If Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., were a conservative, all anyone would be talking about is how uninformed she is. She’d be facing trick questions from reporters designed to expose her lack of knowledge and brutal sketches on “Saturday Night Live” mocking her fitness for office. Instead, SNL fawns over her, while CBS’ “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert – far from making jokes at her expense – eats ice cream with her and asks how little she cares about her critics.
It’s good to be a socialist.
It’s not that there is a lack of material. This week, for example, Ocasio-Cortez declared that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” She’s said that $21 trillion in “Pentagon accounting errors” could pay for most of her massive $32 trillion Medicare-for-all plan – as if there were $21 trillion in unspent tax dollars in a Pentagon vault. She opined that “just last year we gave the military a $700 billion budget increase, which they didn’t even ask for” – unaware, apparently, that the entire Pentagon budget is $716 billion. She wrongly claimed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement “is required to fill 34,000 beds with detainees every single night and that number has only been increasing since 2009” – when ICE is required only to have that number of beds available and that number has stayed flat. She has declared that “unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs” – which is flat untrue. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 6 million to 7 million Americans have two jobs and 148 million have just one.
Those are examples of ignorance. But apparently she is also dishonest. This week, she told Colbert that she has not been able to open a district office yet to handle constituent casework because of the federal government shutdown. “There’s a lot of things we can’t do as freshman members,” she said. “We can’t properly set up our district offices. We can’t get laptops delivered. … It takes the green stuff. And those workers are furloughed.”
That’s wrong. Last September, Congress passed a bill to fund congressional salaries and offices for the coming year. Ocasio-Cortez knows this because, unlike furloughed workers, she is getting paid. The New York Times reports that the three other first-term members from New York have opened district offices. A more likely explanation is that Ocasio-Cortez is spending her time building her national media profile instead of taking care of the constituents who sent her to Washington in the first place.
So where are the articles bemoaning “The incredible, thuggish stupidity of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez”? Where are the journalists trying to trip her up with questions like “Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?” to see if she knows what it is? Nowhere to be found.
To their credit, the fact-checkers have been on the case. PolitiFact gave her unemployment claim a “Pants on Fire” rating, and she is rapidly accumulating a large cache of Washington Post Pinocchios. She told CBS’ “60 Minutes” that “being morally right” is more important than “being precisely, factually … correct.” Apparently, facts matter less as long as you support Big Government.
But facts are crucial, especially when you are proposing the largest increase in government spending in human history. Vox recently added up the cost of all her proposals – from Medicare-for-all, to free college, guaranteed jobs and the “Green New Deal.” The cost was $42.5 trillion over the next decade – more than twice the current national debt. Sorry, you can’t pay for that through Pentagon accounting errors.
It is a testament to America that someone who was working as a bartender a year ago can unseat a 10-term member of Congress and be elected to the House of Representatives. It’s what makes this such an exceptional nation. And it is obvious that she has political talent. But that doesn’t excuse her from the responsibilities as a legislator to learn the facts and serve her constituents. Even supporter Whoopi Goldberg warned her on “The View”: “I would encourage you to sit still for a minute and learn the job.”
That’s good advice. Once people decide you are ignorant, it’s hard to recover – just ask Sarah Palin or Dan Quayle. Of course, they were conservatives, so the standards are different.
Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush.
Twitter: marcthiessen
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