Donald Trump got himself back in the soup (though “back” may be superfluous) with his comment about the “Four Housewomen of the Apocalypse.” He suggested they go back to the “places from which they came.” Not even not ending his jibe with a preposition could save him.
But to some — some racists, of course — his insult seemed more like a football cheer (“push ’em back, push ’em back, waaaaay back!”) than a racist slur.
The Four Housewomen are New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”), Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar of the doubtful spouses, Michigan Rep. Rashida (“We’re going to impeach the motherf—er”) Tlaib, and Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna (“We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice”) Pressley.
Trump critics have duly noted that only one of the Four Housewomen was, in fact, born abroad, but surely it’s a bit too technical to demand that an insult be exactly correct.
Perhaps Trump was just channeling a memorable line from the late 1960s Broadway comedy “There’s A Girl in My Soup.” It went (more or less): “If you don’t like the country that gave you your birth, why don’t you go back to where you came from.”
Racism as a term is wearing thin these days. If everyone is a racist, then no one is, or at least being a racist is a pretty ho-hum thing. As an epithet, it lacks most of its former punch.
One of the Four Housewomen, Omar, came to the U.S. as a refugee. Without the generosity of the people of the United States she would be leading a miserable life in hell-hole Somalia (where GDP per capita is around $478), or perhaps just dead. That could be better than living in her native land, which, it’s a good bet, is not even one of the top 20 destinations for congressional junkets.
Unfortunately for them, when the four gals saddled up, their bags of marbles tore, allowing them to ride on unencumbered. Sufficiently unencumbered to call Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America, a racist.
Bear-baiting and cockfighting are illegal in most states these days. Those “sports” are thought to be inappropriate for a civilized people. (Boxing is exempt from the proscription, probably because it’s easier to fix — how do you teach a cock to take a dive?)
However, the Four Housewomen calling Pelosi a racist provides much of the same pleasure as a good cockfight.
Pelosi chastised the four of them (now known as “The Squad”) for attacking other Democrats personally, warning them that the party infighting was jeopardizing its majority—by which she meant its chance of unseating Donald Trump.
That got AOC sufficiently riled that she charged Pelosi with targeting “newly elected women of color.” You can see why this is as entertaining as cockfighting.
The crowd is going wild. In comes Maureen Dowd, to rescue poor feathers-flying Pelosi:
[AOC] slimed the speaker, who has spent her life fighting for the downtrodden and who was instrumental in getting the first African-American president elected and passing his agenda against all odds, as a sexist and a racist.
Not a stylish sentence: the phrase “as a sexist and a racist” is too far away from the noun, “speaker,” that it modifies; and “passing his agenda” should get a good guffaw given what’s happened to ObamaCare.
Dowd added: “AOC should consider the possibility that people who disagree with her do not disagree with her color” — whatever “disagree with her color” means.
Ooooh! Did you ever think you’d see that sentence in the New York Times? Where are the refs when you need them?
But there you have it — hometown papers, and South Bend Mayor Peter Buttigieg, please copy — it’s possible to disagree with a person of color without objecting to that person’s color.
Buttigieg said on National Public Radio last week that “white America” needs to come to grips with the “systemic racism all around us. It’s in the air we breathe.” He said that explains all today’s racial inequalities. Yeah. Sure.
Hmm. Black unemployment, in the time of Trump, is at its lowest ever. But the black illegitimacy rate (which leads to so many of black America’s problems) is sky-high. That’s the gift, over decades, of trendy Western Civilization-trashing liberals — the kind of people who write for the New York Times — and of people like AOC, who call everyone who disagrees with them racist.
But Liberation Day may be coming. That’s the day when blacks vote, again, for Trump, but in even larger numbers than before, terrifying, one has to suppose, every good progressive liberal, and most especially, the Four Housewomen of the Apocalypse.
Daniel Oliver is chairman of the board of the Education and Research Institute and a director of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was executive editor and subsequently chairman of the board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.