A couple things.....the new freshman class of Democratic women have proved more than capable of handling everything thrown their way by using the same tactics they have seen Republicans use for years, which is to quit apologizing for what you believe and not back down, but double-down. and confront things head on. Aside from any policy positions, what I love most about them is that they don't act weak and couched in the face of attacks.
As for comments on other political sites, look, for years before I came here I posted often at Crooks and Liars, which is a left-wing video blog. We certainly got animated, heated, downright disrespectful and contemptuous of the right. I wrote things there that would get me banned here in 10 seconds flat. But what I never saw was the kind of flat-out eliminationist rhetoric that comes when you dive into comment sections of videos related to alt-right politics or conservative news websites. The worst you can say about most left-wing blogs is that they are looking for any way to creatively call Republicans (and, if I am to be honest, moreso Republican voters) dumb and stupid. What you will often see on similar sites on the other side is people who think liberalism is a mental disorder or disease and who seem to want those of the left-wing political bent to not only be defeated, but to killed or wiped out.
sometimes comments on more mainstream outlets such as national review are worse than anywhere else because, people there may go like "let's spice it up a little bit", while on fringe sites people often try to give it an aura of seriousness and write pseudo-well-reasoned pseudo-serious posts.
At a Washington bookstore on Wednesday she gave a speech about corruption in US politics again. And one
sentence garnered attention: “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
Isn't Israel a foreign country? What's wrong with pointing that out? The label 'antisemitic' is being used in bad faith to shut down much needed debate on why we are allowing our politicians to accept millions of dollars from a foreign country and send out billions back to their country.
Anyway, Rep. Eliot Engel NY-D, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called Friday for Ilhan Omar to apologize over that. WTH guys. Israel is a foreign country? This is ridiculous. This happened before the West Virginia Republican racist sign controversy.
So what's it mean? I guess you can't be an female American muslim and be in politics right. You expect Republicans to be racist and operate in bad faith but to get this from Democrats too is beyond ridiculous.
This is something really wrong what is happening to her.
And she's goddamned right. Money in politics is corruption. That is what she's talking about. Maybe centrist democrats don't want to here that and would rather go along with racist corrupted republicans and destroy a young woman's career.
"“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”"
She's not making a critique of Israeli policy here. She's not making an argument about the ethics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or highlighting the outsized influence of the AIPAC lobby. She's accusing Israeli-Americans who push for or care about the American-Israeli relationship to be traitors with dual loyalty. There are a lot of ways to criticize lobbying, AIPAC in particular, without going out of your way to accuse anyone of Jewish descent who lobbies for America's support for Israel to be traitors.
It doesn't strike me as a coincidence that of all the foreign lobbying groups, and there are many, she could single out to accuse of being traitors, she chooses the Jewish one. In fact that seems to be where almost all of her focus lies. If she actually criticized other groups for doing the same things, like Saudi Arabia for instance, she could defend herself by saying she was making a general statement about all foriegn lobbying groups. But no. Everyone knows she's talking only about AIPAC, and that's what makes me suspicious, at least.
If she's gonna call folks literal traitors to the collective shrug of the D voters I really don't know why I should care about an ad accusing her of terrorist sympathies. Are overblown accusations with no evidence that allude to stereotypes offensive or not?
She never said a damn thing about specifically Jewish-American politicians. She was talking about all politicians in this country who do so. This is the third time words have been put in her mouth she didn't speak. So I offer this:
I've been complaining about the corrupting influence of PAC's for years now, and it doesn't become anti-Semitic when I view AIPAC the exact same way I view the NRA, AARP, and any other PAC, for the exact same reasons: they're all organizations designed to use money to purchase political power.
Granted, I've never singled out AIPAC specifically (or any other, come to think of it), but I'm not going to fault someone for complaining about one corrupting PAC without simultaneously naming all the others. Same reasons I wouldn't complain about someone calling for breast cancer research just because lung cancer is more deadly.
I mean, if Omar actually said "AIPAC is bad, but this other PAC is okay," then we'd have some grounds for accusing her of a bias.
"“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”"
She's not making a critique of Israeli policy here. She's not making an argument about the ethics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or highlighting the outsized influence of the AIPAC lobby. She's accusing Israeli-Americans who push for or care about the American-Israeli relationship to be traitors with dual loyalty.
There are a lot of ways to criticize lobbying, AIPAC in particular, without going out of your way to accuse anyone of Jewish descent who lobbies for America's support for Israel to be traitors.
She never did anything of the sort. You are jumping to conclusions.
I've had people argue on numerous occasions that we owe allegiance (literally, "allegiance") to the state of Israel. Not any other allies, not the ones that have been allies for longer or the ones that are stronger allies. Only Israel. I want to be clear, I'm not using hyperbole here: people have told me that we owe loyalty to both the USA and Israel. And when I argued that no, we only owe allegience to our home country, and that Israel, while an important ally, is still merely and ally, with their own sovereignty and their own national interest that sometimes conflicts with ours - I was called antisemitic.
It doesn't strike me as a coincidence that of all the foreign lobbying groups, and there are many, she could single out to accuse of being traitors, she chooses the Jewish one.
It's not a coincidence. Israel get more foreign aid money - your and my tax dollars, simply handed over for free to a wealthy first-world country - far more aid than any other country, including poor countries that actually, y'know, need aid. And lo, it just so happens that Israel has a very active, very aggressive group of lobbyists. Lobbyists who have suggested that it is antisemitic to argue that we only owe allegience to our own flag.
Frankly, I find that offensive, and fidcally wasteful, and while not traitorous*, definitely a bit "patriotically deficient." I agree with Omar that it is a bad-faith use of the word "antisemitic," and so I'm sympathetic to her in this case. In the other hand, I also think it's bad politics to keep harping on it as she does, and she should let it go.
* (And and let's be clear, I don't believe Omar used the word "traitor," - only you said that. Lay off the straw man arguments.)
I truly realized how bad this was in 2014 when I was involved in a discussion on Daily Kos, which is (I suppose) the left-wing version of Breitbart or Red State. In a discussion thread, I called Netanyahu a "butcher" because of the absurdly disproportionate body count on the Palestinian side of the conflict. A fellow liberal used JUST THIS comment to start railing about how I was anti-semitic. And it became quit clear to me that ANY criticism of Israel is a non-starter, precisely because of how effective AIPAC has been in framing this issue. Again, you cannot even breath heavily in the general cardinal direction of the Israel without this charge being thrown out. And again, I blame the Democrats and Republicans equally for this problem. The only difference being that Republicans are also catering to a religious right that supports them to the death strictly because they believe it fulfills a biblical prophecy that ends with the Jews of Israel converting to Christianity and recognizing Jesus as the savior, or they will be destroyed.
And frankly, the West Virginia Congressman's act isn't even remotely the most vile rumor being spread about her. It is pretty much taken as gospel in online right-wing circles at this point that she is married to her brother.
At a Washington bookstore on Wednesday she gave a speech about corruption in US politics again. And one
sentence garnered attention: “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
Isn't Israel a foreign country? What's wrong with pointing that out? The label 'antisemitic' is being used in bad faith to shut down much needed debate on why we are allowing our politicians to accept millions of dollars from a foreign country and send out billions back to their country.
Anyway, Rep. Eliot Engel NY-D, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called Friday for Ilhan Omar to apologize over that. WTH guys. Israel is a foreign country? This is ridiculous. This happened before the West Virginia Republican racist sign controversy.
So what's it mean? I guess you can't be an female American muslim and be in politics right. You expect Republicans to be racist and operate in bad faith but to get this from Democrats too is beyond ridiculous.
This is something really wrong what is happening to her.
And she's goddamned right. Money in politics is corruption. That is what she's talking about. Maybe centrist democrats don't want to here that and would rather go along with racist corrupted republicans and destroy a young woman's career.
"“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”"
She's not making a critique of Israeli policy here. She's not making an argument about the ethics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or highlighting the outsized influence of the AIPAC lobby. She's accusing Israeli-Americans who push for or care about the American-Israeli relationship to be traitors with dual loyalty. There are a lot of ways to criticize lobbying, AIPAC in particular, without going out of your way to accuse anyone of Jewish descent who lobbies for America's support for Israel to be traitors.
It doesn't strike me as a coincidence that of all the foreign lobbying groups, and there are many, she could single out to accuse of being traitors, she chooses the Jewish one. In fact that seems to be where almost all of her focus lies. If she actually criticized other groups for doing the same things, like Saudi Arabia for instance, she could defend herself by saying she was making a general statement about all foriegn lobbying groups. But no. Everyone knows she's talking only about AIPAC, and that's what makes me suspicious, at least.
If she's gonna call folks literal traitors to the collective shrug of the D voters I really don't know why I should care about an ad accusing her of terrorist sympathies. Are overblown accusations with no evidence that allude to stereotypes offensive or not?
She doesn't 'just' criticize jewish influences though. But whenever she mentions it it OUTSHINES EVERYTHING else apparently. She's against the corrupting influence of money in politics via big pharma, big business in general. She's anti-corruption.
"Until we are able to run fair and clean elections, we will face barriers to the transformative change we seek. We must drastically reduce the amount of dark money in our political system, empower small-dollar donors, and move towards publicly-funded elections."
He didn't just say it, he did it (or tried to) within days of being sworn in. How soon we forget legal green card holders and elderly women stranded at airports all across the country. The most distressing thing about this Presidency is how shit like this just falls down the memory hole as if it never took place.
Oh, by the way, here are 27 kids who we aren't giving back to their parents on god only knows what legal basis. Again, the possible punishment for misdemeanor border crossing is that the United States government will kidnap your child and you apparently never get them back. Millions of people are perfectly fine with this:
Seriously. Even if you think these parents deserved to have the book thrown at them, permanent seperation from your children (as in FOREVER) is not a punishment any redeemable society is willing to inflict. It's hard to even adequately describe how revolting this is. This is an extrajudicial punishment being carried out a full YEAR after an act that is akin to speeding or jaywalking. And the punishment they are going through, for any parent worth a damn, is worse than the death penalty.
From Jane Mayer in the New Yorker today, 3 bombshells:
1.) FOX News had the Stormy Daniels story before the election but killed it to protect Trump
2.). Trump personally ordered Gary Cohn to block the ATT/Time Warner merger as revenge against CNN and to help FOX
3.). Roger Ailes (wait for it, because this is too rich for words) fed Trump debate questions in the 2015 primary, which suggests a major moment in one of them was entirely staged for television. You don't say.......
So just for the record here we have a catch and kill situation about Daniels that could have severely hurt the campaign, we (no matter what you think of ATT/Time Warner) a honest to god 1st Amendment issue in which the President is personally choosing sides in a media dispute and trying to use the Justice Department to control which way it goes, and we have him doing the exact same thing (if not worse given the circumstances and the nature of the how the question was set up) that he and EVERYONE on the right has been railing against when it was tied to Hillary Clinton for the last two years as evidence of a rigged primary.
The first and third are just interesting bullet-points to throw out when the media is accused of being "liberal", and one of them is, again, just too rich for words given the play the Donna Brazile incident has gotten. But the second one, the ATT/Time Warner merger, is a legitimate abuse of power. Again.
"“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”"
She's not making a critique of Israeli policy here. She's not making an argument about the ethics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or highlighting the outsized influence of the AIPAC lobby. She's accusing Israeli-Americans who push for or care about the American-Israeli relationship to be traitors with dual loyalty.
There are a lot of ways to criticize lobbying, AIPAC in particular, without going out of your way to accuse anyone of Jewish descent who lobbies for America's support for Israel to be traitors.
She never did anything of the sort. You are jumping to conclusions.
* (And and let's be clear, I don't believe Omar used the word "traitor," - only you said that. Lay off the straw man arguments.)
Is there a different definition of the word traitor other than one who owes allegiance to a foreign country, rather than your own? That sounds like the textbook term of the word "traitor" to me. Not sure how that can be interpreted any other way. It seems pretty black and white that to question ones loyalties and allegiances to the country is to accuse them of being a traitor.
I don't think she's being honest at all. That she has a problem is Israel is obvious based on her past statements about how they have hypnotized the world about their evil doings and she should just come out and say it. She's so consumed with her obsession and hatred of them it's not hard for everyone else, including some in her own party, to see.
"“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”"
She's not making a critique of Israeli policy here. She's not making an argument about the ethics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or highlighting the outsized influence of the AIPAC lobby. She's accusing Israeli-Americans who push for or care about the American-Israeli relationship to be traitors with dual loyalty.
There are a lot of ways to criticize lobbying, AIPAC in particular, without going out of your way to accuse anyone of Jewish descent who lobbies for America's support for Israel to be traitors.
She never did anything of the sort. You are jumping to conclusions.
* (And and let's be clear, I don't believe Omar used the word "traitor," - only you said that. Lay off the straw man arguments.)
Is there a different definition of the word traitor other than one who owes allegiance to a foreign country, rather than your own? That sounds like the textbook term of the word "traitor" to me. Not sure how that can be interpreted any other way. It seems pretty black and white that to question ones loyalties and allegiances to the country is to accuse them of being a traitor.
I don't think she's being honest at all. That she has a problem is Israel is obvious based on her past statements about how they have hypnotized the world about their evil doings and she should just come out and say it. She's so consumed with her obsession and hatred of them it's not hard for everyone else, including some in her own party, to see.
She is literally the ONLY person willing to speak up on an issue that millions of people find problematic in the entire United States government. And the backlash is why more don't.
It isn't just Ilhan Omar who believes US politicians are easy to manipulate on this issue. Netanyahu himself has been caught on tape saying the exact same thing. And I 100% agree with the "allegiance" comment. Sometimes it's hard not to think Israel is the 51st State. We've certainly done more for them than, oh, let's go with PUERTO RICO, which is an actual US territory.
Sebastian Gorka isn't going to renew his contract with Fox News. Great right, not so fast... because he's instead being put on Sinclair broadcasting to be beamed into 70% of American markets during local news as 'must run' segments.
Is there a different definition of the word traitor other than one who owes allegiance to a foreign country, rather than your own? That sounds like the textbook term of the word "traitor" to me. Not sure how that can be interpreted any other way. It seems pretty black and white that to question ones loyalties and allegiances to the country is to accuse them of being a traitor.
Is there a different definition of the word traitor other than one who owes allegiance to a foreign country, rather than your own? That sounds like the textbook term of the word "traitor" to me. Not sure how that can be interpreted any other way. It seems pretty black and white that to question ones loyalties and allegiances to the country is to accuse them of being a traitor.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
I was going to mention this even though it is semantics, it matters in this situation.
I wouldn't call a recent (or even one who has been here for 30 years) immigrant from India a traitor if they wanted the US to intervene in the India, Pakistan standoff. They may still have family and friends in the region who would be affected.
You can owe allegiance to another region, even an enemy of the nation you are in, its when you help that enemy in spite of your nation or do something to hurt your region that you become treasonous.
Democratic Congressman Juan Vargas, in the same breath condemning Omar, literally calls questioning the US/Israeli relationship "unacceptable". Well, glad we got that debate out of the way. Every step of this saga is proving just how right she is about the insane grip AIPAC and the Israel lobby has on both parties. The Democrats are forming a circular firing squad and are introducing a resolution strictly meant to condemn her. And this, right here, is why Democrats lose. There are about 10 of them with any balls whatsoever, and they are all, ironically, freshman women.
Trump today called Omar's comments "a dark day for Israel". This has reached absurdity. Israel, who we hand billions of dollars for weapons each year, is so fragile that they can't withstand a SINGLE Congresswoman (out of 435) questioning the aide they receive?? Are both parties are now signalling that the Likud Party basically has a blank check when it comes to American politics?? The leader of the Israeli government is currently under INDICTMENT in that country, but god knows, let's just make the issue completely off limits.
Also, let's get real here. It's not just that Omar attacked the influence of the Israel lobby. That's most of it, but the other part of it is that she is wears a head scarf.
"House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler blasts Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio for an 'inane AND anti-Semitic' tweet that spelled billionaire hedge-fund operator Tom Steyer's last name with a "$.". - 4 Mar 19
That's much more in the anti-Semitic realm than anything Omar has said. This fake outrage against Omar should be half of what Jordan gets. But you don't hear Trump saying a damn thing about it do you.
Saying Israel is a foreign country is not anti-Semitic. Saying Congress is responsive to groups giving it money is not anti-Semitic.
Seriously though, we are getting to the very end of this thing, and by all accounts it looks like I was right all along. There is no evidence for any Trump family link to the Wikileaks hack, nor any evidence of being compromised by the Russian government, etc. etc.
CNN is wrong anyway as collusion was the bar they were aiming to prove. The order the Special Council was formed under was to "investigate Russian Interference with the 2016 election and related matters" and more specifically "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and the campaign of Donald Trump" along with anything related to such.
So far the very best evidence of any potential links, is that Roger Stone, Trump advisor, was told by a person supposedly representing Wikileaks about a month before emails were released that damaging info on Clinton might be released. He told Bannon, Trump team member, and they kept in contact with Stone about it. Naturally, the question arises, is knowing Wikileaks might release damaging info in the future the same as coordinating with the Russian government? Obviously not at all, knowing about something isn't coordinating it, and being involved with talking to Wikileaks alone gives the impression that Russia isn't involved at all. How would they know? Nobody has alleged nor has it appeared in any of their communications any knowledge of any Russian involvement on the part of Stone. So nah. Foreknowledge of a Wikileaks release =/= coordination of a hack and/or the dissemination of damaging information in conjunction with Russia.
There's also Manafort and a person working for a Ukranian political consulting firm, who they believe may be a Russian operative, who he was lobbying with on behalf of a former Ukranian president and tried to get witnesses to lie about. Obviously not even close to sufficient evidence for the original charge nor anything a normal person would consider to be worthy of suspicion of grand conspiracy with Russia, who are not on good terms with Ukraine by any means to the point of military hostilities and the acts they were involved in don't seem relevant.
So yeah, the Mueller Report is bound to disappoint, I predict CNN/Time is right about that much. They've got a few slimy yes-men on some slimy things they were doing on the side, and got the Prez on paying off porn stars at least, but Trump supporters already know that he's like that and will simply shrug their shoulders the way the left does with Clinton's pay for play, her history of racist statements, Omar's anti semitism, Warren's abuse of the affirmative action system for her own gain, the DNC subverting democratic elections, the media subverting objective debates, the DNC deciding the messaging for mainstream media sources, etc. Life will go on.
You are ignoring everything related to Don Jr and the hotel meeting.
You are right though, everyone is going to be disappointed with the Mueller report, not of what’s in it, but that it isn’t going to be made public as it is confidential.
Barr, who refuses to excuse himself from the investigation, has already came out and said any report released regarding the investigation will be in his words not Mueller’s and Mueller’s report will be for his eyes only.
So we really won’t know what was in the report only what Barr wants us to know. I am already expecting inconsistencies with what is already public knowledge and what the report says. I am also expecting the right wing media spin on how this report excuses everything that Trump is being investigated on
Sorry, I really should have mentioned that one too, it's been a long series of events. I want the report to be public and I imagine public pressure will make at least some of it so.
Anyway, Trump Tower meeting. Don Jr. is offered damaging info on Clinton from someone claiming to represent Russia. We know that much for a fact, and only that much for a fact. It goes far on it's own to establishing the start of the claim, now we know someone claiming to rep Russia wanted to give info to them, and if they both took it and worked with them to disseminate it to the public it's an open and shut case. But the lack of any post-event evidence of communications or coordination between the groups when all their communications are apparently in the hands of investigators tells me it doesn't exist and nothing much came of it as all parties state.
I think they were certainly offered the potential of such info and an alliance with them, but didn't take it for fear of consequences or the uncertainty of its legality, again, just because no further communication or actions between any such groups ever occurred again. For groups to ally and then to never associate again seems not realistic.
I will add that taking info from foreign countries isn't uncommon and isn't in and of itself anything outrageous in U.S politics. Politifact, of all people, amazingly, did a nuanced analysis of this.
"Politifact, of all people". As in, you will quote a fact-checking site when it fits your pre-conceived bias, but dismiss literally EVERY other link people provide to these sites as liberal media bias.
No one has been making more hay out of this Ilhan Omar controversy than Ben Shapiro, the so-called philosopher boy king of the right. No one in the media landscape is more influential to young, conservative males. Let's review the history of Ben Shapiro's (who is Jewish) comments on the issue. First, in regards to the conflict between Israel and Palestine:
Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue.
But wait, now let's see what he has in the past said about American Jews who don't support the Isralei government;
The Jewish people have always been plagued by bad Jews who undermine it from within. In America, these Jews largely vote Democratic.
This is literally saying that Jewish Americans who a.) don't support the Israeli government and b.) vote Democratic are quite literally DEFICIENT to those that do the opposite. This is easily at least 1000x more anti-semitic than anything Ilhan Omar has ever said.
...The order the Special Council was formed under was to "investigate Russian Interference with the 2016 election and related matters" ...
Here's a few things we know about the crimes and legal jeopardy of corrupt Donald Trump so far:
election campaign finance crimes
We have a list of eight criminal offenses, including seven felonies, potentially committed by Trump include:
reminder: trump claimed many times no one knows more than Trump about campaign finance
Causing American Media Inc. (AMI) to make and/or accepting (or causing his then lawyer Michael Cohen to accept) an unlawful corporate contribution related to Karen McDougal.
Two instances of causing Cohen to make and/or accepting an unlawful individual contributions related to Stephanie Clifford and February 2015 online polling.
Two instances of causing Donald J. Trump for President LLC’s failure to report contributions from AMI and Cohen related to McDougal and Clifford.
Causing Donald J. Trump for President LLC to file false reports with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
Making a false statement by failing to disclose liability to Cohen for the Clifford payment on his 2017 public financial disclosure form.
Conspiracy to defraud the United States by undermining the lawful function of the FEC and/or violating federal campaign finance law related to “hush money” payments, false statements, and cover-ups of reimbursement payments to Cohen made by the Trump Organization.
Obstruction of Justice
Firing of James Comey to interfere in the Russia Investigation
Directing Matt Whitaker to assign a trump crony to oversee particular SDNY investigations into Donald Trump
Witness Tampering
Conversations with Michael Cohen prior to earlier testimony
Conversations with Paul Manaford
He's constantly been threatening people so there's a million examples here.
Lying to Investigators/FBI under oath
Donald Trump (and his lawyers) gave written answers to Robert Mueller where he probably lied and directly contradicts what Michael Cohen testified to under oath.
Does any of that spell collusion? Haha not directly but plenty of other criminal activity and felonies, felonies, felonies. Just because the cops bust into your house looking for drugs, if they find a dead body you still get in trouble for that.
Law and order Democrats are starting to provide some oversight over this President and it's lawless Republican enablers. We
need some people who actually believe in the Constitution to hold this lawless administration accountable and it's starting to happen.
Has anyone answered the question as to why, to a person, every single person in Trump's orbit, whether in answers to Mueller's team or Congressional committees, has lied?? Not just a couple, not 50% of them. ALL of them. Sessions lied. Don. Jr. lied. Manfort lied. Flynn lied. Gates lied. Stone lied. Whitaker lied. Cohen lied. Though it hasn't been before anyone under threat of perjury, Ivanka (at least based on what Cohen is now saying) lied about knowing about Trump Tower Moscow. If this is such an innocent operation, you'd think just a SINGLE person somewhere down the line would walk in, tell the truth, and let it sort itself out. But that hasn't happened. It's been nothing but a Macy's Day Parade of bullshit from day one.
And these are not just "slimy yes-men". They are (in no particular order) the President's personal lawyer and fixer, his campaign chairman, his top political guru for DECADES, and his National Security Adviser. Do people actually think ALL of them are being convicted or indicted of lying to the FBI by happenstance?? Because they all randomly woke up one day and thought it would be a fun thing to try??
And again, to beat a dead horse, if this was happening to similar people in a hypothetical Hillary presidency, there would be conservatives setting up a gallows for her across the street from the White House.
Comments
As for comments on other political sites, look, for years before I came here I posted often at Crooks and Liars, which is a left-wing video blog. We certainly got animated, heated, downright disrespectful and contemptuous of the right. I wrote things there that would get me banned here in 10 seconds flat. But what I never saw was the kind of flat-out eliminationist rhetoric that comes when you dive into comment sections of videos related to alt-right politics or conservative news websites. The worst you can say about most left-wing blogs is that they are looking for any way to creatively call Republicans (and, if I am to be honest, moreso Republican voters) dumb and stupid. What you will often see on similar sites on the other side is people who think liberalism is a mental disorder or disease and who seem to want those of the left-wing political bent to not only be defeated, but to killed or wiped out.
"“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K. for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”"
She's not making a critique of Israeli policy here. She's not making an argument about the ethics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or highlighting the outsized influence of the AIPAC lobby. She's accusing Israeli-Americans who push for or care about the American-Israeli relationship to be traitors with dual loyalty. There are a lot of ways to criticize lobbying, AIPAC in particular, without going out of your way to accuse anyone of Jewish descent who lobbies for America's support for Israel to be traitors.
It doesn't strike me as a coincidence that of all the foreign lobbying groups, and there are many, she could single out to accuse of being traitors, she chooses the Jewish one. In fact that seems to be where almost all of her focus lies. If she actually criticized other groups for doing the same things, like Saudi Arabia for instance, she could defend herself by saying she was making a general statement about all foriegn lobbying groups. But no. Everyone knows she's talking only about AIPAC, and that's what makes me suspicious, at least.
If she's gonna call folks literal traitors to the collective shrug of the D voters I really don't know why I should care about an ad accusing her of terrorist sympathies. Are overblown accusations with no evidence that allude to stereotypes offensive or not?
Granted, I've never singled out AIPAC specifically (or any other, come to think of it), but I'm not going to fault someone for complaining about one corrupting PAC without simultaneously naming all the others. Same reasons I wouldn't complain about someone calling for breast cancer research just because lung cancer is more deadly.
I mean, if Omar actually said "AIPAC is bad, but this other PAC is okay," then we'd have some grounds for accusing her of a bias.
I truly realized how bad this was in 2014 when I was involved in a discussion on Daily Kos, which is (I suppose) the left-wing version of Breitbart or Red State. In a discussion thread, I called Netanyahu a "butcher" because of the absurdly disproportionate body count on the Palestinian side of the conflict. A fellow liberal used JUST THIS comment to start railing about how I was anti-semitic. And it became quit clear to me that ANY criticism of Israel is a non-starter, precisely because of how effective AIPAC has been in framing this issue. Again, you cannot even breath heavily in the general cardinal direction of the Israel without this charge being thrown out. And again, I blame the Democrats and Republicans equally for this problem. The only difference being that Republicans are also catering to a religious right that supports them to the death strictly because they believe it fulfills a biblical prophecy that ends with the Jews of Israel converting to Christianity and recognizing Jesus as the savior, or they will be destroyed.
And frankly, the West Virginia Congressman's act isn't even remotely the most vile rumor being spread about her. It is pretty much taken as gospel in online right-wing circles at this point that she is married to her brother.
She doesn't 'just' criticize jewish influences though. But whenever she mentions it it OUTSHINES EVERYTHING else apparently. She's against the corrupting influence of money in politics via big pharma, big business in general. She's anti-corruption.
"Until we are able to run fair and clean elections, we will face barriers to the transformative change we seek. We must drastically reduce the amount of dark money in our political system, empower small-dollar donors, and move towards publicly-funded elections."
https://www.ilhanomar.com/elections (www.ilhanomar.com)
Oh, by the way, here are 27 kids who we aren't giving back to their parents on god only knows what legal basis. Again, the possible punishment for misdemeanor border crossing is that the United States government will kidnap your child and you apparently never get them back. Millions of people are perfectly fine with this:
https://kvoa.com/news/national-news/2019/03/03/deported-parents-demand-the-return-of-their-children-in-u-s-custody/
Seriously. Even if you think these parents deserved to have the book thrown at them, permanent seperation from your children (as in FOREVER) is not a punishment any redeemable society is willing to inflict. It's hard to even adequately describe how revolting this is. This is an extrajudicial punishment being carried out a full YEAR after an act that is akin to speeding or jaywalking. And the punishment they are going through, for any parent worth a damn, is worse than the death penalty.
1.) FOX News had the Stormy Daniels story before the election but killed it to protect Trump
2.). Trump personally ordered Gary Cohn to block the ATT/Time Warner merger as revenge against CNN and to help FOX
3.). Roger Ailes (wait for it, because this is too rich for words) fed Trump debate questions in the 2015 primary, which suggests a major moment in one of them was entirely staged for television. You don't say.......
So just for the record here we have a catch and kill situation about Daniels that could have severely hurt the campaign, we (no matter what you think of ATT/Time Warner) a honest to god 1st Amendment issue in which the President is personally choosing sides in a media dispute and trying to use the Justice Department to control which way it goes, and we have him doing the exact same thing (if not worse given the circumstances and the nature of the how the question was set up) that he and EVERYONE on the right has been railing against when it was tied to Hillary Clinton for the last two years as evidence of a rigged primary.
The first and third are just interesting bullet-points to throw out when the media is accused of being "liberal", and one of them is, again, just too rich for words given the play the Donna Brazile incident has gotten. But the second one, the ATT/Time Warner merger, is a legitimate abuse of power. Again.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/03/04/activists-setup-local-news-sites/
Is there a different definition of the word traitor other than one who owes allegiance to a foreign country, rather than your own? That sounds like the textbook term of the word "traitor" to me. Not sure how that can be interpreted any other way. It seems pretty black and white that to question ones loyalties and allegiances to the country is to accuse them of being a traitor.
I don't think she's being honest at all. That she has a problem is Israel is obvious based on her past statements about how they have hypnotized the world about their evil doings and she should just come out and say it. She's so consumed with her obsession and hatred of them it's not hard for everyone else, including some in her own party, to see.
She is literally the ONLY person willing to speak up on an issue that millions of people find problematic in the entire United States government. And the backlash is why more don't.
It isn't just Ilhan Omar who believes US politicians are easy to manipulate on this issue. Netanyahu himself has been caught on tape saying the exact same thing. And I 100% agree with the "allegiance" comment. Sometimes it's hard not to think Israel is the 51st State. We've certainly done more for them than, oh, let's go with PUERTO RICO, which is an actual US territory.
Sebastian Gorka isn't going to renew his contract with Fox News. Great right, not so fast... because he's instead being put on Sinclair broadcasting to be beamed into 70% of American markets during local news as 'must run' segments.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/432450-gorka-fox-part-ways
How about this one:
I was going to mention this even though it is semantics, it matters in this situation.
I wouldn't call a recent (or even one who has been here for 30 years) immigrant from India a traitor if they wanted the US to intervene in the India, Pakistan standoff. They may still have family and friends in the region who would be affected.
You can owe allegiance to another region, even an enemy of the nation you are in, its when you help that enemy in spite of your nation or do something to hurt your region that you become treasonous.
Also, let's get real here. It's not just that Omar attacked the influence of the Israel lobby. That's most of it, but the other part of it is that she is wears a head scarf.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/04/jerry-nadler-blasts-jim-jordan-for-anti-semitic-tweet-at-tom-steyer.html
That's much more in the anti-Semitic realm than anything Omar has said. This fake outrage against Omar should be half of what Jordan gets. But you don't hear Trump saying a damn thing about it do you.
Saying Israel is a foreign country is not anti-Semitic. Saying Congress is responsive to groups giving it money is not anti-Semitic.
Seriously though, we are getting to the very end of this thing, and by all accounts it looks like I was right all along. There is no evidence for any Trump family link to the Wikileaks hack, nor any evidence of being compromised by the Russian government, etc. etc.
CNN is wrong anyway as collusion was the bar they were aiming to prove. The order the Special Council was formed under was to "investigate Russian Interference with the 2016 election and related matters" and more specifically "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and the campaign of Donald Trump" along with anything related to such.
So far the very best evidence of any potential links, is that Roger Stone, Trump advisor, was told by a person supposedly representing Wikileaks about a month before emails were released that damaging info on Clinton might be released. He told Bannon, Trump team member, and they kept in contact with Stone about it. Naturally, the question arises, is knowing Wikileaks might release damaging info in the future the same as coordinating with the Russian government? Obviously not at all, knowing about something isn't coordinating it, and being involved with talking to Wikileaks alone gives the impression that Russia isn't involved at all. How would they know? Nobody has alleged nor has it appeared in any of their communications any knowledge of any Russian involvement on the part of Stone. So nah. Foreknowledge of a Wikileaks release =/= coordination of a hack and/or the dissemination of damaging information in conjunction with Russia.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/us/politics/roger-stone-trump-mueller.html
There's also Manafort and a person working for a Ukranian political consulting firm, who they believe may be a Russian operative, who he was lobbying with on behalf of a former Ukranian president and tried to get witnesses to lie about. Obviously not even close to sufficient evidence for the original charge nor anything a normal person would consider to be worthy of suspicion of grand conspiracy with Russia, who are not on good terms with Ukraine by any means to the point of military hostilities and the acts they were involved in don't seem relevant.
http://time.com/5306563/robert-mueller-indicts-konstantin-kilimnik-and-hits-paul-manafort-with-another-charge/
So yeah, the Mueller Report is bound to disappoint, I predict CNN/Time is right about that much. They've got a few slimy yes-men on some slimy things they were doing on the side, and got the Prez on paying off porn stars at least, but Trump supporters already know that he's like that and will simply shrug their shoulders the way the left does with Clinton's pay for play, her history of racist statements, Omar's anti semitism, Warren's abuse of the affirmative action system for her own gain, the DNC subverting democratic elections, the media subverting objective debates, the DNC deciding the messaging for mainstream media sources, etc. Life will go on.
You are right though, everyone is going to be disappointed with the Mueller report, not of what’s in it, but that it isn’t going to be made public as it is confidential.
Barr, who refuses to excuse himself from the investigation, has already came out and said any report released regarding the investigation will be in his words not Mueller’s and Mueller’s report will be for his eyes only.
So we really won’t know what was in the report only what Barr wants us to know. I am already expecting inconsistencies with what is already public knowledge and what the report says. I am also expecting the right wing media spin on how this report excuses everything that Trump is being investigated on
Anyway, Trump Tower meeting. Don Jr. is offered damaging info on Clinton from someone claiming to represent Russia. We know that much for a fact, and only that much for a fact. It goes far on it's own to establishing the start of the claim, now we know someone claiming to rep Russia wanted to give info to them, and if they both took it and worked with them to disseminate it to the public it's an open and shut case. But the lack of any post-event evidence of communications or coordination between the groups when all their communications are apparently in the hands of investigators tells me it doesn't exist and nothing much came of it as all parties state.
I think they were certainly offered the potential of such info and an alliance with them, but didn't take it for fear of consequences or the uncertainty of its legality, again, just because no further communication or actions between any such groups ever occurred again. For groups to ally and then to never associate again seems not realistic.
I will add that taking info from foreign countries isn't uncommon and isn't in and of itself anything outrageous in U.S politics. Politifact, of all people, amazingly, did a nuanced analysis of this.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2017/jul/12/did-ukraine-try-help-clinton-way-russia-helped-tru/
Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue.
But wait, now let's see what he has in the past said about American Jews who don't support the Isralei government;
The Jewish people have always been plagued by bad Jews who undermine it from within. In America, these Jews largely vote Democratic.
This is literally saying that Jewish Americans who a.) don't support the Israeli government and b.) vote Democratic are quite literally DEFICIENT to those that do the opposite. This is easily at least 1000x more anti-semitic than anything Ilhan Omar has ever said.
Here's a few things we know about the crimes and legal jeopardy of corrupt Donald Trump so far:
election campaign finance crimes
We have a list of eight criminal offenses, including seven felonies, potentially committed by Trump include:
reminder: trump claimed many times no one knows more than Trump about campaign finance
Obstruction of Justice
Witness Tampering
Lying to Investigators/FBI under oath
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-submits-written-answers-robert-mueller-s-questions-n938666
Does any of that spell collusion? Haha not directly but plenty of other criminal activity and felonies, felonies, felonies. Just because the cops bust into your house looking for drugs, if they find a dead body you still get in trouble for that.
Law and order Democrats are starting to provide some oversight over this President and it's lawless Republican enablers. We
need some people who actually believe in the Constitution to hold this lawless administration accountable and it's starting to happen.
And these are not just "slimy yes-men". They are (in no particular order) the President's personal lawyer and fixer, his campaign chairman, his top political guru for DECADES, and his National Security Adviser. Do people actually think ALL of them are being convicted or indicted of lying to the FBI by happenstance?? Because they all randomly woke up one day and thought it would be a fun thing to try??
And again, to beat a dead horse, if this was happening to similar people in a hypothetical Hillary presidency, there would be conservatives setting up a gallows for her across the street from the White House.