‘We cannot run this country based on political strategy…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) While a series of videos making the rounds on social media last week mocked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for seeming confused and jumbled, one of Pelosi’s biggest inter-party rivals, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., has once again outdone her.
In a rambling appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball” Thursday, Tlaib dismissed the notion that Democrats needed to move forward with a strategic plan before diving into politically risky and divisive impeachment proceedings.
“We cannot run this country based on political strategy,” Tlaib said. “… We can’t do our job when the man that is in charge in the Oval Office is endangering our, our, you kn—our country and our democracy.”
Tlaib, whose district is in a safely liberal section of Detroit, has been one of the staunchest advocates for impeachment, capturing headlines on the very day that she was administered her oath in the House of Representatives by saying that she intended to “impeach the motherf***er” during a reception with the far-left group MoveOn.
That group, and several others associated with leftist extremism, claimed in early May to have delivered a petition with 10 million names to Tlaib calling for Trump’s impeachment. However, an online petition referenced by the groups appeared to have just under 298,000 names.
A similar online petition via Change.org calling for Tlaib’s impeachment had more than 326,000 signatories.
Asked by host Chris Matthews whether she was prepared for the political battle that lay ahead should Democrats press forward against Trump, Tlaib struck a defiant and confrontational tone.
“I tell the president, ‘bring it,’ because 10 million people signed a petition to impeach this president,” she said. “They want us to hold them accountable—and I bet you I can get 10 million more people from organizations that have been talking to people at home.”
Her fuzzy math on the petition signatories was not the only statement that needed fact-checking.
Tlaib also seemed to imply, falsely, that President Richard Nixon was impeached.
Although Nixon resigned in 1974 facing imminent impeachment in the Watergate scandal, the only president actually to have been impeached since the 20th century began was President Bill Clinton.
“Just like the Watergate class, when it came in, they didn’t run away from their responsibility and their duty,” Tlaib said. “They may not have run or campaigned on impeaching the president, but in the end they did what was right for the country and they put the people first before they chose any kind of political stance.”
If viewers needed a further preview of what Tlaib’s vision of a strategy-less America, led only by her personal intuition, might look like, her discursive diatribe on “Hardball” might have offered a good glimpse.
She jumped from one platitude to the next, insisting voters in the 2018 midterm elections had given her and her radical colleagues a “mandate” to remove Trump.
“It was very clear that many people came out because they wanted to elect a jury that would impeach this president,” Tlaib said.
Clear indeed.
“They are very clear: No one should be above the law,” she continued. “No one should sit there and become a king-like president. It endangers our well-being, our future. What a precedent do we set when we don’t do anything. Inaction is basically action in saying that what he’s doing in acting above the law and not upholding on to his oath as the president of the United States—I say to people, please understand that this is not about this president—who’s a me me me president. This is about people, about government, which is supposed to be about people, and about upholding the most brilliant, awesome document that we have in this country, which is the United States Constitution. That is my responsibility—and I know many of my colleagues agree.”
Matthews then cut her off by thanking her, saying he liked clarity.