A week or two ago, we noticed peripherally that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had something to say about President Donald Trump’s impeachment. Without bothering to look up her exact phrasing, it was something to the effect of, “If it took this Ukraine business to get everybody on board with impeaching Trump, then I’ll take it.” Whatever it was she precisely said, it was clear that AOC had little interest in the details of the Ukraine saga and was, in fact, merely happy that some random thing had come along to convince her fellow Democrats to finally impeach this president.
AOC is known for making wild, unsubstantiated, downright ignorant remarks, but in this instance, she’s closer to mainstream Democrat opinion than most in the establishment. Or, at least, what those in the Democratic establishment will say in public. You know it from Twitter. You know it from the cheers that greeted Rashida Tlaib’s “we’re gonna impeach the motherf**ker!” You know it from op-eds like this one from Teen Vogue, where Muslim-American writer Amani Al-Khatahtbeh explains that Trump should have been impeached a long time ago. Not for any crimes he may or may not have committed, but for his “racism and Islamophobia.”
To set the stage, Al-Khatahtbeh takes us back to a moment in her childhood when her father let her watch the execution of Saddam Hussein via satellite.
“Over a decade later, I can still remember staring into Saddam’s face as he approached the gallows, surrounded by masked men, the noose being placed around his neck, with onlookers chanting and taunting him,” she writes. “Make no mistake, Saddam was a vicious leader responsible for the deaths of many people. But, even as a child, watching this celebrated death, brought on by war and American invasion, didn’t feel liberating to me at all. As an American it felt violating to be exposed to images of war and violence against people that looked like me.”
Putting aside our doubts about whether or not these are the accurately-transcribed thoughts of a pre-pubescent child, we might point out what Al-Khatahtbeh does not: That the men putting Hussein to death were not white Americans but brown Iraqis. And they didn’t seem too conflicted about doing so.
But after wringing her hands over American foreign policy for a paragraph or two, Al-Khatahtbeh gets to the topic at hand:
The ongoing impeachment trial is a necessary measure, and, frankly, something that should have happened long before Trump had the chance to almost complete an entire presidential term. His abuse of power has already devastated millions of lives. The strict travel ban, which Trump plans to expand this year by adding another seven countries to the list, has sown chaos, keeping families apart and preventing refugees from seeking a safe haven in the United States. His immigration policy at the U.S.-Mexico border has ripped so many children away from their parents, causing irreversible damage to their physical and mental development, not to mention their cultural lineage. For Trump, these children are just collateral damage.
In other words, by actually enforcing U.S. law and living up to his sworn duties as a defender of the Constitution, Trump should be impeached.
This is the kind of silliness that Democrats are trying to harness in the upcoming election. And this is why they MUST be defeated at all costs.
