Keith Ellison was on Morning Joe to talk about Trump's Muslim Ban 2.0. His answer on that subject will surprise no one. This at the end of the interview:
REP KEITH ELLISON (D-MN) It's an irrational list. It's a meaningless list, and let me just say this: in Minneapolis we're very proud of our Somali-American community. They're starting businesses, running for office, Ilhan Omar first to State Legislature of Somali descent and there now Somalia's now going through a massive drought and a famine and these people could be banned from getting relief through coming to the United States because of this ban. This is where this is inhumane, it's cruel, and it's wrong.
MIKA BREZINSKI: Well anyway and I just get your description of it Congressman. "Irrational and mean" is matching the behavior that we're getting from this president on all other levels, so it's incredibly disturbing. Congressman Keith Ellison thank you.
As an aside, I do believe we are getting the best of all worlds with Keith Ellison where he is. If he had been elected DNC chair he had promised to resign his House seat. As deputy there is no need for him to do that and he can still represent the party while maintaining a strong progressive voice in the House.
But now on to Mike Barnicle, and what is truly the stupidest question I've heard in a while:
MIKE BARNICLE: Congressman you are now number two in the DNC trying to get the Democratic Party back on the winning side of things nationally. How do you go about doing this? How do you go about getting, you know, a 42 year old man with his 42-year old wife and their two kids who live in suburban Minneapolis who may be bringing home in between 75 and a hundred grand how do you convince them that your party has not gone so far left that they are now... their lives their hopes their dreams... are in the rearview mirror?
ELLISON: Well that person, if they're living in suburban Minneapolis? They voted for me
I've won with seventy percent of the vote and my turnout has been increasing every single year that I've been in office so that person is not a problem.
There are two myths beltway media millionaires like Mike Barnicle are going to push, HARD, for the next two years. One, is that Trump is an outlier, and not representative of conservatism or Republicans. I demolished that myth last year:
Donald Trump lies about a lot of things, but he is not lying when he says he received more Republican Primary votes than any other candidate in US history. That statistic is skewed by how many Republicans voted "Not Trump," but the fact that the race boiled down to Trump versus not-Trump is not helpful to the "Trumpism" argument. Republican voters selected Trump as their candidate, in state after state after state.
The beltway news media is terrified that the Republican Party will be forever tarnished by this Trump candidacy. Why? Because Trump-as-Republican busts open their "both sides" myth, that "both sides" of the political spectrum are equally bad, equally wrong and right, equally to be blamed for the "mess" in Washington.
Which brings us to the second myth, the " big lie that makes all the other lies possible" as Driftglass puts it. It is the evergreen beltway myth they cling to as their mother's bosom: that there is "extremism on BOTH SIDES." There is no better-timed example of this than today's column in Washington Post's "The Fix" which, and I am not making this up, equates Bernie Sanders calling out Donald Trump's lies with Donald Trump saying Obama wiretapped him. It's all so uncivil!
Here's the problem with using the “L” word in politics, though. To say someone's lying suggests that you know they don't believe what they're saying.
It's possible Trump believes the allegations he's making, which seem to have surfaced on a conservative news site one of his top aides used to manage.
So The Fix acknowledges that Trump uses Breitbart (though they won't name names because COWARDS) as a source but won't acknowledge that quoting Breitbart (or actually believing that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower personally) is either lying or crazy, and definitely disqualifying for the office of president.
It's no longer about "normalizing" Trump. He's too far gone for that. Self-preservation in the Beltway has now switched to "Trump doesn't represent real Republicans" and "both sides are equally bad" myths. You won't be able to miss them. They're everywhere.
The hashtag is #BothSidesDont.
