Isn’t it great that the Democrats passed that resolution about hate last week? You can see what a salutary effect it is having on Rep. Omar. Seriously though, the good news is that she didn’t make any comments about Jews. The bad news is that she’s broadened her rhetorical style to literally dehumanizing her political opponents, which doesn’t seem like a huge improvement. Here she is clarifying her comments comparing former President Obama to President Trump saying, “That is silly to even think and equate the two.” She continued, “One is human; the other is really not.”

This stems from a story Politico published about Rep. Omar last week in which she appeared to attack Obama as “a pretty face” masking bad policies. Here’s the excerpt which raised some eyebrows:

As she saw it, the party ostensibly committed to progressive values had become complicit in perpetuating the status quo. Omar says the “hope and change” offered by Barack Obama was a mirage. Recalling the “caging of kids” at the U.S.-Mexico border and the “droning of countries around the world” on Obama’s watch, she argues that the Democratic president operated within the same fundamentally broken framework as his Republican successor. “We can’t be only upset with Trump. … His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was,” Omar says. “And that’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.”

Within hours, Omar was backtracking from that by claiming her words had been distorted. In a tweet last Friday, she wrote, “I’m an Obama fan” and she included a link to her own recording of the interview. That was apparently meant to prove her case, i.e. that her words had been distorted. There was just one problem: The audio recording confirmed she’d said exactly what Politico had claimed she did. The author of the Politico piece was just one of many people who noticed:

Exhibit A of how politicians use the media as a straw man to avoid owning what they said. Your tape…supports what I wrote 100%. So does my longer tape. It's beyond dispute. Next time, a phone call from your office before the Twitter ambush would be appreciated. https://t.co/eb2grgn5Cd — Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) March 8, 2019

The next day, after being dunked on by hundreds of people, Rep. Omar deleted the tweet:

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) just deleted this tweet In an interview with Politico, she suggested that Obama was a murderer and made other attacks on him Omar then claimed she never said that and tweeted out an audio link of the interview The link showed she *did* say those things pic.twitter.com/GjmMvWefRe — Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) March 9, 2019

So to sum this up:

Omar fumbled the interview by attacking the most popular figure in her party.

She fumbled the walk back by attacking Politico and putting out audio that confirmed Politico’s account.

She walked back the walk back by deleting her tweet.

Now she’s saying she never said what she said because Trump isn’t human.

I’ll give her this much. After several tries, she finally landed on a target that her supporters won’t care about defending. Sure, she’s still lying about what she said in that interview, but the Democratic base will be happy to overlook that in exchange for a little Trump bashing. Things really are so much better now that the Democrats have rid the world of hate.