“I hesitate to contribute to this freak show,” Sen. John Kennedy (R‑La.) told Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night.
I know the feeling.
“I don’t think President Trump is a racist,” added the senator. “I don’t think his original tweet was racist.”
While I haven’t peered into the president’s soul, I didn’t see racism in his tweet, either. But I did catch a whiff of other wrongs.
Xenophobia, for instance.
And nastiness.
I didn’t like Mr. Trump’s attempt to paint “the Squad” — Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D‑Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D‑Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D‑Mich.) — as somehow un-American or illegitimate by tweeting: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
All but Rep. Omar were born here, and immigrant Omar is just as much an American citizen as was George Washington.
“Our opposition to our socialist colleagues has absolutely nothing to do with their gender, with their religion, or with their race,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R‑Wyo.) rightly said. “It has to do with the content of their policies.”*
Let’s note that only two, AOC and Tlaib, have chosen the socialist label. Reps. Omar and Pressley have not, though their policy positions seem in sync.
It may be, as NBC News reporter Jonathan Allen wrote, that Trump’s tweet was designed to “flip the script,” ending the feud between the Squad and Speaker Pelosi, because “he wants the Democratic Party stuck to its progressive fringe.”
But the ends do not justify the means. Two wrongs don’t make a right. And our politics stinks.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Cheney added (and I concur): “They are wrong when they pursue policies that would steal power from the American people and give that power to the government.”
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6 replies on “Truth Squad”
I’m still waiting for the investigation into Rep Tlaib’s ‘alleged’ marriage to her brother in order for him to gain American citizenship.
I heard it was Ilhan Omar who did this. And a major Minnesota news source did indeed do an exhaustive investigation.
Here is a link to a story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on June 23, 2019 and the first few graphs:
http://www.startribune.com/new-documents-revisit-questions-about-rep-ilhan-omar-s-marriage/511681362/
New investigative documents released by a state agency have given fresh life to lingering questions about the marital history of Rep. Ilhan Omar and whether she once married a man — possibly her own brother — to skirt immigration laws.
Omar has denied the allegations in the past, dismissing them as “baseless rumors” first raised in an online Somali politics forum and championed by conservative bloggers during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota House. But she said little then or since about Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the former husband who swept into her life in 2009 before a 2011 separation.
The questions surfaced again this month in a state probe of campaign finance violations showing that Omar filed federal taxes in 2014 and 2015 with her current husband, Ahmed Hirsi, while she was still legally married to but separated from Elmi.
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For Paul Jacob’s information, George Washington was NOT an immigrant.
Paul didn’t call Washington an immigrant. He only said that Omar was as much a US citizen as Washington. The only thing that distinguishes her from Washington (and from the other three squad members) is that she can never be a president of these United States, since she is not a natural-born citizen.
I didn’t see xenophobia in Trump’s tweets. That is too broad a term and it doesn’t apply to someone who has business interests all over the world and who has worked with people from all over the world. Is it too much to ask that people who come from other places and are accepted and welcomed by Americans stop casting aspersions on this country? Is it too much to ask that they follow our laws? These women were given a special trust. They have been entrusted with authority to wield power for the betterment of all Americans. Do they take that seriously? I don’t think so. They are playing the race card and pretty much saying that all Trump supporters are, by definition, racists. Anyone (even Speaker Pelosi) who disagrees with them is a racist. The US has its flaws but so do almost all countries. That doesn’t make us evil, just human. Anyone who is looking for utopia is on the wrong planet.