“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.”
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)