Some in the news media were charmed by comments Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., made in an interview last week, wherein she said that former President Barack Obama was a disappointment to progressives and that her Democrat colleagues in the House should more aggressively push liberal policies like “Medicare for all” and the “Green New Deal.”
Though she sounded like the thoughtful politician that make journalists fall in love, her remarks were naive and superficial. Even if you wanted to credit her for some critical reflection on her own party’s last president, you can’t, because everything else she says reveals her to be superficially partisan.
A Fox News reporter on Monday asked Omar if she saw a direct comparison between Obama and President Trump in their policies on detaining illegal immigrants and using drones in limited warfare.
“Absolutely not, that is silly to even think and equate the two,” she said. “One is human. The other is really not.”
Fox host Jeanine Pirro was just this weekend reprimanded by her own network for questioning Omar’s allegiance to the Constitution, given that she spent her whole childhood in Somalia and, upon arriving in the U.S. in 1995, continued her life in Minneapolis, where there are more Somalis than anywhere else outside Somalia. Omar thanked Fox, tweeting, “No one’s commitment to our constitution should be questioned because of their faith or country of birth.”
That’s interesting. It’s a problem to question a lawmaker’s commitment to American tradition based on her anti-Semitism, but okay when she starts calling her political rivals subhuman.
After Democrats declined to directly rebuke Omar’s anti-Semitic commentaries, instead passing a diluted House resolution condemning all forms of bigotry, a senior aide to Omar explained that there’s nothing to worry about because the congresswoman would write “a forthcoming op-ed piece in an unspecified publication” to “more fully explain” her views.
So clear-eyed and confident in her views is Omar that she needs to write them all down, run them by her staff for sanititation, and then submit them to a newspaper. Though maybe we should be grateful, we’ve seen what happens when she tweets.
