Ellison exploits the ignorant

As the Minnesota’s Fifth District representative in Congress, Keith Ellison has a good gig. He’s a hustler who is accustomed to exploiting the ignorance of voters in a one-party district in a town with a one-party newspaper. Ellison has exploited the ignorance of his constituents in lying repeatedly about his personal history, as I tried to show in “Louis Farrakhan’s first congressman.”

Seeking to make himself a player on the national stage, Ellison performed the same act by omission in his recent memoir, as I tried to show in “The Ellison elision.” The Star Tribune even let me put in what Ellison had left out of his memoir in “Keith Ellison remembers to forget.” Ellison was extremely unhappy about that, dunning his supporters with a request for contributions in response to my alleged bigotry. There he went again.

And there he went again yesterday on ABC’s This Week with the Democratic Operative. The Washington Free Beacon caught Ellison trying to palm off George Wallace as a former Republican presidential candidate (video below, about one minute). “We do have the worst Republican nominee since George Wallace,” Ellison proclaimed.

Wallace was of course one in a long line of devout Democratic segregationists. Amazingly, Republican Rep. Tom Cole corrected Ellison without gagging. “Well, first I want to correct my friend. George Wallace was a proud Democrat and ran for the Democratic nomination. It was on that stage down there,” Cole said.

I will just add this. Exploiting the ignorant is an easy habit to get into when you represent Democrats in a one-party town. Like the Democrat at the top of the ticket –the worst Democratic nominee since Barack Obama–one begins to take it as a point of privilege.

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