4 thoughts on “The Latest From Ilhan Omar”

  1. The appeal? That’s easy: As a US Representative, she has power. From there, sky’s the limit.

    Paraphrasing science fiction author and astrophysicist, David Brin: Power may corrupt, but the truth may be closer to “power attracts the corrupt.”

  2. Those who cannot do, teach. Those that that can do neither seek elective office.
    By the way, why is it that most of the quotes from the Quran are “roughly translated”? Seem we could do better.

    1. Maybe the analogy was St Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible (he was a scholar and not a mystic, and his translation is even regarded as a reference point for Protestant Bible translators)? With this document regarded as sacred and not to be translated into other European languages? With communities of scholars and clergy studying Latin along with the Latin Bible, with most of everybody else taking them at their work on what those guys read in their schools?

      I understand that Iranians and Turks and Malaysians and Nigerians and others study Arabic towards this end. I have heard that passages are very poetic and inspirational, the kind of literature with moving excerpts to be read at weddings and funerals like popular Bible passages?

  3. When one is homebound and runs out of things to do outside of work, I watched Peter Robinson’s “Uncommon Knowledge” interviews with history professor Stephen Kotkin plugging his books on Stalin.

    Both Churchill and Truman were quoted to the effect that Stalin was a bro’ and a regular guy and some who keeps his promises and so on. Robinson asks Kotkin, “How can that be when you describe Stalin in your books as such a monster?”

    The explanation was somewhat elliptical and perhaps incomplete, but Kotkin offers that Stalin was “charismatic” and that the Western leaders were seeing his “good side” and not his “evil side.”

    Do you think that being charming and friendly up until you are sent to the Gulag or to that prison where you were tortured and executed is all part of the zero-empathy personality profile, that the charismatic part is all part of the psychological profile about a super-manipulator of other people?

    The other observation from Professor Kotkin is that Stalin, along with his inner circle whom he eventually fed into the maw of the Great Terror, were all true believers in Marxist-Leninism. The historical documents show that they were using the same language amongst themselves as they used outwardly in their public pronouncements. Kotkin asserts that what Stalin did was not about him, it was all about his devotion to Communism, and he was enabled by those around him because they believed him to be the most sincere Communist. Kotkin goes on to say that it is Communism itself as a governing philosophy that leads to this kind of thing.

    I am just going off topic about how Stalin rose to power, this has nothing to do with a member of the Minnesota Congressional delegation.

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