NBC News last night went all in for the identity politics advocacy, highlighting the numbers of women elected to the new incoming House, which was won by the Democrats. The idea of course was to paint Republicans by implication as racist and sexist, and promote Democrats as the only party of 'inclusion.'

It's drivel - and with NBC's exclusion of Southern California's first Korean-American congresswoman, Young Kim, it was obviously a selectively edited report.

Young's problem, see, is that she's a Republican who defeated a Democrat, and that doesn't quite fit the "narrative." So despite being the first Korean-American congresswoman, she got left out of the story. Take a gander at the report:

The Associated Press reports that as of yesterday at 12:05 p.m., and with 100% of the ballots counted, Kim beat her competitor, Gil Cisneros, 51.3% to 48.7%, taking 76,956 votes to her opponent's 73,077. The New York Times reports the same. That pretty well gave NBC time to include her in.

Nope, no coverage. As the Stalinists did it, she's a "non-person."

And that's rather disgusting. Most Republicans don't play the identity politics game, and that includes the conservative Kim, given that she won the election based on her ideas, not her femininity let alone race. But if that's the game NBC wants to play, she belongs in the bunch. Yet she didn't make the cut.

Note that she didn't even win in a Korean- or even Asian-majority district. She won in California's District 39, which has as many Latinos as it does Asians, each group amounting to about one quarter of her electorate. Vacated by well-loved GOP congressman Ed Royce, it includes Orange County, Los Angeles County and San Bernardino County, with lots and lots of immigrants from all over (the kind who set up businesses, buy homes, and make their kids do their homework) as well as Reagan country conservatives. Kim, who served as chief of staff by Royce and who got his hearty endorsement, knew the district well.

Her opponent, by contrast, was a well-known machine pol of the Highway 710 corridor's "Latino mafia," who moved to the district only last year, presumably to run for the seat. He was best known as the guy who somehow won a $266 million "Megamillions" lottery in 2010, and was a creature of the Sacramento power structure with its "illegals first" philosophy. He had both political clout and a lot of bucks, and he'd been around. You can see why people wouldn't want to vote for him, even outside his being a Democrat.

Other narratives Kim has blown apart is that Orange County is going blue because of Asian immigrants. No, and no, on both fronts.

This isn't the only press coverage that seeks to downplay what Kim has accomplished. The Los Angeles Times reports that her 51.3%-48.7% victory might just be too narrow to count as a victory, which is an odd thing to say, given the AP report, and the happy victory pictures in the Korean press, as well as the Times' insistence that Democrat Katie Porter beat Republican Steve Knight by almost the same victory margin. Apparently, such a margin is only a victory if a Democrat does it. The Korean press is hailing the victory as "historic."

That's not a victory?

That the press doesn't seem to want to report it is also a little disturbing, given the political machinations Cisneros has been known to engage in. Here the Washington Free Beacon describes how Cisneros uses his money to buy power:

Since that time, Cisneros and his wife have set up a philanthropic foundation that has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to various charities across the country. In 2016 alone, the foundations doled out, among many other donations, $100,000 to the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication; $100,000 to the Congressional Hispanic Fund; and $50,000 to the George Washington University to pay for a "Cisneros Institute Senior Fellow Fund."

Federal Election Commission records show that Cisneros has loaned his campaign for Congress $8.8 million and contributed $52,000 to it while collecting another $1.9 million in contributions from supporters.

Cisneros's frustration over being repeatedly asked for donations from other Democratic candidates and causes was a factor in a #MeToo scandal that plagued his campaign for months. Melissa Fazli, a Democrat running for the California state Assembly, said he expressed frustration about her request for a political donation to her campaign back in February and then made inappropriate remarks.

She went public with her complaints about Cisneros in May, accusing him of asking her in response to her request for a donation, "Well, what are you going to do for me?" in a suggestive manner that made her believe he was requesting that she have sex with him in exchange for $4,400 political donation. During a previous encounter at state Democratic convention in February, Fazli said Cisneros asked if he could go back to her hotel room while they chatted outside a hotel elevator late in the evening.

In early October Fazli withdrew her complaint about Cisneros after what she described as months of pressure from other members of the Democratic Party to do so. Fazli said she and Cisneros sat down together to discuss the issue and he apologized to her and both agreed to a ceasefire on the issue and that she would withdraw her sexual harassment complaint.

Bigfoot donors always have lots of power right there. Uses money to buy influence? Check. Uses money to make problems go away? Check. Enough money to get the Democrats to take his side and use their muscle to defend him while lesser lights go crashing down for the same sort of sex-harrassment bahavior? Check. But unlike Harvey Weinstein, who used his money to buy influence and make sex-harrassment problems go away, Cisneros seems to have had even more political influence with his money, because he able to get a credible sex harassment claim dismissed as a "misunderstanding." And what a coincidence, he has a lot of money for Democrats.

Is the press trying to minimize Kim's victory based on that kind of influence? Call me paranoid, but look how Cisneros does business: Is he going to accept a defeat from an Asian-American woman? By that narrow margin after all the money he spent? Are some "found" ballots going to be found, and all of them go in Cisneros' direction? Somehow that doesn't look right and that could explain why the Democrat-aligned press (but not the ethnic or overseas press) just seems to want to make her go away.

Now we see the press studiously ignoring the woman, left off the Year of the Woman coverage, and all because she's inconvenient to the narrative and might just be forced to go away. Let's hope it doesn't come to this.

Correction: NBC, not CBS, produced the report in question.

Image credit: Arirang News screengrabs