Even for liberal Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent, this is over the top. “The Plum Line” blogger for the paper spewed hate at conservative Congressman Dan Crenshaw for daring to criticize Representative Ilhan Omar’s dismissal of 9/11 as “some people did something.”
One of the sub-headlines for the Post piece concluded, “Trump keeps using rhetoric that incites hate and murder.” In what Sargent probably assumes is magnanimity, he concluded that the President might not want to have Omar murdered: “We don’t know whether Trump actively wants to see harm befall Omar — he probably does not.”
But Sargent thinks Trump would be okay with it:
But we do know that the possibility that his attacks on her, and their hateful and dishonest content, might make that more likely does not trouble him sufficiently to dissuade him from them.
The Post writer spun the Democratic Congresswoman’s comments as “an aside” with the “obvious intent [being] to isolate the act of 9/11, its perpetrators and their ideology, and separate them from the enormous majority of U.S. Muslims.”
In defense of Omar, Sargent lashed out at the “slimy” response by Crenshaw:
As Peter Beinart argues, Omar is urging American Muslims to be citizens, that is, to be politically active in resisting discrimination and in defense of their rights as Americans.
I want to take this a step further and argue that it’s this idea that Trump and his allies really object to. Crenshaw, oozing a slimy trail of bad faith and phony sanctimony, claims the charge of incitement is meant to “silence” critics of Omar.
Continuing a rant that belongs more in Daily Kos than the Washington Post, Sargent fumed:
But Trump and Crenshaw are the ones doing the silencing. They are trying to demagogue into silence someone who is an outspoken resister of the use of 9/11 for discriminatory purposes and a vocal advocate for the rights of U.S. Muslims.
The Post identifies Sargent as having a “take from a liberal perspective.” At least that’s accurate, unlike when the paper tried to portray Jennifer Rubin as coming from a “conservative perspective.”
