Inside the alternate reality of AOC
Ramblings on CNN out of (far) left field
WHY did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez run for Congress against a liberal Democrat, Joseph Crowley? Well, as she told CNN’s Dana Bash in an hourlong (!) interview Monday night on CNN, AOC lives in an imaginary world where people have to choose between eating and filling their prescriptions. (Has she been to The Bronx? The average woman weighs 191 pounds there.) Never mind that for the last half-century, poor people have gotten their grub on the house (food stamps) and their meds taken care of (Medicaid). She believes her presence in Congress was the crucial difference-maker in these nonexistent people’s lives. Hence, her nuking of Crowley, who . . . would have voted the same way she has voted on everything.
Now AOC apparently has her eye on another fellow Democrat who votes exactly the same way she would on everything: Chuck Schumer. He’s up for re-election next year. Would she run against him in the Democratic primary? Bash asked. AOC laughed heartily, threw out heaps of meaningless words (“I do not look at things and I do not set my course positionally . . . I make decisions based on what I think our people need or what our community needs . . . I really do not attempt to make these kinds of decisions out of a sense of personal ambition”) before wrapping up with, “So yeah, I don’t know; it’s no comment on it.”
Bash had previously noted that AOC is “a target of scorn and criticism, even within her own party.” Well, if you don’t want that, maybe don’t threaten to knock out your own party’s lead senator?
AOC must be the only member of Congress whom CNN considers worthy of an entire hour in prime time. Don’t hold your breath waiting for an hour in prime time with Steny Hoyer. But then again, she’s the only one (apparently) that has inspired a sub-sub-sub genre of TikTok teens lip-synching to one of her speeches while putting on lipstick.
Bash and AOC spent quite a bit of time on AOC’s makeup routine, which was refreshing, in a way; not for her, the baggy Hillary Clinton pantsuits. She’s a woman and she doesn’t hide it. (For the interview, she wore a black sheath dress that showed off her legs, although to be fair to Hillary Clinton, if Madame Cankles did that, it would probably cause sudden-onset mass blindness.)
As always with CNN programming, there was a lot of discussion of what’s on Fox News, and Bash said, “Let’s just talk turkey — how much do you think is that you are an attractive young woman?” Wait, that’s talking turkey? I thought AOC being an admitted socialist was talking turkey. Are her beliefs not fair game?
But, no, both Bash and AOC pretended Fox has a problem with pretty women. (Have they looked at Fox? Pretty women seem to do OK there.) AOC at first tried to sound like a Womxn’s Studies seminar leader (“I think that it’s really fascinating . . . It reveals a lot about the subconscious of the folks that are crafting these narratives . . . about women or about people of color”) but then dropped all the wouldn’ t-this-be-an-interesting thesis talk and basically accused Fox of trying to get her killed. She said that during the Jan. 6 riot, when she was convinced she was going to be raped and murdered, she noted “how direct the through line is between right-wing targeting on TV and how much that is a driver of very real, serious threats.”
Apparently, everything Fox says about her is just a matter of them not understanding all the far-left stuff she says. “I think the thing that is more impactful is not necessarily about being hated but about being misunderstood,” she said, adding that Fox “just churns out intentional misperception to generate that hate.” And what are those misperceptions? “Just thinking that I’m rash, unintelligent, and that I intend to do harm.”
Well, AOC is a fan of the world’s worst extant idea, socialism, and a proponent of crackpot Modern Monetary Theory, which essentially says that if the government wants to fund stuff, it should just print more money, without limit. Even fellow far-left economics major Paul Krugman has said this theory “seems just obviously indefensible,” notes that it would “lead to hyperinflation” (which gave us Nazism) and said its “claims that fundamental principles of logic lead to a worldview that only fools would fail to understand has a sort of eerie resemblance to John Galt’s speech in ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ ”
If you know Paul Krugman, that’s basically the sickest burn he could possibly lob in AOC’s general direction. It’s the Nobel laureate’s version of the boss from “The Devil Wears Prada” accusing you of wearing a sweater from the Gap.
One admission, though, I really enjoyed. “I think that femininity has a tremendous amount of power and influence,” Ocasio-Cortez noted. “I think that there is as much power in femininity as there is in masculinity.”
No kidding. Sorry about your dream of appearing on the cover of Vogue, Steny Hoyer. I thank the congresswoman for admitting that she leverages femininity to the max. Now can we stop pretending young women are helpless victims of The Patriarchy and are well aware of how to play the game to their own advantage?