Tag Archives: Louie Gohmert

Yeah, I Voted for Ilhan Omar

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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.

Impeachment Blahs?

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One thing I always try to keep in mind anytime there’s an issue or event requiring more than an hour of the public’s attention is: how high is the entertainment quotient here?

Take impeachment, where for all the headlines, all the indignation on cable news and all the chanting at rallies like the one I attended last night in downtown Duluth, (+2 degrees, but “Hey, hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go”), there doesn’t seem to be the same pitch of fervor that I remember back when ’70s-era Republicans were telling us every president did what Richard Nixon did, so get over it.

A lump of beautiful coal for you, Donnie boy. Duluth. Dec. 17.

Good public entertainment requires juicy dollops of suspense, excitement, hilarity or prurient appeal. Mix and match as you see fit.

But other than Trump’s Stephen Miller copy-edited letter to Nancy Pelosi, the antics of Rudy, Lev and Igor and the fools-at-court blithering of Doug Collins, Louie Gohmert, Matt Gaetz and other House Republicans, hilarity is in pretty short supply with this impeachment drama.

Likewise any prurient appeal. Especially if like me you’re still trying to bleach your neurons of the image of Donny having his way with a porn queen.

There’s been too much inevitability about this episode to really grab and hold an American audience. Going way back, everyone familiar with Trump’s career as a fraudulent real estate buffoon (of the casino-bankrupting variety) knew he was such a reckless fool it was inevitable that sooner or later he’d screw the pooch so badly he’d get himself impeached. We’re just amazed it took this long.

But now we’re dealing with the House’s long inevitable vote to actually do the deed, and that’s rolled in with the very high expectation that Mitch McConnell will cook the Senate trial into a quickie nothingburger putting a “fully exonerated” Donald on the road to reelection against a creaky, bumbling Joe Biden.

As loathsome a national embarrassment as Trump is nothing galls me more than the fact that there has never been even an hour of reckoning for Mitch McConnell. You know the system is in shambles when he flat-out says things like he said to Sean Hannity last week, about how he, the jury foreman, is tightly coordinating his trial duties with the defendant, right before, during and after he takes that oath to be impartial … and there’s no legal downside.

There are various ideas being floated to force a series of votes on things like the witnesses (Mike Pompeo, Mick Mulvaney, John Boltobn) Mitch doesn’t want anywhere near the trial cameras.

There’s even an interesting idea whereby Pelosi and Adam Schiff don’t even formally send the articles of impeachment to McConnell to begin a trial. They do this on the grounds that (pick one) McConnell has disqualified himself by his public remarks to Hannity and/or the obvious fact that Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, is still running around try to get Scorsese-worthy Ukrainian wise guys to invent a tale or two about those Biden bastards. In case you’ve forgotten, that presidential attorney Rudy who is being paid by his “translators” Lev and Igor, the former of whose wife recently came in possession of a $1 million check from a Russian gangster.

Point being, the plots to pollute the next U.S. election and obstruct Congress are clearly still going on. So … instead of a sham trial led by a guy who has said he’s in the bag for the defendant, Pelosi and Schiff hang on to these articles and announce they’re contining the dozen or so inquiries slogging through the Trump-crippled U.S. court system.

Wait long enough and the SDNY may spit out its case against Rudy, Lev and Igor … and Principal #1. Or maybe … really maybe … in June the Trump-toady Supreme Court will go all Nixon on him and compel him to release his tax returns.

Whatever. As effective as the Democrats have been in telling the story of Trump’s Ukraine scandal, the Senate trial, hobbled and gelded by Moscow Mitch, is going to need several twists of plot to go boffo at the box office.