Summer 2019 showcases politics’ worst
And so it continued yesterday morning, a little after 8 o’clock. President Trump tweeted, “Our Country is Free, Beautiful and Very Successful. If you hate our Country, or if you are not happy here, you can leave!”
With that Trump framed his previous inflammatory tweets demanding four progressive congresswomen “go back” to their countries as a prelude to a simple test of patriotism.
Trump had tweeted out Sunday that “Democrat Congresswomen” should go back and fix the “corrupt” and “crime infested places” they came from and then “come back and show us how it’s done.”
The Herald’s Hillary Chabot deftly described the strategy behind the tweets and there is no doubt that the president is focused on his re-election, but his words were disgraceful and must not be dismissed as political strategy. U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) are all Americans.
They are accomplished women who are as much an example of the American success story as countless figures in our history. For a sitting president of the United States to make an irresponsible determination of the worthiness of a fellow American to inhabit the same borders based on the kind of speech they practice is grotesque.
Terms like “racism” and “xenophobia” are tossed around so much in today’s politics that using such labels no longer evokes the passionate response it once did. In the case of President Trump’s tweets, though, we needn’t dig that deep — his words were un-American to the core.
No elected politician should assign value to a fellow citizen based solely on his or her beliefs.
Unfortunately, that is exactly what we got from Ayanna Pressley at the Netroots Nation conference on Saturday, during which she demanded conformity and threatened exclusion to any up-and-coming politician who even entertained the idea of straying from the progressive playbook.
“If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice,” she said, “Don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice.”
It is the cynical theme of intersectionality: You are the sum of your identity, be it racial, gender, etc., and you are nothing more. It is pure prejudice based on immutable characteristics.
While the various parties in Washington, D.C., compete to out-bombast one another, real things are happening. We’ve still got a crisis on the border that can only be resolved with action by Congress. The North Koreans are acting up again, and too many Americans lack adequate health care and can’t afford what they do have.
After an ICE facility was attacked in Washington State on Saturday night, no member of the “squad” could be bothered even condemning the event.
Americans deserve representation in Congress dedicated to their needs rather than political newbies looking for fame and Twitter validation. We also need a president in the Oval Office representing all Americans, from every corner, without making them casualties of his spats with political rivals.