middle aged black woman sitting in seat 1A. Only when she got to her seat in economy and told her story (with exhibits) to the man in the seat beside her did she learn the woman’s identity: Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (who turns 68 today, January 12, 2018—happy birthday, Sheila). Simon later wrote:
“I was the last passenger on the plane. A Texas congressman, a nice guy, [was seated] next to me. He said he was glad I had made it on the flight. I showed him my boarding pass with my seat, 1A, printed on it. He said, ‘You know what happened, right? Do you know who’s in your seat?’ I said no. He told me that it was Sheila Jackson Lee, a fellow [U.S. Representative] who regularly does this, that this was the third time he personally had watched her bump a passenger.”
The flight was delayed for an hour due to mechanical issues, and during that delay Simon went forward to the first class compartment and snapped a picture of Jackson Lee, tweeting it out with the caption: “Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) in seat 1A, the one I paid for dearly, and the one United gave to her without my consent or knowledge. Fellow congressman on same flight said she does it repeatedly. @United.”
United Airlines claims that Simon cancelled her own ticket using a smartphone app: “After thoroughly examining our electronic records, we found that upon receiving a notification that Flight 788 was delayed due to weather, the customer appears to have canceled her flight from Houston to Washington, DC within the United mobile app,” United stated. But Simon vehemently denies that she cancelled her ticket, or ever had any notion of doing so.
What seems more likely is that United, having had long and sad experience with Sheila Jackson Lee, decided to let her have the seat; they then invented the story about cancellation on the app to cover up for their preemptive surrender to the congresswoman.
The male Texas congressman who sat beside Simon is not the only eyewitness to Jackson Lee’s frequent abuse of her status. “I've seen Lee . . . cutting in line and rudely taking advantage of her status before. United knows she will play the race card if she isn't treated like royalty so they just give in. They don't care about a hard-working teacher vs a privileged idiot,” one person tweeted.
Daily Mail reporter David Martosko tweeted his experience with Jackson Lee, saying, “I saw Sheila Jackson-Lee on a domestic flight two years ago. While I was walking back to coach, she was throwing a hissy fit in First Class over why the steward had to gate-check her carry-on. (It was too big to fit in the overhead.) She threw a tantrum worthy of a 3-year-old.”
Back in the late 1990s, the Houston Press reported that Jackson Lee would regularly demand first class upgrades and throw temper tantrums when she did not get special treatment. On one occasion, when Jackson Lee boarded a flight at Reagan National Airport and found that the menu did not include a seafood special she had wanted, she flew into a rage: "Don't you know who I am? I'm Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. Where is my seafood meal? I know it was ordered!" According to Rebecca Cox, a Continental Airlines vice president for governmental affairs, Jackson Lee "screamed at the top of her lungs at least a minute. She embarrassed the flight attendants and the passengers in first class. And she embarrassed herself."
Whenever she is called out for her rude behavior, Jackson Lee plays the race card. According to a 2011 Daily Caller report, she once demanded that her driver park in an area in front of the Treasury Building that the Secret Service had placed off limits. When the Secret Service stopped Jackson Lee’s vehicle, she claimed it was because the “white” officers (who were actually Hispanic) were racist.
Unsurprisingly, Jackson Lee now claims that Jean-Marie Simon is a racist. In a tweet about the incident, Jackson Lee wrote: “Since this was not any fault of mine, the way the individual continued to act appeared to be, upon reflection, because I was an African-American woman.”
Ordinarily, the Leftist media would close ranks around Jackson Lee, accept United’s story that Simon cancelled her own ticket, and possibly even buy the baseless slur that Simon is a racist. This would have happened if Jackson Lee had bumped, say, a white conservative man and he had taken umbrage at losing his seat. (Our story’s male congressman, sitting near the back of the plane in coach, had likely long since accepted that, politically, he could not get away with even flying first class, much less bumping a civilian to do so.)
But Jean-Marie Simon is not just a “school teacher,” as most of the press accounts have reported, and she was not in Guatamala as a tourist. She’s a graduate of Georgetown University and Harvard Law School. During the 1980s, she lived in Guatemala and worked as a photojournalist, documenting human-rights abuses during that violent decade when the military seized control in a coup, and tens of thousands of Guatemalans were killed or “disappeared.” Simon wrote the book, “Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny,” and has donated a thousand copies of her book to schools and universities in Guatemala “to keep the truth of what happened alive.”
The point is that Simon has liberal/progressive credentials that cannot easily be dismissed by the Leftist media, which helps explain why this story has had the “legs” to take it not only throughout the United States but to England and the entire anglophone world.
According to credible reports from numerous former staffers, Sheila Jackson Lee is an abusive employer who berates her staffers, calling them obscene names. She is also physically abusive, throws cell phones at staff, and has demanded unsafe driving while being chauffeured (which reportedly once resulted in a motorcar accident).
“You don’t understand. I am a queen, and I demand to be treated like a queen,” she once told a member of her staff.
What a lot of rubbish and rot. No, Sheila, you are not a queen. We have a queen here in merry old England, and you’re not her. When you Yanks split off from the mother country, you opted for a republic with no royalty nor even any titles of nobility. You are an elected citizen-legislator, which gives you no license to be rude and overbearing toward the people you were hired to serve.
Why am I writing about Sheila Jackson Lee? Why not leave her in well-deserved obscurity—if, alas, she has any obscurity left? Because she identifies as a Seventh-day Adventist. (By the way, if she’s really an Adventist, why did she go off her trolley over that missing shrimp cocktail?)
This woman has been paraded around Adventist and NAD circles for years. She was trotted out at the San Antonio General Conference and shown to the delegates as a high-ranking American politician and an Adventist. She was invited to speak at Oakwood University in February, 2016. The communications directors featured her at one of their annual conventions several years ago, and she has been asked to speak at numerous upper level NAD gatherings.
But she gives no evidence of having had a conversion experience, or of living a life of charity and humility. Is there any evidence that her Adventist religion has refined and ennobled her character, or even filed down the sharpest edges of her temper?
She seems to be a first-rate narcissist. “I am a queen, and demand to be treated like a queen” is dangerously close to, “I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, And I will sit on the mount of assembly . . . I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.”
I would suggest the NAD blokes find another prominent SDA politician to invite to their shindigs. Ben Carson, perhaps? Or does the fact that gentle Ben is a cabinet secretary in a Republican administration disqualify him from being a role model for the Left-leaning NAD?