After a week of efforts to equate the controversial remarks of two particular members of Congress, I pushed back a bit at New York:
It looks like House Republicans are going to deal with outrage over their perennial problem child Marjorie Taylor Greene by finding a Democrat to punish. That would be Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, according to Politico’s Huddle:
“’I think that Ilan should receive the same type of punishment as Marjorie because if it’s good for one, it is good for another,’ Rep. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.), who voted to remove Greene from her committees, told me. ‘Anti-semitism is the same thing as anti-semitism. It’s just that Nancy is afraid …'”
There are others who want to push for Omar’s removal as well as those looking to censure her over her war crimes remarks — and a few Dems may join them.
The idea of equating Omar’s complaints about unequal treatment of countries in investigating military misconduct with Greene’s comparisons of mask and vaccine requirements to the Holocaust is deeply satisfying to a lot of people. Republicans can continue their now-ancient habit of waving away extremism in their ranks by claiming it’s more prevalent on the other side of the aisle. Nervous centrist Democrats can document their nervous centrism by firing thunderbolts left and right. And most of all, accusing both parties of harboring those prone to “false equivalence” appeals to the false equivalence many Beltway media folks want to draw between Democrats and Republicans, who are engaged in the mutually assured destruction of partisan polarization.
There’s only one problem: Treating what MTG and Omar have said as equal expressions of false equivalence actually is false, as any honest evaluation of their words quickly shows. Greene bluntly compared COVID-19 precautions to the Holocaust, analogized vaccine documentation mandates to the Nazi practice of making Jews wear yellow stars, and, for good measure, said Democrats are like Nazis because they are “socialists.” Omar said this in the midst of a virtual exchange with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken over investigations of the brief but intense war between Israel and Hamas:
“’We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity,’ she wrote. “We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.’”
Her point wasn’t to say the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban were equally culpable in their commission of atrocities, but that all should be equally subject to international investigation. I suppose there are superpatriots who would dispute the idea that America has ever committed “unthinkable atrocities,” though the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks, and of countless genocidal assaults on Native Americans, among many examples, suggest otherwise. But in any event, when challenged by Republicans and Democrats alike to make it clear she was not imputing equivalent culpability to these various nations and coalitions of fighters, Omar complied instantly:
“U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar said Thursday that she was ‘in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems … ‘
“’To be clear: the conversation was about accountability for specific incidents regarding [International Criminal Court] cases, not a moral comparison between Hamas and the Taliban and the U.S. and Israel.’”
MTG, meanwhile, kept doubling down on her comparisons of public-health measures with the slaughter of many millions by Nazi Germany, and finally, after more than three weeks and a tour of the Holocaust Museum, she issued an apology that betrayed little understanding of the full scope of the Holocaust, and then refused to apologize for the Democrat-Nazi analogy.
Looking more broadly at the two women and their records of controversial utterances, Ilhan made an unfortunate and erroneous reference to “the Benjamins,” in a gratuitous comment about support for Israel in the United States, for which she “unequivocally” apologized:
“Anti-semitism is real and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-semitic tropes. My intention is never to offend my constituents or Jewish Americans as a whole. We have to always be able to step back and think through criticism, just as I expect people to hear me when others attack my identity. This is why I unequivocally apologize.”
Greene lost her committee assignments earlier this year after media focus on an almost incredible blizzard of incendiary statements she made on social media before coming to Congress (barely anyone even noticed her practice of brandishing an AR-15 when discussing her enemies in campaign ads). In February, she apologized for claiming that school shootings were fake and for promoting QAnon conspiracy theories. She never apologized for happily contemplating violence against congressional Democrats (including, very specifically, Ilhan Omar) and the Speaker of the House, or for her unusually aggressive support of Trump’s electoral big lie and the effort in January to overturn the presidential election results, or for her own subscription to very weird anti-Semitic claims.
If you cannot discern a qualitative difference between Omar’s “outrages” and Greene’s, and between the speed and coherence of their clarifications and apologies, it may be time for some remedial work in logic and rhetoric. These two members of Congress aren’t alike at all, and as much as I sometimes disagree with Ilhan Omar, treating her as a left-wing MTG is lazy and just plain wrong.
What I really want to hear is that Bush’s intensive negative ad campaign ($6 million?) in the swing states is not working. Then I think we will know his goose is cooked. I have heard that the 527 campaigns plus Kerry are matching the Bush effort.
What a relief. Why is it that the political coloration of the organizations sponsoring or conducting the polls (NBC, WSJ, Fox) always seems to result in bias? How do their subjective wishes seem to get into the polls?
Here’s the commercial that will win the election (based on real footage, I’ve seen it):
Video:
Bush sitting at Booker Elementary on Sept. 11, 2001
VO:
On September 11th 2001, President Bush was in Florida at the Booker Elementary school for a planned photo op. By the time he arrived he already knew the first tower of the World Trade Center had been attacked. He proceeded with the photo op. In this unedited footage you can see the moment Andrew Card, his chief of staff notifies the President of the second attack.
Video:
Card leans in to whisper to Bush
VO:
Card is quoted as saying, ”
A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack”
Watch the President’s reaction.
(key over the video) HE KNOWS
VO:
The president went on with the photo op for a minimum of another 9 minutes (some witnesses say as long as twenty minutes), asking no questions, not acting, not responding to the crisis. At the same time Vice President Cheney was taken to a secure location. Weren’t the children potentially at risk? Wasn’t the president a target?
Would YOU call this steady leadership?
________________________
If you’d like to see the actual raw footage of Bush at Booker the file is large..25 megs…
but it can be downloaded here
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/bushbook.mov
I took at look at the ARG poll, and I was fascinated by two of the findings: first, that Bush’s support among REPUBLICANS is softening. 17 percent of Republicans polled disapproved of Bush’s handling of the economy. Double-digit disapproval among Republicans on the economy cannot be spun into good news for Bush; second, among Independents, Nader actually draws support away from BUSH! I think that if Kerry can avoid a major, and I mean major scandal, he’s in an extraordinarily strong position to take the White House in November.
C. Ama
This may be slightly off on a tangent, but it is very timely given the recent events in Madrid. I am wondering about Bush’s consistently favorable ratings regarding “fighting terrorism” and his continual lead over Kerry regarding his ability to combat terrorism. I have heard repeatedly that a new terrorist attack could be an “external event” that would send people scurrying back to Bush, because of their confidence in his ability to fight it.
But it seems to me that another terrorist attack, particularly of the kind that we saw in Madrid (where two previously distinct terrorist groups may be acting together) is very strong evidence that Bush is not winning the war on terrorism. He is using poor judgment, his ideological bent is causing us to approach the matter incorrectly and his domestic “starve the beast” plan is limiting our ability to execute the war properly. I realize this is all speculation, but at what point do we believe that the public will turn on W on this issue (like they have all the others) and realize that he is botching this one too?
The thing I find most interesting here is the rumblings of discontent among Republicans about the economy and jobs. It would be interesting to see how this correlates with household income — my guess is that the discontent among Republicans is mainly among people of average-to-below-average income, who are beginning to figure out that, while they may be in line with Bush’s social conservatism, their economic interests aren’t being well served by the Bush administration.
Greg