Over Thanksgiving, Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert was back in her home district. While talking to a group of constituents, she made a joke at the expense of Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar.
This is what Boebert had to say:
The other night on the House floor I had my first “Jihad Squad” moment.
I was getting into an elevator with one of my staffers. He and I are leaving the Capitol and going back to my office and we get in an elevator. And I see a Capitol Police officer running, running to the elevator. I see sweat all over his face. He’s reaching…the door’s shutting, I can’t open it. What’s happening? I look to my left, and there she is, Ilhan Omar. And I say well, she doesn’t’ have a backpack, we should be fine.
See our coverage of this incident at The Left Goes Bonkers Over Lauren Boebert’s Hilarious Mocking of Anti-Semite and Terrorist-Simp Ilhan Omar and Why I’m Not Mad at Lauren Boebert
The joke is mildly funny, and as Ilhan Omar is perhaps uniquely vile among House Democrats, that makes the joke much funnier than it probably is. Omar has minimized the 9/11 attack (“some people did something”) and has succeeded in making anti-Semitism protected speech in the Democrat caucus.
That’s just her public policy side. Her personal life is a felonious trainwreck. She married her brother to effect immigration fraud, banged one of her campaign consultants (this seems to be a common thread), steered a few hundred thousand dollars of campaign funds to his company. Then they both abandoned their families to live together in adulterous bliss. Somehow, the FBI has managed to avert its eyes from this sh**storm because it is too busy pursuing trespassers and using “friendly” interviews to indict GOP Congressmen.
Omar was not amused. On Twitter, she whined, “Fact, this buffoon looks down when she sees me at the Capitol, this whole story is made up. Sad she thinks bigotry gets her clout. Anti-Muslim bigotry isn’t funny & shouldn’t be normalized. Congress can’t be a place where hateful and dangerous Muslims tropes get no condemnation.”
Later she sniveled, “Saying I am a suicide bomber is no laughing matter. @GOPLeader and @SpeakerPelosi need to take appropriate action, normalizing this bigotry not only endangers my life but the lives of all Muslims. Anti-Muslim bigotry has no place in Congress.”
By mid-afternoon yesterday, Boebert surrendered. In a pathetic tweet, she apologized to Muslims who may have been offended (ISIS and al-Qaeda did not respond to requests for comment) and said she was “reaching out” to Omar’s office, presumably to apologize.
Perhaps I’m being uncharitable, and Boebert came up with this boneheaded idea all on her own, but it isn’t hard to see Kevin McCarthy’s hand at work in something so ill-thought-out. Everyone knows Omar is a bully who was instrumental in getting Marjorie Taylor Greene booted from her committee assignments.
As I opined in my original post, a blind man could see that Omar would push for Boebert to be “censured” and stripped of committee assignments. McCarthy lacks the huevos to duke it out with the Democrats, and, at the same time, he is trying to give the illusion of being the scrappy fighter because he sees himself as Speaker in 2023. My theory is that McCarthy threw Boebert under the bus, directing her to undertake an apology tour to try to stop the Democrats from treating her like they treated Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.
If anyone thought that was going to work, they still believe in leprechauns.
It didn’t take long for the left to start screaming about bigotry and islamophobia because, you know, carrying a suicide bomb is something that every Muslim does, and blowing yourself up to kill innocent people is deeply ingrained in Islamic culture. For the idiots at MMfA and Mediaite, that’s a joke, Scooter.
One of the leaders of the mob was none other than the guy alleged conservatives have a man-crush on — because he DMs them and RTs their stuff and makes them feel like something other than abject losers, Jake Tapper.
About the time Tapper was winding up the “we’re better than that” conservatives and the online left, Omar’s fellow socialists were pitching in.
The House Democrat leaders also issued a statement on l’affaire Boebert.
“Racism and bigotry of any form, including Islamophobia, must always be called out, confronted and condemned in any place it is found. This is particularly true in the halls of Congress, which are the very heart of our democracy.
“Congresswoman Boebert’s repeated, ongoing and targeted Islamophobic comments and actions against another Member of Congress, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, are both deeply offensive and concerning. This language and behavior are far beneath the standard of integrity, dignity and decency with which the Constitution and our constituents require that we act in the House. We call upon Congresswoman Boebert to fully retract these comments and refrain from making similar ones going forward.
“Leader McCarthy and the entire House Republican Leadership’s repeated failure to condemn inflammatory and bigoted rhetoric from members of their conference is outrageous. We call on the Republican Leadership to address this priority with the Congresswoman and to finally take real action to confront racism.”
I have no problem with Boebert’s joke. It’s too bad that President Trump isn’t holding a rally and borrowing it so that it gets a wider audience. Omar needs to be mocked and ridiculed at every opportunity. The fact that we don’t isn’t a sign that we are morally superior, but rather it is a sign that we are led by a bunch of happy losers who would prefer to pick up the crumbs from under the Democrat table than win.
That said, if you make a joke like Boebert did about a nasty piece of work like Omar, you have to do so deliberately and anticipate the consequences. When Omar made her first tweet about Boebert’s fear of looking at her, Boebert should have directly challenged her. What you can’t do is go after one of the most powerful Democrats in the House in a way that accentuates her well-documented support for Islamic terrorism and imagine a) that word of the joke will not leak out and b) deceive yourself that you are not in a dogfight.
If, as I suspect, McCarthy was the guiding hand behind Boebert’s apology, it underscores his lack of fitness for any leadership position. He should have used this to lay down a marker with the Democrats that if they persist in this nonsense that when he becomes Speaker, he will strip several Democrats of their committee assignments for every Republican that has been treated that way so far. (Read my previous post on this subject: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, 2022, and the Chicago Way.) Instead, he seems to have deluded himself into thinking that the Democrats would leave Boebert alone and not officially retaliate if she apologized rather than them using her apology for wrongdoing and McCarthy’s failure to discipline her as a campaign fundraising pitch.
Our Republic is in crisis. We are on the cusp of clawing back enough power to stop the progressive onslaught. We have a lot of tough fighters in the House and Senate. But, unfortunately, without the leadership, who and how many people we elect doesn’t make a damned bit of difference. The fact that the GOP has not risen to Boebert’s defense against the dishonest accusations of “islamophobia” and whatever shows just how far we have to go to deserve to be a ruling party.