Ilhan Omar Gets Exposed When Asked Who Should Replace the Police
When a liberal Democrat can’t handle questions from a CNN anchor, it’s a good chance the answers aren’t to be found.
Rep. Ilhan Omar proved that in an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, when she was asked point-blank who will enforce the law if Democrats can satisfy their current fetish of dismantling police departments, and gave a fog of an answer that should disturb any sensible person.
Rep. @IlhanMN on “who investigates crimes” if the police department is “dismantled”:
“We have a department that’s led by a chief who’s suited for racism …. You can’t really reform a department that is rotten to the root.” pic.twitter.com/OD3uZtfG8L
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 14, 2020
According to a CNN transcript, host Jake Tapper led off the interview with a question about the shooting Friday night in Atlanta, where a police officer killed a black motorist who forcibly resisted arrest, stole one of the officer’s Tasers and apparently turned to shoot it at his pursuers.
Normal Americans would regard the incident as regrettable, but realize that the man, identified as 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks, would be alive today if he had peacefully accepted being arrested on a suspicion of driving under the influence charge. (Falling asleep at the wheel in a Wendy’s drive-thru is a pretty good sign that all is not well.)
Sane people would conclude that if Brooks hadn’t wrestled with the two officers, if he hadn’t forcibly grabbed a weapon from one of them, if he hadn’t turned on a pursuing officer with the stun gun, his children would still have a father.
For Omar, of course, it was simply evidence of why “trust in the system as it is right now is so low.”
One of the country’s most outspoken Democrats brought exactly the same kind of critical-thinking skills to bear when the discussion moved to the current movement to dismantle the police department in Omar’s home city of Minneapolis, where the death of a man in police custody May 25 sparked riots nationwide and the current wave of anti-police animus in liberal politics and popular culture.
“So, let’s talk about that, because you have talked about the dismantling, the need to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department,” Tapper said.
“What takes its place, and — if you could just decree what takes its place? Who investigates crimes? Who arrests criminals? What happens?
Omar’s response was a word salad of liberal buzz words — “a new way forward,” “crisis of credibility” — and non-sequiturs that didn’t add up to a thing.
“A new way forward can’t be put in place if we have a department that is having a crisis of credibility, if we have a department that’s led by a chief who’s suited for racism, if we have a department that hasn’t solved homicide,” she said. “Half of the homicides in Minneapolis Police Department go unsolved.
“There have been cases where they have destroyed rape kits. And so you can’t really reform a department that is rotten to the root. What you can do is rebuild. And so this is our opportunity, you know, as a city, to come together, have the conversation of what public safety looks like, who enforces the most dangerous crimes that take place in our community.”
There’s nothing approaching an answer to Tapper’s question in there.
Is the Minnesota Police Department perfect? Of course not. No human institution is.
But its closure rate in homicide cases and instances of misplaced evidence don’t have any connection to what Tapper is asking.
(It’s doubtful, for instance, that the other half of Minnesota’s murders would be magically solved if the department were taken apart.)
And Omar’s claim that Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, himself a black veteran of the MPD, is somehow “suited” to racism (whatever that means) has its own crisis of credibility.
As Minnesota Public Radio reported in 2007, Arradondo was part of a lawsuit against the department in 2007 claiming the department engaged in racial discrimination against its own employees. (The lawsuit was settled and Arradondo won a promotion, MPR later reported.)
Whatever merits or drawbacks Arradondo might have as a police chief, that’s not the usual background of anyone “suited” to racism.
Omar’s stab at fogging up the issue didn’t go unnoticed on social media.
So basically she has no answer. That’s what I thought.
— BA (@Badams65) June 14, 2020
LOL- “Half the homicides go unsolved” – oh, so what, theres’s a lot of them then?
They never address how they will do that any better….
I’m sure without police, people will just.. get along.. and pixies will sprinkle gumdrops on the doorsills’ .. fantasy land must be lovely…— Gavin Kreijkes (@GavinKreijkes) June 14, 2020
She never answered the question, and I knew tapper wouldn’t press her because he too is far left, but what’s scary is they don’t plan to replace law enforcement in MN and she has to answer to no one for this lunacy
— stan (@kerlickTexas) June 14, 2020
Insanity of the highest order.. Blathering Rambling and spewing total Gibberish.. people should be outrage by this…
— Miramwilliam (@Miramwilliam2) June 14, 2020
If nothing else, the interview was a useful look into the moral abyss of the liberal mind.
Nonstop propaganda from a Democratic mainstream media has a chance of convincing at least some Americans that the party really cares about the individual rights and safety of the country’s citizens, but appearances like Omar’s on Sunday destroy the illusion entirely.
Elected officials like Omar and Minnesota City Council President Lisa Bender have made it clear they don’t consider protecting citizens from crime to be a credible function of government. Bender apparently considers the desire for protection from violent home invasions a matter of “privilege.”
(It will be interesting to see if female voters feel that way when the 2020 election gets here.)
Democrats don’t have an answer for how policing can function without police because there isn’t one.
Are there ways American police departments can work better? Of course.
But liberals would first have to recognize that virtually every troubling case of alleged police “brutality” has come in cities where Democrats have been the dominant political force for decades (New York, for instance, or Baltimore, or Minneapolis) and involved officers protected by a powerful public employees union (another traditional bastion of Democratic strength.)
Solving problems starts with getting to the root of them — in this case Democratic political power and the power of Democrat-supporting groups.
Those are answers no Democrat wants to hear, and they’re certainly not answers any Democrat wants to offer.
So when a liberal Democrat can’t handle questions from one of the most liberal networks in American journalism, it’s because — no matter what Democrats are trying to sell the American people now — the reality is the party doesn’t have any answers at all.
And Ilhan Omar just exposed that for the whole world to see.
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