How about that, perpetually aggrieved House Democrat Illhan Omar and President Trump have something in common -- both want to make America great, at least as Al Sharpton sees it. The difference being, Trump remembers an America that was great before it fell into decline while Omar sees no greatness whatsoever in its past, again according to "the Reverend" Sharpton.
Here's how Sharpton described it during Saturday's PoliticsNation on MSNBC --
SHARPTON: The lede tonight -- send him back, to Sunday school! Earlier this week, Donald Trump went down to the Bible Belt for a campaign rally and he took his base to church, the church of white identity politics. And instead of preaching as Jesus did, Jesus who loves all the little children of the world, black and white, President Trump continued to demonize four congresswomen of color, focusing his wrath on a war refugee resoundingly elected on a message this president cannot understand -- Making America Great In the Future.
The thing that jumps out here in Sharpton's ever-entertaining if seldom enlightening remarks is his curious claim about Ilhan Omar getting elected on a pledge of "Making America Great in the Future." That would make two politicians who ran on much the same platform in 2016, the other actual example being Trump.
But the crucial difference between the two messages is Trump's insertion of the word "again", implying that America was great in the past but has fallen, and Omar's suggestion, at least as interpreted by Sharpton, that America was never great before and can only be so in the future, presumably through people like her and Sharpton.
But it sure comes across as decidedly churlish to suggest that America wasn't great ... ever. Not when it fought a cataclysmic civil war rather than perpetuate slavery? Not when thousands of our soldiers waded through hellfire to liberate Europe from a demonic regime killing millions of innocent people -- the vast majority of them not American -- every year? Not in our harrowing, decade-long effort to land men on the moon in the most remarkable technological feat of the ages? Never before ... really?
So after years of demonizing Trump as the American Fuhrer, left-wingers such as Sharpton are now appropriating his campaign slogan -- for which he presciently sought a legal trademark only a week after Obama defeated Romney in 2012 -- and rewriting history to suggest it was through much the same slogan that one of Trump's most richly deserving targets, Omar, was "resoundingly" elected in 2016.
In the entertaining 1992 bio-pic Chaplin, with Robert Downey Jr. playing the lead, Chaplin and a German Nazi Party official exchange words at a Hollywood party in the '30s before the war. Afterwards, the party's host, Chaplin's close friend and fellow United Artists studio creator Douglas Fairbanks, reels off the funniest line in the movie.
"It's funny, you look a lot like him. Adolf, I mean," Fairbanks tells Chaplin, alluding to Hitler. "With your mustache on," alluding to the Little Tramp. "I think he stole your act!" (Which he did). And now the left is stealing Trump's.
