Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice tovarisch in our present day judicial Potemkin village

Back in the bad old days of Empress Catherine II of Russia, the interior minister was a gent named Grigori Potemkin. And every now and then Catherine would announce to her court that she was going to travel to a particular part of her vast Russian Empire to see what the peasants were up to.

It should be recalled that the peasant had a bit of a rough go of it back then, living in thatched roofed huts, one step above wattle and daub, where the animals, maybe the family cow, a few head of sheep and maybe a few pigs would move inside when the first snowflakes began to fly, and the unpaved roads turned from a bottomless sea of mud to icy wrought iron. The animals would sleep together on the floor of these huts while the family slept on those ubiquitous shelves on the big oven. And at 30 or 40 below zero F, who could blame them. A phrase often used to describe peasant housing of that era was "mean little hovel."