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Showing Original Post only (View all)Ilhan Omar Backtracks After Calling Obama a "Pretty Face" Who "Got Away with Murder" [View all]
Source: Vanity Fair
Even as the Twitter commentariat continues to litigate whether Rep. Ilhan Omars latest comments about Israel were merely poorly phrased or fully anti-Semitic, the freshman congresswoman ignited another controversy Friday when Politico published part of an interview in which Omar appeared to bash Barack Obama, the patron saint of the Democratic Party, as some sort of war-mongering, neoliberal shill:
Omar says the hope and change offered by Barack Obama was a mirage. Recalling the caging of kids at the U.S.-Mexico border and the droning of countries around the world on Obamas watch, she argues that the Democratic president operated within the same fundamentally broken framework as his Republican successor.
We cant be only upset with Trump . . . His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was, Omar says. And thats not what we should be looking for anymore. We dont want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.
For some, those comments may prove to be more incendiary than Omars criticisms of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, which left Republicans and more than a few Democrats fuming. Obama, after all, remains astoundingly popular within his party. In a recent Harvard-Harris Poll survey, a plurality of Democrats said they would label themselves an Obama Democrat; fewer identified themselves as progressive, and even fewer as democratic socialist. If the AIPAC flap was successful in turning off the more hawkish members of the Democratic Party, going after one of its most popular members as a pretty faceor, at the very least, giving conservatives enough ammo to build that messagecould end up being just as damaging for Omar, whose district voted for Obama by about 50 percent both in 2008 and 2012.
Read more: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/03/ilhan-omar-barack-obama-pretty-face/amp