Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera shares a similar trait with the radical freshman class of Democrats in Congress in that he eagerly stumbles headlong into one controversy after another.
In the face of the justified outcry of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., not only belittling the 9/11 terrorist attack at the hands of Islamic extremists, but also mocking Americans for being apprehensive about al Qaeda, which carried out the attack, Rivera opted to defend the Somali refugee Friday on “The Five.”
Co-host Jesse Watters referenced a damning New York Post cover that was critical of Omar, before calling her out for always playing the victim.
“She never really acknowledges what she says when she’s attacked,” he noted. “She says, ‘You’re only attacking me because of my identity, not because of what I said,’ and that’s like playing sports against someone, they’re getting dominated play after play after play, and they’re always whining to the referee.”
“She just does not have the talent, I don’t think, to stand in the ring and fight,” he added.
This prompted Rivera to push back — he has also defended Omar’s colleague, Rep. Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., the socialist who happens to share Rivera’s Puerto Rican heritage.
“This is not whining when she is being attacked like this, this is an existential threat,” Rivera said. “She’s getting death threats on a daily basis.”
Sounding a lot like Speaker Nancy Pelosi trying to run interference for Omar when she was embroiled in controversy over her anti-Semitic remarks, saying she doesn’t realize the “full weight” of her words, Rivera said Omar doesn’t have the “glibness” to speak properly about the attack.
“She doesn’t have the glibness, the language of a veteran who knows that this is the proper response when you are talking about something as horrific, as traumatic as 9/11 that screwed up all of our lives for the worst,” he said.
Rivera then made an inane comparison to the criticism Kohn F. Kennedy faced as a Catholic running for president to the outcry over Omar’s highly insulting words and actions.
“This is beginning to sound a lot like when — my first presidential election, 1960 — Kennedy being attacked because he was Catholic and they said he’s going to have allegiance to Rome rather than to the United States. I smell the same stink here.”
Watters dismissed Rivera’s efforts to paint Omar as a victim because of her identity.
“If this was a white guy saying this, a white straight male Christian freshman Democrat congressman, you don’t think the Republicans would be running up the score on something like that?” he asked.
Rivera doubled down in his defense.
“It’s a gotcha. I mean let her learn on the job,” he bemoaned. “Give her a break, Jesse.”
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The longest-tenured writer at BizPac Review, Tom grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills.
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