Forum screenshots show … the (undisputed) marriage license and … Facebook posts where the legal husband refers to Ilhan’s kids as “nieces” and “nephews.” …. Yet the allegation received lurid play merely based on … [sic] nothing….

So stripped of several gratuitously minimizing descriptors, the quoted statement is obvious nonsense. The play received by the story was based not on “nothing,”but on, wait for it, screenshots of the undisputed marriage license and Facebook posts where IO’s husband refers to her children as is he were their uncle. What part of “smoking gun” does Mr. Brauer not understand?

I am admittedly not a fan of Ms. Omar, who has become the Swiss Army Knife of identity politics. She goes around with her foot perpetually in her mouth while her defenders pick whichever of her demographic inconveniences suits them to mount an ad hominem attack on her critics. She must recognize that, by making herself a public figure, she has chosen to represent all of those demographic groups with which she is so quick to identify. This is the twenty-first century. It matters what Mitt Romney says to donors and what Ms. Omar says to Muslims.

I find the marriage story overblown because I don’t much care what Ms. Omar did along those lines to get admission to the USA. She is the sort of immigrant we want, whether or not she had to cut some corners to get here. But she is a poor representative of her various identities, embodying every stereotype she opposes.

Take the recent “Some people did something” flap. No competent, right-thinking representative politician talks that way. She could have as easily said “A few fanatical extremists committed a terrible crime against humanity, and now we are being held accountable for it as if we all did it.” That’s simply how it’s done, and if Ms. Omar is to be considered a competent politician, she must be assumed to have understood the rhetorical import of her minimizing the affront of 9/11. She has chosen to be conspicuous, but representing all those identities is not an entry-level position. She should be expected not to do it until she can do it skillfully.