ROLLING OUT 'BARREL'
Rep. Wilson calls Kelly’s ‘empty’ attack false, racist
A Florida congresswoman fought back on Friday against White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s attack on her, calling him a liar and claiming an insult he lobbed her way was racist. Democratic Rep. Frederica Wilson told CNN that the retired Marine general mischaracterized remarks she made at a 2015 dedication of an FBI field office nnamed after two sslain FBI agents.
Kelly denounced Wilson on Thursday for criticizing President Trump’s call to a Gold Star widow — and also charged that she had crudely boasted about securing federal funding for the office during the otherwise solemn dedication ceremony.
“We were stunned,” he said. “Stunned that she had done it.”
Wilson called the claim false on Friday.
“I was not even in Congress in 2009 when the money for the building was secured,” she said. “So that’s a lie. How dare he.”
Wilson did introduce legislation to have the Miramar, Fla., building named for the two agents and worked with thenHouse Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, to get it passed.
In his remarks Thursday, Kelly also called her “an empty barrel,” suggesting she was a person who made a lot of noise but had nothing important to say. Wilson slammed the insult. “That’s a racist term,” she said “We looked it up in the dictionary, because I had never heard of an empty barrel. And I don’t like to be dragged into something like that.”
She did not elaborate, and an Internet search yielded no such definition for the term.
Wilson and Kelly’s clash stems from a condolence call Trump made to the widow of Army Sgt. La David Johnson, one of four US soldiers killed in an Oct. 4 ambush in Niger.
Wilson had slammed the call
as insensitive, claiming Trump told the widow that Johnson “knew what he signed up for.”
Kelly defended Trump in his emotional remarks Thursday.
But a video of Wilson’s dedication speech appears to contradict Kelly’s claim that she had bragged about funding.
Posted online by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the video shows her briefly touting her passing a law that dedicated the building to agents Benjamin Grogan and Jerry Dove, who were killed in a 1986 shootout with bank robbers near Miami.
But she spends most of her address praising the two agents.
Other speakers at the event, including Congress members from both parties and then-FBI Director James Comey, also praised Wilson for getting the building named for the agents.
Trump, meanwhile, attacked her anew late Thursday.
“The Fake News is going crazy with wacky Congresswoman Wilson (D), who was SECRETLY on a very personal call, and gave a total lie on content!” he tweeted, even though Kelly had largely corroborated Wilson’s account of the call.
And the White House doubled down when asked if Kelly stood by his claim that Wilson bragged at the dedication.
“Absolutely,” spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.
“General Kelly was stunned that Representative Wilson made comments at a building dedication honoring slain FBI agents about her own actions in Congress,” she said.
“As he pointed out, if you’re able to make a sacred act like honoring heroes about yourself, you’re an empty barrel,” she said. “Or, as we say in the South, all hat, no cattle.”
She suggested Wilson made other remarks at the event that corroborated Kelly’s claim.
And she also suggested that reporters not question Kelly’s account of the event, noting he was a Marine general and saying that debating him would be “highly inappropriate.”
We’re trying to figure out what’s racist about the term “empty barrel.” Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) says it is, but Google isn’t showing us how. Nor can we see why she had to go there.
Wilson had slammed President Trump’s words in a phone call to the family of Sgt. La David Johnson, killed in Niger.
Chief of Staff John Kelly (who had coached Trump on what to say, and is himself a Gold Star father) vented his anger at Wilson for politicizing the sacred subject of these calls, likening the congresswoman to an “empty barrel.”
For what it’s worth, video suggests he was wrong in hitting her over her remarks at a 2015 FBI ceremony. If she had to keep this flap going, she could’ve focused on that.
Instead, the congresswoman (who has re- portedly bragged of becoming a “rock star” in this woeful mess) played the race card, claiming “empty barrel” is “a racist term. . . . We looked it up in the dictionary.”
Which one? Our search led to the saying, “An empty barrel makes the most noise,” which quora.com says is invoked “to minimize insult and downgrade a very loud critic” — and which Kelly used before, when a congressman called him “a disgrace to the uniform.”
A reflexive resort to crying “racism” does not serve Democrats well. As Andrew Sullivan notes in New York magazine, many on the left now even say that national borders are themselves racist — a lunatic claim sure to drive moderate voters into Republican arms.
There are no winners here, but Wilson seems determined to be the biggest loser.