Yeah, I Voted for Ilhan Omar

Whatever problems the Post Office is having, they haven’t slowed the torrent of anti-Ilhan Omar/pro-Antone Melton-Meaux clogging our mail slot here in the beating heart of the Fifth District. In sheer total mass the accumulating pulp is approaching the heft and gloss of that Restoration Hardware catalogue. Post-primary, the printers handling all this stuff will be kicking back in Cabo for a month.

The cash for attacking Omar is believed to be coming from “bundlers” associated with pro-Israel lobbies, committees and such, as well as Republicans eager to paint Omar’s high-profile immigrant, female, Muslim “radicalism” as a political loser and swap her out for something more mainstream. At this moment I’m not certain if either or both is true. But the size and sophistication of the effort to take out a young, first-term Congresswoman is both extraordinary and more than a little repellent.

I’ve rolled my eyes more than a few times over the past two years at the way Omar has said things as well as moves she’s busted in the context of her squirrely personal melodramas.

IMHO there’s a prima donna factor involved there, as well as, ironically, a tone of entitlement. At the risk of stepping out into the minefield of sexism, what I’ve seen with Omar is not unlike what I’ve seen countless times with other young, female celebrities. Being successful and good-looking buys you a lot of space in modern America. It can go to your head.

That said, I had no second-thoughts about checking her name and mailing in my ballot for her. Having yet to meet the perfect politician, my attitude is that Omar deserves another term, at least to tidy up her personal life and refine her message discipline. You never want to set the bar for comparison as low as utter fools and frauds such as Louie Gohmert, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes, Thomas Massie, Ted Yoho, Matt Gaetz and a dozen other trolls in the Republican caucus. But if they, (mostly sewage-spewing white guys), can hang around DC year after year, Ms. Omar — who may be self-involved but isn’t stupid — deserves at least one more term.

Frankly, I like Omar’s style of in-your-face “radicalism”, and I’m not all that bothered that she hasn’t stuck a sock in it and waited ten years to step up and say what’s on her mind. Despite what Breitbart and OANN and FoxNews are forever hyper-ventilating over, Omar and the rest of the all-female, “ethnic” Squad are hardly on the verge of enacting Sharia Law in ‘Murica, grabbing our guns and forcing us to live on a diet of kale and seaweed.

They remain distinctly minority voices … but with unusual potency in the age of social media.

Far from being detrimental, the noise Omar and the others are making, both impudent and imprudent to the ears of sclerotic institutions like the Star Tribune editorial page, is actually healthy for a functioning democracy. And absolutely vital to one like we have today, which is being rotted out from within by an enormous cast of shameless, homogeneous charlatans. (You want eye-rolling? Zoom me any time the Strib natters on about the anodyne values of “reaching across the aisle”, “consensus-building” and “pragmatism.”)

I don’t know if Nancy Pelosi has ever had a kind of Mother Hen chat with Omar. But certainly someone explained to her the hellfire she’d face if she dropped so much as a syllable of negativity about America’s carte blanche commitment to “Israel”, which is synonymous with “Benjamin Netanyahu” as far as too many Americans are concerned. Netanyahu is as flagrantly corrupt as Donald Trump, and as long as his kind holds power in Israel we need someone with a high Congressional profile asking, “Exactly what in hell are we doing here?”

Ms. Omar is hardly a bashful flower. She likes the stage and the lights. No one will confuse her with quiet, plodding Marty Sabo. And that’s good. This is a wildly different time.

The Squad is .92% of the current Congress. The GOP’s Orwellian-named Freedom Caucus is nine times as large, and none of them are enduring a flash flood of attack cash during their primary campaign.

Stylistically and tactically Omar has things to learn. And if she doesn’t, her 2022 race may be a different story. But right now she’s a valuable voice because she’s unique and because she won’t quietly relent to brute tradition.

The Fifth District can live with that just fine.

Michael Cohen: “I fear … there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

You couldn’t help but make a direct, almost umbilical connection, between Michael Cohen’s parting words yesterday … “Given my experience working for Mr Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power” and the performance of 99% of the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee.

As was plain to everyone watching, the Republicans, led by the loudest and most cynical of the (so-called) Freedom Caucus, had zero interest in refuting anything …  anything, mind you … Cohen accused Trump of being. Not of being a “racist”, or a “con man” or a “cheat”. Hell, if Cohen produced a HiDef video of Trump kidnapping schoolgirls (or boys) off the streets of Mole Hill, West Virginia and shooting them up with opioids the Republican response would still be, “Oh, yeah! But you want a book deal, you lying bastard!”

Trump’s flagrant incompetence and corruption has never bothered the likes of Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan and … it’s very important to emphasize … it never will.

Those two, the leaders of The Wrongest of The Right Wing, get elected and stay in office because they bring full-on toxic cultural warfare, not in spite of it. They are the equivalent of Subutai the Mongol for America’s fear-driven racist under-class. For that sad over-stressed crowd, ethics, legality, logic and human decency are incidental to defeating … liberals. “Liberals” of course being code for uppity women, blacks, Hispanics, climate change, electric cars, mass transportation, cheaper prescription drugs and everything else that comes with common sense in 2019.

Meadows and Jordan may not be quite the abject fools and buffoons that some of their colleagues are. Here’s looking at you ex-Loooosiana Sheriff and wearer of weird, ill-fitting vests, Clay Higgins

(may you personally re-confiscate Cohen’s “boxes”), or Carol Miller of West Virginia,

or Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin,

or … well, it got to the point, before the lunch break, where the Republicans looked to be in a competition to see who among them could sound most most like they were having an ischemic stroke; bug-eyed and struggling to put two coherent sentences together. With the exception of Justin Amash from Michigan, you’re excused if you thought the brain-eating zombie apocalypse had already attacked and fed off the GOP caucus.

Lord, what a collection of goobers.

But my point here, and it too is somewhat apocalyptic, is that this crowd; bred, raised and sustained on the raging gibberish of talk radio (several of them are ex-talk radio hosts), don’t have the genetic composition to concede defeat. Because of that, it is worth considering that they will see Trump being driven from office by the legal weight of Robert Mueller and the Southern District of New York and/or defeated at the ballot box in 2020 as the catalyst for all-out civil insurrection.

As Cohen suggested and others who have known Trump for years have concurred, Trump will resort to anything to avoid (or reject) defeat. This is acutely true in the context of this moment, where the Presidency may be the only thing that temporarily protects him from total financial destruction. Should the SDNY indict him for bank fraud, tax fraud, insurance fraud and on and on, the penalties for could easily leave him penniless, a blubbery shamble in a Trump Gardens efficiency, rocking a soiled wife-beater and eating cold, day-old KFC out of a bucket.

Facing that prospect Trump will have no choice but to rally the goober masses, the cesspool swamp of deplorables that re-elect the Jim Jordans, Mark Meadows, Glenn Grothmans and Carol Millers of the planet … because of their indifference to decency and common sense and revulsion of “liberals.”

Now, we always want to avoid hysteria and hyperbole. But you know that line you keep hearing about how, “this isn’t normal”?

Well, it could very easily, and likely, get even less normal.

Benghazi Committee vs. Hillary: Talk About a Fool’s Errand.

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterWhat do I know about political strategy? Somewhere along about the second hour of the latest interrogation of Hillary Clinton over Benghazi … Benghazi!BENGHAZI!!!, I turned to my dog, who looked about as interested in what was going on as the average voter. “I don’t get it, Lou. I would have opened with the blockbuster new revelation, the killer detail, the smoking pipe bomb that would have her sweating, ‘like Dan Quayle on ‘Jeopardy’, as we used to say. But they’re two hours into this and they’re talking … e-mails. This Gowdy guy couldn’t possibly be so stupid that he’d let the lights go up on this circus without bringing something new to the show, could he?”

Well, Trey Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor, may not be stupid, but he pretty clearly found himself in the position that having pandered for a year to his Tea Party base he couldn’t figure out any way to pull the plug on the lifeless corpse he was required to roll out on national TV, showing off a kind of Tea Party “Weekend with Bernie”, without any intentional laughs. He had no other choice than to put on whatever show he could, so he can go back to South Carolina, look the tri-corner hat crowd in the eye and say he brought the fight to the devil incarnate.

You knew it was a resounding disaster, certainly for the ambitious Mr. Gowdy, when his close-ups showed him slathered in Nixonian flop sweat by the time he gaveled the thing to adjournment 10 hours and 59 minutes after it opened. At least his faux hawk held up.

If you’re a Republican outside the Freedom Caucus psycho ward you had be shaking your head and reaching for the Jim Beam before lunch. All you could possibly see, knowing that Gowdy had nothing, much less anything new, is that Ms. Clinton would not only prevail against GOP’s clown car of interrogators, but that their easily foretold failure was only going to strengthen her for the 13-month run to the White House.

The conventional (Freedom Caucus) wisdom (sic) was that given enough time, the tea cup Torquemadas on Gowdy’s committee would either force Clinton into at least one juicy, viral 5-second gaffe or reduce her to a babbling Socialist, troop-hating ninny. Because, you know, she’s Hillary Clinton, someone who has never before in her long career ever had a tough/stupid question put to her or been forced to sit in front of cameras and smile patiently at a panel of filibustering buffoons. Of course they’d break her! She’s never seen the likes of Gowdy or Jim Jordan (leader of the Freedom Caucus) before! By the glory of God and our guns we’ll show her what freedom’s all about!

Talk about a fool’s errand. You got nothing. She knows it. She’s been at this game for 25 years. You’re still trying to find the Capitol rest rooms. What could possibly go wrong?

Until Hillary oversees the indictment of Goldman, Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein and JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon she won’t be my dream candidate. But as long as mastery of The Game and serenely swatting down mosquito logic — keep biting until it bleeds — are criteria for high office, she’ll do just fine.

Lord, what a pathetic farce that was.