I don’t know what Omar‘s own citizenship has to do with anything. If anyone has expressed any doubt that she is rightfully a US citizen, I missed it.
As for Melania Trump, I am very willing to believe that she immigrated in some bogus way. Would be nice if we could put down our partisanship for a moment and not just reflexively filter every question of legal impropriety through that lens. There are crooked pols on both sides of the aisle, although not as many in total as the most cynical people tend to believe.
I guess that depends on whether you believe IQ tests measure intelligence. There is no disputing the fact that their average IQ scores are significantly different. As are those of people with East Asian ancestry, so much so that they are suing elite universities for using reverse affirmative action on them. This is of course all getting very off-topic.
Your racism isn’t about your beliefs about IQ test scores – it’s about your (evidence free) beliefs about the genetics of intelligence and race. Unless my memory is wrong, you’ve directly asserted that you believe that black people are inherently intellectually inferior, on average, as compared to white (and Asian) people. That’s a white supremacist belief (maybe an Asian supremacist one too, but that’s not a particularly influential viewpoint in the US). In fact, it’s pretty damn close to the most fundamental and basic of the white supremacist beliefs.
What I wanted to point out is that to get citizenship one’s immigration steps are also checked, and more so now with a meddlesome administration as the Trump one. (As in going back to see if she faked something, chances are that she did not as per Snopes).
Hence, my point that even your hunch is weaker tea than the one about Omar’s slur about her marriage with a relative.
If she got paid to get someone a green card via marriage (the most common scenario even if not as exciting as an incestuous marriage) they would need to catch that at the time, not now. There would be nothing amiss with the paperwork.
Did her (first legal) husband Ahmed Nur Said Elmi ever in fact receive, or even apply for, a green card for permanent residence in the US? Given that they were living together for three years and still officially married for another five or six, you’d think they’d have had ample time to cut that deal if such a deal existed.
Also, according to Omar Elmi is a UK citizen, so not really seeing why he’d be desperate enough for a US green card to enter into a loveless mariage de convenance for it.
[Spock]My density sensors are picking a reading captain…[/S]
Uh, actually it would be easy then to find that her public testimony does not match with what they could hypothetically find and they can investigate further and press charges. When no charges or accusations from USCIS are coming I can say your hunch is a bad one.
They would have to send agents out to investigate it, interview people and so on. The Strib already did that and was unable to find out, apparently, whether they were living together. (Still can’t see any reason why Omar won’t even answer that question.) But sure, I guess the FBI could have more resources in theory. But they also may be a little leery of investigating one of Trump’s political appointees. Remember, the FBI is not exactly his best friend.
I should add too that I don’t exactly think the shenanigans I suspect her of being up to are some kind of huge moral failing. When I was 19, I tried to get a friend to marry me so we would both be eligible for financial aid (we were not eligible due to our parents’ income, but neither of our parents were supporting us at the time). You might remember that my sense of that article was that there was something hinky about her marriage, but I wasn’t up in arms about it. My main point here is to push back against the protestations that the whole thing is some kind of wacky conspiracy theory. It looks to me like she probably did something technically illegal, but not heinous or even unethical. If she were a politician I liked, I would be perfectly content for the whole thing to fade away.
You can’t see why she wouldn’t answer a question about her living arrangements ten years ago with an ex-husband that she’s been separated from since 2011? How about because it’s simply nobody else’s business?
If that’s supposed to be some kind of analogy about the follies of youth, I think you’ve got Omar’s timeline a bit wrong. She intended to (legally) marry her present husband Ahmed Hirsi (whom in her official statement she describes as “the father of my children and love of my life”, which is actually kind of sweet) when she was 19 in 2002. She and Hirsi ended their (religiously but not legally sanctioned) form of marriage in 2008, when Omar was 25, and she legally married Elmi the next year. They separated in 2011 when she was 28, but didn’t legally divorce till 2017. Omar and Hirsi reconciled in 2012 and legally married in 2018.
So Omar’s married life with Elmi took place well into her mid-20s, when she’d been a US citizen for nearly a decade and was combining a career with her bachelor’s degree studies. Not exactly an irresponsible crazy mixed-up kids situation. I’m not saying that Omar’s personal life doesn’t have some drama in it, but there doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason for you to “suspect” her of being up to irresponsible “shenanigans” like your own dumb teenage notion of marrying for financial aid.
The “whole thing” at present is centered on the allegations that Omar married her own brother. Given that AFAICT nobody has so far presented even one shred of concrete evidence supporting those allegations, why shouldn’t we regard them as “some kind of wacky conspiracy theory”?
It looks to me that unless you can produce some actual evidence that she did anything “technically illegal”, then your speculations about what you imagine she “probably” did belong right back in your ass where you pulled them from.
Just because your unsupported accusations of Omar’s having done something “hinky” or “technically illegal” are less lurid and salacious than the unsupported accusations of Omar’s having married her brother doesn’t mean that they’re one whit more credible, in the absence of any actual evidence for either of them.
But since she happens to be a politician you don’t like, you’re perfectly happy to keep stirring the shit-kettle for the conservatives, racists and Islamophobes who want to go on smearing her with scandalmongering even if they have absolutely zero actual evidence for it. Mighty principled of you, SlackerInc.
Stirring the shit-kettle isn’t just good for the right. I think it’s arguably even better for those of us Democrats who are trying to keep that wing of the party from gaining power and influence. It’s not exactly “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” or even “The West Wing”, granted: but politics ain’t beanbag as they say. If there’s nothing there, she and her family have the power to make it go away. And please don’t come back with talk about how conspiracy loons will still make some tenuous claim about a coverup. Right now it’s in the realm of reasonable suspicion, and they could make it unreasonable (if in fact it is unreasonable, which I kinda doubt).
BTW, I wasn’t talking about the “follies of youth”. I think my idea to marry to get financial aid was a good one, and my friend was foolish to pass it up. She wanted her first marriage to be “real” and “special”, but to me that’s being needlessly sentimental.
It most assuredly is not “reasonable suspicion”. It’s bigoted nonsense exactly like the birther BS. And that crud hasn’t gone away either. She is the one you are accusing (and, yes, you are accusing her) and thus the onus is on you to provide actual evidence of your assertion. The only evidence you have is that others have accused her. That’s not actual evidence of anything she has done wrong.
Whatever, we are just going round and round. I obviously don’t agree with your characterization but I stand behind what I already wrote several times upthread.
Nope. I’m consistent. I am doing as I always have done on this board: I am denoucning unfounded and baseless accusations. I am also decrying racism and other types of prejudice.
You? You’re continuing to tout bigoted nonsense. Guess what that makes you.
I don’t think it really matters *why *SlackerInc is persisting with this nonsense - maybe he hates blacks and Muslims, maybe he’s trying to earn a merit badge in “JAQing off”, maybe he had “post ludicrous nonsense on the Internet” pencilled in his calendar for the first week of September, or maybe he genuinely believes he’s making a credible argument because he spends his spare time repeatedly slamming his own head in a car door.
Whatever the reason or motivation, the fact remains that every time it’s pointed out that all he’s got is “rumor and innuendo” (to quote m’learned colleague) and absolutely nothing in the way of actual evidence or a coherent argument, he simply doubles down or accuses us of being partisan hypocrites or Kellyanne Conway.
Of course they will. Look at how the “birther” crazies kept demanding more and more evidence of Obama’s US citizenship status. And slightly over half of Republicans STILL believe that Obama was born in Kenya. The idea that “if there’s nothing there”, a politician targeted by conspiracy theorists has “the power to make it go away” is the delusion of someone with his head firmly up his ass.
On the other hand, now she doesn’t ever have to deal with the embarrassment of explaining why she chose for her first husband a guy with his head so firmly up his ass, so there’s that. :dubious:
