El-Sayed retells his beard confrontation — somehow forgets the smashed vodka bottle

BS BULLETIN:

Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed recently retold a story about confronting a Muslim gas-station clerk who criticized the length of his beard.
El-Sayed described grabbing a bottle of vodka and telling the clerk, “You can’t sell it” — but ended the latest version of the story there.
That’s interesting because when El-Sayed told the same story on a podcast in May, he added one memorable detail: “So, I smashed it on the ground and walked out.”

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has apparently discovered the abridged edition of one of his own stories.

The Democratic nominee recently told supporters about an encounter he says occurred at a Detroit gas station after he became director of the city’s health department in 2015.

According to El-Sayed, the clerk recognized that he was Muslim and questioned whether his beard was long enough.

El-Sayed said he went to the back of the store, grabbed a fifth of vodka and brought it to the counter.

The clerk told him he couldn’t buy it.

El-Sayed replied:

“Habibi, you can’t sell it.”

And that’s where the latest telling ended.

There was just one missing scene.

The bottle hitting the floor.

When El-Sayed told the same story during a May appearance on the “Intellectually Petty” podcast, he described what happened next.

After the clerk told him he couldn’t buy the vodka, El-Sayed said he responded that the clerk couldn’t sell it.

“So, I smashed it on the ground and walked out,” El-Sayed said in that earlier telling.

That’s a fairly substantial detail to lose between May and September.

The incident resurfaced during Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary and prompted criticism from Republicans.

When Fox News sought comment from El-Sayed’s campaign in May about the bottle-smashing story, his campaign did not specifically address the destruction of the bottle.

Instead, campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner said El-Sayed was “angry on behalf of the people” and contrasted him with President Donald Trump.

El-Sayed has since won the Democratic nomination and is facing Republican Mike Rogers for Michigan’s open Senate seat. The contest will help determine control of the chamber.

The vodka story is resurfacing while El-Sayed is already dealing with several other controversies from his past statements and political associations.

Last weekend, he apologized to Michigan’s Jewish Democratic Caucus for remarks he made after the March attack on Temple Israel outside Detroit.

El-Sayed had said “hurt people hurt people” while discussing the attack and the assailant’s loss of relatives in an Israeli airstrike. Critics accused him of appearing to rationalize the attack.

El-Sayed said his intention was to provide context, not justification, and apologized to anyone hurt by his remarks.

Separately, old social-media posts have continued resurfacing during the campaign, including posts about policing and 9/11 that El-Sayed had deleted before entering the Senate race.

But the gas-station story presents a simpler problem.

El-Sayed isn’t being confronted with somebody else’s version of events.

He’s being confronted with his own.

May Abdul told the audience he smashed the bottle.

September Abdul stopped the story one sentence earlier.

MY QUICK TAKE

Forget politics for a second.

I’m fascinated by the editing.

Version one: Guy insults my beard. I grab his vodka. SMASH. I walk out.

Version two: Guy insults my beard. I grab his vodka. I make a clever remark. THE END.

That’s not shortening a story. That’s removing the part where somebody might ask, “Wait — who paid for the vodka?”

And there’s an old rule that applies very nicely here: when you’re telling a story about yourself to demonstrate your character, be careful which version of your character you put on tape.

Unfortunately for El-Sayed, both versions are on tape.