You have to hand it to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA). She somehow seems to know exactly the wrong thing to say at any given point. She has a long history of controversial comments, perhaps most infamously when she encouraged people to get up in the face of Trump officials and “push back.”

But she stepped in it, big time, recently in an encounter with homeless people in Los Angeles. Then she made it even worse with an attempt to cover up her response.

The nonprofit advocacy group Fathers and Mothers Who Care was holding an event in South Los Angeles which was meant to help homeless people get emergency shelter. But hundreds of homeless people were misled into believing that Section 8 housing vouchers would be given out at the event.

Waters was present at the event and when the staff started to get overwhelmed, Waters told the homeless crowd, “I want everybody to go home.” That’s when they started to get angry at her cluelessness. “We don’t got no home, that’s why we’re here!” one person retorted. “What home we gonna go to?”

Warning for graphic language:

LA and California keep voting for trash and this is the result you get… Mad Maxine Waters tells homeless people to go home… Pelosi does nothing for then in San Francisco, and y’all keep voting for them. Y’all are proven idiots LOL pic.twitter.com/iQmKRMOjQB

— Bryan McNally (@BryanDMcNally) March 31, 2022

Waters then laughed and said that nothing more was going to happen there today. She said that her office was going to follow up. But then she was pressed by someone from the local non-profit who said that they’d tried to get a response from her office but that they were failing in the effort and Waters needed to know that. That’s when Waters flipped out and threw an “f-bomb.” “Excuse me, there’s nobody in Washington who works for their people any f**king harder than I do,” she said. “I don’t want to hear this. No, no, no.”

One of the homeless people, Joyce Burnett told the LA Times how frustrating the process was.

“Maxine Waters was here, and she said to come back Tuesday with our paperwork filled out,” Burnett said. “I have it, everything they asked for. But every time we get near the front of the line, they shut the door. They opened the door about 20 minutes ago and said they’re not servicing anyone else today.”

When reporter Connor Sheets of the Los Angeles Times contacted Waters about the incident, he said that she warned him not to do the story.

“You’ll hurt yourself and the community trying to put this together without background,” she told Sheets, according to the report. “I don’t want you to start trying to write it, you won’t understand it.”

Blanca Jiminez, Waters’ district director, provided a video of local TV with glowing coverage of Waters at the event.

100s of people were misinformed & lined up thinking housing vouchers were being handed out today. Congresswoman Maxine Waters noticed the crowd and stopped by to give them the real information about the emergency housing vouchers and help out. @RepMaxineWaters @MaxineWaters @ABC7 pic.twitter.com/LYEs5Fq8gO

— Ashley Mackey (@abc7ashley) March 25, 2022

That local TV coverage left out all the negative interaction and just praised Waters. No wonder they wanted that to be the takeaway. But even in providing that, Jiminez added something that was also insulting under the circumstances. “Someone shared this photo with the office,” Jimenez told the LA Times. “Isn’t she brave?” Was that suggesting that Waters had something to fear from the homeless people? Because that’s sure what it sounded like. And once again, it showed the priorities — Waters is more concerned about how she looked in this incident than about the concerns of the homeless that she purports to care about. She wanted the media to run with the favorable report and how dare they have a different take (namely, the truth)? That has to be shut down and suppressed. What does she mean by saying, “You’ll hurt yourself” to the reporter and why is she trying to threaten a reporter? She owes everyone in this incident an apology and it’s long-since time that she retired, so the people can have an effective advocate.

Good for the reporter and the LA Times for standing up to that threat, and running the story anyway.