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With the republic in peril… by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 14, 2019

With the republic in peril…
by Tom Sullivan

Minnesota Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar has had a busy week of stirring controversy that focused the Beltway press on proper decorum rather than on more direct threats to the republic.

First, a pair of Omar tweets that skewered the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) played into anti-Semitic tropes about wealthy Jews. She subsequently apologized for them. Then on Wednesday she used her House Foreign Affairs Committee questioning of Trump special envoy to Venezuela Elliott Abrams to suggest his responses could not be trusted. Abrams in 1991 pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress in the Iran-Contra Affair. Somewhere in that testy exchange about Abrams role in support of the Salvadoran military and Nicaraguan insurgents during the Reagan administration, Omar was attempting to highlight Abrams’ propensity for destabilizing rather than stabilizing foreign hot spots.

Sarah Jones comments at New York Magazine:

Omar is right, of course. In 1993, a lengthy New York Times report detailed the dedication with which members of the Reagan administration defended their material support for El Salvador’s military, even though they knew some atrocity had occurred. The U.S. government’s role in the steady destabilization of El Salvador is not only directly pertinent to the question of Abrams’ suitability for his role, it is the subtext to a familiar piece of agitprop. Trump loves to stoke fear about immigrants, including many Salvadorans, who cross the southern border. Not only are the vast majority peaceful, they’re fleeing a violent political climate that we helped create.

Charlie Pierce was more blunt: “My advice to Venezuelans? Dig shelters immediately.”

The freshman Democrat’s overarching political “crime,” if any, was taking press focus away from more serious stories.

Here’s one. Federal teams assembled to fight foreign meddling with the 2020 elections are being downsized:

“The clear assessment from the intelligence community is that 2020 is going to be the perfect storm,” said a DHS official familiar with the teams. “We know Russia is going to be engaged. Other state actors have seen the success of Russia and realize the value of disinformation operations. So it’s very curious why the task forces were demoted in the bureaucracy and the leadership has not committed resources to prepare for the 2020 election.”

[…]

“The Trump administration intelligence chiefs in their worldwide threat assessment clearly stated that the use of influence operations from countries like Russia, China and Iran poses a significant threat to the country,” said John Cohen, the former deputy undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at DHS. “If these reports are true, it’s highly disturbing that the department and the administration are not more focused on dealing with that threat.”

Here’s another:

Instead, we get coverage of spluttering, right ring hissy fits over Ilhan Omar.

On the upside, we got this overdue takedown of their phony outrage:

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