Game Change referred to the impact of Sarah Palin. She certainly looked like a game changer at first. Then Palin accused a reporter of bias for asking what she reads and it was downhill from there.

Schmidt has been an aggressive truth-teller since the Palin blunder and has not spared himself. This week, on Morning Joe, Schmidt was commenting on Donald Trump’s reluctance to distance himself from David Duke and the KKK and he let slip an odd revelation about the McCain debacle.

He complained that every large McCain rally would have at least one loud crank saying something racist about Barack Obama. Schmidt said that if McCain had taken on every loud racist who supported him in public, it would have turned the McCain campaign into an “apology tour.”

My Republican Cousin Ray, who liked McCain, was glum. “That’s a tough position, but you gotta ask why those nutcases kept coming? Maybe McCain should have tried shock and awe.”

Writing in The Washington Post, Joe Scarborough commented on Trump’s inability to distance himself from white supremacy. “Is this how the party of Abraham Lincoln dies?”

There was more disgusting behavior in a Foreign Policy report that the U.S. Army has extended its self-imposed deadline to decide whether to end Sgt. First Class Charles Marland’s career for roughing up an Afghan police commander and physically tossing him off an American-Afghan base.

Marland and another Green Beret, Capt. Daniel Quinn, took matters into their own hands when the chain of command failed to respond to reports of the Afghan commander keeping a boy chained to his bed and subjecting the boy to repeated rapes.

I was not aware that intolerance of violent pedophilia violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

When Robert Griffin III, known here in Baja Oklahoma as RGIII, signed with the Washington football team, it broke hearts in his fan base. The Washington team is the archenemy of the regional favorite Dallas Cowboys.

Another problem is that the Washington team is symbolized by a racial slur. It made me queasy when RGIII became an apologist for the indecent name.

RGIII was an explosive and exciting player who drew attention in his high school career at Copperas Cove and his college career at Baylor. The Washington team destroyed his promise, putting him in an unsuitable offense behind a porous offensive line. He was injured as often as not.

Now, The New York Times reports that team president Bruce Allen told a San Diego radio station that RGIII will not be back in the coming season after riding the bench this last year as number three in the depth chart.

Squandering RGIII’s potential was just the latest crime against football by the front office of the Washington team. Here’s hoping RGIII lands on his feet and the Washington team’s mediocrity continues. It would be harder to avoid uttering their name if they were winning.

The Guardian reported on a visit to Australia by Jonathan Rudin of Aboriginal Legal Services in Canada. Rudin was struck by similarities in the way the colonial law played out on indigenous bodies.

Indigenous people are 4 percent of the Canadian population and 25 percent of the prison population. In Australia, those numbers are 3 percent and 27 percent. In Canada, 40 percent of kids in juvenile detention are indigenous. In Australia, it’s 59 percent. Indigenous kids are about half of those in the child welfare system in both countries.

“If it’s something people want, Aboriginal people have less of it,” Rudin said, “and if it’s something people don’t want Aboriginal people have more.”

“Sure glad that doesn’t happen in the U.S.,” Cousin Ray tried to deadpan. But his irony mask slipped.