Your position is that something will be found on Omar, which is what Skywalker quoted. While you’re not sure she married her brother, you think something untoward happened, and that it will be discovered.
Yes, that’s vague. But a vague accusation is still an accusation. It’s the classic conspiracy theorist gambit: try to throw as wide a net as possible. That way you can claim you are always right.
Given the quote from your blog where you believe you were right about the Mueller report, it seems being right about your predictions is very important to you. Hence the constant attempts to move the goalposts.
A man comes to you saying that he was told by a low-level flunky in Donald Trump’s orbit that they had access to illegal Russian-gained materials that had been stolen.
You take a one hour to Google and determine that Trump has various ties to Russian sources.
You write this and post it publicly.
As soon as you do so, all of the information about those links is deleted and scoured from the Internet.
Now, should you be completely surprised if a full investigation fails to prove guilt? No.
Is that deeper investigation merited? Probably, yes.
The Donald may well be innocent. But it’s curious if he works very hard to destroy information. Possibly it’s because he’s guilty of the hinted-at crime. Possibly he’s just overly concerned with his image and can’t handle people using innocent business relationships against him. Possibly he’s just worried that any in-depth investigation will find something else of which he is guilty.
But in all cases, Alexander Downer had no personal profit from making the accusation. And that is worth taking note of, and particularly if the reaction to the accusation is bizarre.
I would quibble that my position is that it is likely that she is guilty of something and thereby something is liable to found. But, in general, I’ll accept your description.
Thank you for being (largely) accurate to my statements.
Prior to to being famous, two publications, The Harvard Law Review 1992 and a pamphlet promoting up and coming authors 1993, published biographies stating Obama was born in Kenya. All us Birthers have to do is point to Obama’s own words to validate our beliefs. Who else other than Obama would write his biography at that point in his life?:eek: :dubious:
I know multiple people who have a parent from a foreign country and not a single one of them has ever mistakenly stated they were born in that foreign country, yet this happened to Obama twice. :rolleyes:
President Obama’s father was Kenyan, so it’s simple for someone not double-checking to mistakenly put that he was born in Kenya. Especially in the early 90s, many years before he was famous. There’s no “gotcha” there.
OK, I got a new month’s worth of access to the Star-Tribune, and even though the Vikings season opener is this weekend, I used up one of my articles on this. You’re welcome.
So let’s first dispense with this notion so many of you are pushing hard, that raising these questions is complete nuttery, equivalent to Alex Jones claiming the Newtown shootings were a false flag operation and that the grieving parents were actors. The “Strib” is no yellow journalism tabloid: as Wikipedia notes, “Journalists from the Star Tribune and its predecessor newspapers have won six Pulitzer Prizes, including two in 2013.”
And of course they are the newspaper of record for Omar‘s district, given that the entire city of Minneapolis lies within her district.
So let’s look at the lede of the article in question, which as I had thought was published earlier this summer:
The article is quite long and I won’t try to sum it up here. But there is an aspect of it that I think should be highlighted. Omar herself does of course try to dismiss the allegations as being “baseless” and specifically raises an objection that is reminiscent of some of yours:
But it really does seem like she and her family could put these questions to rest, which backs up Sage Rat’s perspective. It’s one thing to say they shouldn’t even have to, in response to conspiracy theories posted on fringe sites. But when the questions are coming from the only major daily newspaper in your congressional district, wouldn’t you want to dispel them if you actually could? It seems very fishy to me. Specifically, I am referring to the following:
It’s pretty obvious they are hiding something. What exactly that is, I can’t say because they are hiding it.
My hunch is that he is actually not her brother, but that the reason she can’t disprove this is that doing so would require confessing to some other immigration-related malfeasance. (The Strib did find people who knew her ex-husband and they said he never mentioned being married.)
I agree. It seems like a fairly straightforward sort of goof to make. It’s a harder goof to make to write a post where you say that you have heard tell that she married her brother and link to posts where the ex-husband is calling her children his nieces.
And, as said, it is a bizarre reaction to scrub the internet of such posts rather than simply say, “Yeah, they weren’t his children but he was sort of their dad for a while, so ‘niece’ was a compromise term that he took up using. No, he’s not my brother.”
A person who acts guilty isn’t always guilty. But, it does tend to be correlated. As one Lawfare podcast said, if Bill Clinton had simply been like, “I’m a consenting adult. She’s a consenting adult. We did adult things. Butt out.” No one would have cared. But Bill felt like he was guilty of something, acted guilty, committed perjury as a side effect of guilty, and in fact was guilty of what he had been accused of doing. It wasn’t a surprise that the accusation proved true based simply on Bill’s acting guilty.
At a mile-high view, comparing the genesis of the two accusations may seem reasonable. But the Alexander Downer situation is a better parallel. Going to the FBI and accusing Papadopoulos of talking about criminal activity is not a typo. It could be have been wildly off-base, but it’s much less likely to be predicated on a goof.
The SomaliSpot case would have been relatively likely to have been a goof of reading too much into the word “niece”. But the reaction to the discovery matches the Trump case more than the Obama. As said, a person who acts guilty is liable to be guilty.
Trump acted hella guilty. Even without his past, I would expect that a thorough investigation was liable to discover something that he didn’t want found just based on how he responded. Note, in a similar vein, Comey’s reaction to breaking news of the Steele Report to Trump. Whatever reaction it was that Trump had to it, Comey’s first instinct was, “This dude’s guilty. I better start keeping careful notes.”
That could be wrong and unfair, but it’s a reasonable response to someone acting guilty.
The Omar accusation on SomaliSpot itself…eh. The acting guilty - well, it makes me lean a particular direction in my expectations. But, as said, I’m more riled up by people deciding a priori of nothing that a bunch of right-wing idiots learned Somali so that they could manufacture falsified images of social media posts. That’s plain off stupid and if that’s you, then you are stupid whether my leaning on the matter proves to be correct or not.
Plus there’s the whole previous discussion we’ve already had about the fact that in Somali and many other cultures, reference to someone as an aunt, uncle, niece or nephew often has nothing to do with familial relationships at all. My Somali-born friend calls me “Uncle” when talking to her children and I’m pretty sure we’ve never been in any sort of relationship beyond having the odd cup of tea in her kitchen and chatting.
So he didn’t even have to be “sort of their dad for a while” to be called uncle and to use the term ‘niece’. All he had to be was on speaking terms with them.
There’s nothing more than rumor and innuendo. That the Star Tribune investigated it means nothing - newspapers investigate rumor and innuendo all the time. All they found was more rumor and innuendo.
But, see, there wouldn’t be any rumor or innuendo unless she was “acting guilty”. And just because “acting guilty” is an entirely subjective measure and is only being cited by people predisposed to believing that she’s guilty of “something”, this in no way mitigates the fact that this is all somehow her fault.
It’s not entirely subjective at all. The Strib asked for a variety of things she refused to give. She wouldn’t turn over documents, she wouldn’t give full names of her family members, she wouldn’t even answer as to whether she was living with her then-husband when they filed their marriage paperwork. In court when she filed for divorce, she claimed she not only didn’t know where he was but she didn’t even know anyone who might know. That’s extremely hard to believe, and all of these things in combination make it look quite obvious that she is not being forthcoming.
But she’s never actually been caught lying about anything or breaking any rules, right? Oh wait, not true. As the article points out, she got fined for violating campaign finance law.
“The victim of our bullshit witch hunt will not turn over endless reams of documents to exonerate her from our bad faith attacks! This clearly proves that she’s guilty!”
Look, did Birthers shut up when Obama turned over his birth certificate and later the long form birth certificate? No. They called it fake. Why the fuck would Ilhan Omar even dignify this bullshit with her attention?
Yes, it’s very suspicious how she wouldn’t provide the media with details of her personal life (or “hand over documents”) when asked about unsupported rumors and innuendo. Oh wait - no it isn’t. And she’s made it clear that she’s not answering stupid intrusive questions about her personal life because they’re stupid intrusive questions about her personal life.
She was fined for “using campaign money for out-of-state travel while serving as a state representative”. Is it your contention that this translates into a predilection for lying about everything?
I bet you’ve lied a few times in your life, and therefore everything you write here can be assumed to be a lie. In fact, I demand you provide me with details of all the times you’ve told a lie. If you refuse to, that indicates you have something to hide and therefore we can reasonably assume you’re guilty of something. I’m not sure what yet, but clearly we can’t trust any protestations of innocence you may make.
To be frank, I’m not really defending Omar here. I don’t really care that much about her, except in a general humanitarian way. What I’m doing is attempting to point out some deeply flawed arguments that have no rational or evidential basis to them, as is the case here and as is the case with Sage Rat’s similarly ludicrous lines of reasoning.
