The Incivility of Maxine Waters

This article first appeared in New English Review.

First it was DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen driven from a Washington DC restaurant by hostile, pro-illegal immigration diners. Others showed up in front of her house chanting. White House press spokeswoman Sarah Sanders was ordered out of a Virginia restaurant. Then it was Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi being confronted at a Florida theatre. Now it is Congresswoman Maxine Waters actually calling for people to get in the faces of Trump administration  officials on the street. It matters not one whit that Trump himself has ordered a halt to separating children from their parents when they are arrested crossing the border illegally.

The mainstream news media also has its share of responsibility for this ugliness. This week, Time Magazine, on its cover, is running a doctored image of Trump staring down at a Hispanic toddler who is looking up at him and crying. In all the hysteria over family separation, nowhere is there any criticism of parents who drag their children across a border in violation of our sovereign laws.

But it is Waters’ language that sets the bar so low. Here you have a member of Congress advocating that government officials be confronted and harassed in public  because they work in the Trump administration. Before she was calling for impeachment. At least that has a constitutional foundation. This latest outburst has the potential to lead to violence. But what does she care? She is in a safe district. The more she embarasses herself with her language, the more votes she gets. Her constituency is blind  to her intemperate language and blind to her corruption.

In February 2012, I actually had a chance to see and hear this pathetic woman speak in Orange County. She was part of a panel hosted by the Orange Country Islamic Center in Garden Grove, California. This is the same mosque, where in 1992, head imam Muzammil Siddiqi actually hosted the so-called Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman and translated his sermon into English.

On this occasion in 2012, the topic was sharia law. Also present on the panel were Democratic congresswomen Judy Chu and Loretta Sanchez as well as now disgraced former LASD Sheriff Lee Baca and Michael Downing, then chief of the LAPD Counter Terrorism unit. (How deceiving titles can be.) It was a town hall event, open to the public, and devoted to the lie that sharia law is perfectly compatible with the US Constitution. It was an amazing exercise in public deception as each of the panelists repeated the lie including Waters. Of course, much of the discourse was devoted also to bashing Republicans.

Maxine Waters’ resume is one that should guarantee defeat in any election for normal candidates. But it is an exercise in futility in hoping that the citizens of Waters’ district will one day “woke up”, to borrow a phrase and vote her out of office. Even if worse comes to worse and this call to go after administration officials in public should lead to bloodshed, it would only result in another landslide re-election for this joke of a member of Congress.