During the House Oversight Committee's hearing to take testimony from President Trump's former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, Meadows brought Lynne Patton, an African-American woman who works in the Trump administration at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to refute Cohen's allegations of Trump's racist behavior.
Tlaib, a freshman, was one of the last lawmakers to question Cohen and used part of her time to admonish Meadows for doing so.
"Just because someone has a person of color — a black person working for them does not mean they aren't racist," she said Wednesday.
Quite so.
"And it is insensitive that some would even say — the fact that someone would actually use a prop — a black woman — in this chamber, in this committee is alone, racist in itself."
Both charges are wrong.
Meadows subsequently absurdly cited his colored nieces (?) as proof he is not himself a racist.
And Tlaib insisted she had not called him a racist, giving two reasons in this order, that she had called the act racist and that she had said "someone" and not used his name.
That second reason is absurd and undermines the first, that she had called the act, not its perpetrator, racist.
It seems at least she understood herself to call "someone" a racist.
And just who might that have been?
BTW, though everyone who used it was pretty clearly a racist, the ludicrous birther bullshit that O was not, or was probably not, or was possibly not a natural born American citizen eligible for the office was not racist in itself.
It just wasn't.
But "racist" is so ugly a word and so damaging a charge, some people love to use it as a club.
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