Fan of a Pretty-Faced Murderer

The barrage of bipartisan gaslighting finally may have gotten to Ilhan Omar, congresswoman from Minnesota.

 While steadfast and brave in the face of charges of anti-Semitism for her critique of the right-wing government of Israel's outsize influence on American politicians, she appears, at first glance anyway, to have collapsed under the weight of all the shocked reaction to her spot-on critique of Barack Obama's drone assassinations, mass deportations and imprisonments of migrants and refugees, and his corrupt fealty to Wall Street.

Less than 24 hours after her scathing assessment of the Obama presidency was published in Politico, Omar lamely insisted she is a "fan of Obama" whose remarks were taken out of context. It's as if a whole squad of Obamabots in little white coats had kidnapped her and forced her into some emergency Obama Conversion Therapy. It's as if she's starring in another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. One minute she's one of the last lefty Obama critics standing, and the next minute she says she's in love with the guy. She went to sleep as a progressive, and she woke up as a brainwashed neoliberal replicant.

But I think we should cut her some slack. She must recant and pretend to love Obama so as to blend in with the rest of the zombie pod people, too many of whom are merely playing at being humane. She pretends to succumb so that others might wake up, face the recent past, escape the hagiographic propaganda of his lingering personality cult, and warn the rest of the world about all the smooth-talking Obama clones who might be lurking in our midst.

Omar's surface conversion has become a matter of political, not to mention physical, survival, for her. It's hopefully only a temporary form of Stockholm Syndrome. She must at least pretend to join forces with her gaslighters, and go along to get along.

Omar is a refugee from Somalia, a poor country that was the target of many a drone strike by Obama. She simply has to learn, or pretend to believe, that unlike Trump's stupid drones, Obama's drones killed thousands of people therapeutically and philosophically. She must learn to identify, or pretend to identify, with her native country's own abuser. She should just lighten up. After all, Obama was able to urbanely joke about his drone murders without acting like a total xenophobic Trump-ass about them.

She has to learn that to survive as a Democratic pod-person in good standing, she must keep her accurate assessments of Obama to herself for now, especially when her own hometown newspaper appears to be turning against her. Her accurate assessment of the influence of the Aipac lobby was hard enough for some of her constituents to bear, but insinuating that Obama is a slick smiling killer is worse than stomping on the flag, spitting in a plate of apple pie and stealing from your own mother all at the same time.

Here's the heretical statement that got Omar into so much trouble:

“We can’t be only upset with Trump. … His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was. And that’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.”

And then came the pod people in their little white coats, and Omar hastened to tweet:

“Exhibit A of how reporters distort words. I’m an Obama fan! I was saying how Trump is different from Obama, and why we should focus on policy not politics.”

Omar linked to an audio of the Politico interview, which, strangely enough, only confirmed her initial assessment. And since it confirmed rather than refuted her critique of Obama, she then hastily deleted the tweet proclaiming her fandom and the audio confirming the exact opposite. It confused people, including (at first) me.

But the main reason that I cut Omar a lot of slack is that despite her surface fealty to the Cult of Obama, she has started a long-overdue conversation about the actual Obama legacy, which the corporate media have been burnishing to a high gloss for the past decade or more. There's quite a bit of rot hiding beneath all that surface shininess. 

Other critics and even some recovering victims of Obama Stockholm Syndrome are beginning to come out of their own woodwork and acknowledge the inconvenient truths that Omar has publicly proclaimed, at much personal and political cost to herself.