dagblog - Comments for "Democrats Are Falling Into the Ilhan Omar Trap"

I see a person who is

rmrd0000 — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 01:25:15 +0000

I see a person who is knowledgeable about authoritarian governments issuing a warning. Bessel did not notice death threats increasing after Trump went after Sanders. Pelosi, Gessen, etc do see something different happening with Omar that did not happen with Sanders.

Hate crimes increase after Trump rallies. Trump targets Maxine Waters, she gets death threats. Ditto with Omar. You see pity olympics. Ordinary citizens might think that if people are willing to go after politicians, they have no problems attacking regular citizens. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed to send a message to all black people.

You have a different point of view than Muslim activist

s who criticize Democrats who do not support Omar

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/muslim-voters-wont-forget-which-democrats-had-ilhan-omars-back_n_5cb5fd9ee4b082aab08d21c5

Omar has no obligation to leave the Democratic Party. She is a Democrat and seeks to make change from within. She is in the tradition of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

When faced with an authoritarian, as Gesson notes, the last thing you want is appeasement. You cannot compromise with authoritarians. Societies that were silent succumbed to the authoritarians.

You see victimhood. I see

artappraiser — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 00:54:10 +0000

In reply to Trump is a master at

You see victimhood. I see incompetence. I expect more savvy from politicians against their antagonists. I don't feel sorry for any politician. I do feel sorry for private citizens who are smeared. But politicians, they asked for votes and they asked for the job and they asked to be in the hardball game of politics. Actually, I especially don't like the idea that the salaries of incompetents are paid with tax money. Smart politicians have been the targets of Trump and handled it well and even to their benefit because frankly: he's not that smart. She's not a poor baby private citizen anymore, she's a U.S. Congressperson and a member of the Democratic caucus. She presented herself as being capable of handling that. If she can't handle speaking her version of her "truth to power" that doesn't jive with everyone in her party, she should have let someone who can.

How come I never saw you complain about poor Bernie Sanders being picked on by Trump, Fox News, the right wingers?

Again: she is not a baby, she's a U.S. Congressperson.

And if she doesn't like the amount of support she is getting from her Democratic colleagues, maybe she belongs as an Independent like Bernie was. And take the heat for it like he did.

Edit to add: and if she saw herself as representing Muslim-Americans in Congress, if I was one, I would judge her as doing a poor job so far. I would expect more savvy.

Trump is a master at

rmrd0000 — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 00:10:04 +0000

In reply to Why Trump Won’t Stop Talking

Trump is a master at diversion. It boosts the Republican base. Republicans are racists and bigots. People who are now racists and bigots would at least criticize his words on minorities and immigrants.

Rational people realize that Omar’s words were taken out of context. The Republican base approved of Trump’s Muslim ban. They have no problem with Trump’s statement that he saw Muslims rejoicing after the Twin Towers fell. Some on the Right are falsely saying that the cathedral at Notre Dame was attacked by Muslims. They turned a blind eye when Barack Obama was said to be a Muslim. The rot was already in the Republican Party before Trump showed up to fertilize the ground.

Masha Gesson studies authoritarian states. Trump is an authoritarian. His attack on Omar is predictable.

You know how bullying works. The victim is marked long before the bullying begins: it’s the kid no one really likes, the weirdo who is barely tolerated by the larger group. The defenseless, isolated kid. And when the bullying starts to happen, the rest of the children look the other way. Even the ones the victim thought were his friends go silent. Especially the ones he thought were his friends.

Political violence can work the same way. In modern states ruled by autocrats, or aspiring autocrats, political violence is dispersed and delegated. Its first weapons are ridicule and ostracism. Once a person has been marginalized and discredited among allies, physical violence becomes a likely option. In Russia, I witnessed this several times among people I knew, who stood alone and embattled before they were killed. The Parliament member Galina Starovoitova, who had once been a prominent member of Boris Yeltsin’s Cabinet, was, by the late nineteen-nineties, portrayed by the Russian media as someone whose ideas were outdated and irrelevant. She was shot dead in the stairwell of her apartment building, in November of 1998. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya was an often short-tempered person whose reporting was viewed as partisan and unreliable by many of her more mainstream colleagues. She was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building, in October of 2006. The politician Boris Nemtsov, once viewed as Yeltsin’s most likely successor, was by the twenty-tens seen as an old-timer who, even as he protested the regime, didn’t quite grasp the new language of protest. He was shot dead on a bridge in central Moscow, in February of 2015. In all three cases, the people convicted or accused of the murder did not have a direct relationship to the Kremlin but were seemingly moved by a desire to act on their loyalty to it.

After their deaths, all three victims were idealized. Most Americans who have heard of them probably imagine that they were widely revered. They certainly deserved to be widely revered, but in fact they had been abandoned, late in life, even by many of those who should have been their political allies. They were difficult people with uncomfortable views; standing by their sides in an increasingly hostile political environment was hard work. But, by omitting this part of the story, we elide a key fact about contemporary political violence: bullies don’t go after the strong. In Russia, the anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny is walking around, not only alive but also mostly free, solely because the government knows that he has the support of hundreds of thousands of people who will protest if he is jailed and may revolt if he is killed. His life depends on this support.

For the past three months, Americans have observed the process of drawing a target on a politician’s back. The politician is Representative Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota. Two of her fundamental positions—that the United States government and many of its elected officials support an apartheid regime in Israel-Palestine, and that the civil rights of Muslims in the U.S. are routinely trampled by entities that include the government—are as uncomfortable for many Americans as they are indisputable. Her way of expressing those positions—unabashed, and at times seemingly unaware of context—makes her the kind of disagreeable person who is easy for presumptive allies to shun. This, in turn, makes her vulnerable to attack

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-dangerous-bullying-of-...

The only patriotic response is to defend those under attack. Trump and his supporters are salivating over the danger Omar faces because of their words

Why Trump Won’t Stop Talking

artappraiser — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:52:06 +0000

In reply to Democrats Are Falling Into the Ilhan Omar Trap

Why Trump Won’t Stop Talking About Ilhan Omar

The president is following a Republican playbook that is now nearly two decades old.

By Jamelle Bouie @ NYTimes.com, Opinion Columnist, April 16, 2019

From bio link: Politics, history and culture. Based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington, Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. Mr. Bouie, who is a political analyst for CBS News, has been a staff writer at The Daily Beast and has held fellowships at The American Prospect and The Nation magazine. You can follow him on Twitter. He is also a photographer. To see his photos, follow him on Instagram.

Trump targets seniors on

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 20:42:10 +0000

In reply to Again, I just agree with

Trump targets seniors on Facebook

The Trump 2020 campaign is going after seniors on Facebook in a much more aggressive way than the leading Democratic campaigns, according to data given to Axios exclusively from Bully Pulpit Interactive.

So far this cycle, the Trump camp is spending 44% of its Facebook ad budget to target users 65 years old and older, Axios reports. The top 12 Democrats have allotted 27% of their Facebook ad budgets to those voters.

Older voters helped boost Trump to the White House in 2016, when voters 65+ went for Trump over Hillary Clinton by a 52-45 margin. That’s six points better for Trump than his average (Clinton won the overall popular vote 48-46).

At the Orlando Amphitheater, Florida, December 2016. Photograph: ddp USA/REX/Shutterstock
In his ads targeting older voters, Trump’s anti-immigrant message is sounding loud and clear, Axios reports:

Trump is using nativist language around immigrants in 54% of his ads, according to BPI. So far Democrats have not responded in kind on the topic of immigration and are focused on fundraising and other policy issues.

The Guardian

David Frum helped America

NCD — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 14:37:13 +0000

In reply to Democrats Are Falling Into the Ilhan Omar Trap

David Frum helped America fall into the Iraq War trap. He was GWB speech writer who coined the "axis of evil" line in GWB SOU speech in 2002.

The speech and the linking of Iraq with North Korea, followed by "regime change" in Iraq, not only greased the skids for the invasion of Iraq, but caused NK to kick out the video cameras and the international inspectors from NK nuclear facilities. A few years later NK detonated its first nucelar weapon.

That Frum is still given a cushy job at Atlantic is testimony to the insular bubble of the inside the beltway corporate media, where, no matter how wrong or how much damage you have done, you will never be held accountable, will always have a job, and the disasters you supported will be no hindrance to your well reimbursed media career.

The Republican attack on Omar

rmrd0000 — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 12:15:44 +0000

In reply to Again, I just agree with

The Republican attack on Omar is predictable. Omar is a Muslim, black, and a woman. She is the perfect target for the Republican base.

Republicans put Omar’s life at risk. She has to be defended.

Hate crimes spike when Trump holds rallies.

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/24/18279807/trump-hate-crimes-study-white-nationalism

The United States is now the fifth most dangerous place in the world for reporters to work. Trump loves criticizing the press.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/04/15/us-was-added-list-most-dangerous-countries-journalists-today-some-american-reporters-will-be-honored-with-pulitzer-prizes/?utm_term=.aab8e25f1d67

Omar is not the problem. She is the one who is at risk.

Edit to add:

It is interesting to note that Frum’s article was part of a project supported by Charles Koch. (See the funding acknowledgment in the footnote to the article.

David Frum wrote a lazy column and some people fell for the premise.

David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who now has a cushy gig writing proto-fascist shitposts for the Atlantic, does not like Rep. Ilhan Omar. Bret Stephens, the climate change denier who now has a cushy gig writing proto-fascist shitposts for the New York Times, also does not like the Somali refugee-turned-elected official from Minnesota. Shocker!

What is consistently appalling to me, however, is how lazy both of these writers are in their attacks on Omar. Take Frum’s latest piece on Sunday, for example, which opens with praise for the president’s shrewd political move of tweeting out a heavily edited juxtaposition of 9/11 footage with one line of Omar’s comments at a fundraiser for the Council on American Islamic Relations, something that you can easily see could as inciting violence.

The general thesis of the piece is that by supporting Omar, whose comments at CAIR have been blown wildly out of proportion and used to fuel a week of dangerously bigoted attacks, Democrats have fallen into the trap of supporting a radical, which opens them to new attacks from the right.

Here are the obvious rebuttals: that, actually, it’s good if mainstream Democrats adopt Omar’s progressive views; that this piece and Frum’s entire career right now are an example of Republican guy tries to give advice to Democrats who he’s obviously working against, and that Frum was just looking for an excuse to hate a black Muslim congresswoman because he’s a gigantic bigot.

https://splinternews.com/fravid-dum-1834046590

How does this change anything

tmccarthy0 — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 12:06:01 +0000

In reply to Big game changer

How does this change anything? Primary season hasn’t even begun and Trump voters are cult members and they would never vote for Weld or anyone normal like him.

Again, I just agree with

artappraiser — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 08:43:25 +0000

In reply to As for Ilhan's "worst

Again, I just agree with David Frum, no need to get into all of that. People's feelings about 9/11 aren't easily going to be changed by now, whatever they are. Same with I-P. You can get into that on blogs if you like, I am a First Amendment purist after all. If you want enough votes for a winning majority, different story.

Or you could watch what Nancy Pelosi said on 60 minutes in the first minute of this video (and you gotta to watch to get the tone of voice; just reading a transcript won't give you her message accurately):

She knows that this is getting stuck in the Trump trap of childish trolling behavior and the Dems need to look like adults. The majority is right in there in the polls for the taking-60% against Trump like behavior. All you got to do is not behave like him. Why look a gift horse in the mouth by going down to his level? What I admire the most about her new learned demeanor is that she no longer falls for the troll bait but always looks like the grownup compared to Trump. I.E. no we are not going to talk about your nonsense emotional culture wars distraction of the day and no we are not going to feed you culture wars memes to troll about and distract with. She learned from hard experience . Remember she used to be enemy #1 of the troll nut cases not so long ago, a distraction herself. She's got eyes on the prize now.

Edit to add: the word to remember with is inflammatory. As in: inflame the emotional knee jerk reactions. (I don't know why I have such a hard time remembering it, we used to have a separate section on the forum where I was a moderator called Flame Wars where people knew they could insult other's sensibilities to the max if they wanted.) Omar doesn't seem to do it intentionally, it is like a clueless naivete of using terminology from a little closed tribe that is not considered inflammatory in private but is inflammatory in the big wide real world. GOP experts look for that, they seize on it and pound on labeling the opposition with it. It sticks with just enough voters especially if pounded this early on.

As for Ilhan's "worst

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 07:56:09 +0000

In reply to Not really. It's about being

As for Ilhan's "worst trolling", an interesting victim of 9/11 shares how the event's been co-opted and trivialized even as similar events tak place but are quickly forgotten. Sandy Hook parents were just "fakes", while 9/11 is sacrosanct. Parkland? Them kids...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/15/ilhan-omar-9-11-co...