Shot in the Dark

A For Facts, C+ For Premise

Kevin Williamson on – ahem – “Why Alexandria Ocasio Cortez drives Republicans Crazy”, and I’m gonna stop right there.

She doesn’t “drive anyone crazy”.  She’s a walking, talking testimony to the media’s left-wing bias; Ocasio Cortez actually is as vapid and ignorant as the media would have had you believe Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann were, and much more extreme.

No matter!

Ocasio-Cortez, seen from that point of view, presents Republicans with a lot of things they despise — her far-left politics — wrapped up in a package that they very much want but cannot have. She’s everything they want and everything they hate at the same time: Odi et amo, RNC chairman Ronna Romney McDaniel might well say.

About those politics: Ocasio-Cortez describes herself as a socialist, a declaration mitigated somewhat by the fact that she doesn’t seem to know what the word “socialist” means. She is a reflexive practitioner of identity politics, immediately suggesting that any criticism of her is racist or sexist or both. And she is an unapologetic authoritarian, threatening to abuse congressional subpoena powers to retaliate against Donald Trump Jr. for posting something mean about her on Twitter. An avowedly socialist practitioner of identity politics and social-media bully: that, and not her views on marginal tax rates, is what gets up Republicans’ noses. Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, too, but he’s a grumpy old Muppet from Vermont — a useful cat’s paw to maul Mrs. Clinton, but otherwise old news.

But Williamson notes there’s danger in making her too much the figurehead of Big Left’s “Resistance from Above”:

As a purely tactical matter, Republicans would probably be better off keeping Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer as their leading partisan archnemesis, inasmuch as neither of those candidates can deride the GOP as the party of rich old white folks without inspiring at least a little bit of a giggle.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may personify much of what Republicans despise about the distinctively millennial brand of censorious progressivism that currently dominates the Democratic Party, but, if they were smarter, they’d be grateful for that: If this callow dilettante is the best the other side has to offer, then maybe the Republicans — no strangers to callow dilettantism — still have a chance after all.

She – and her elder sister in entitled identitymongering, Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren – are in that sense gifts to conservatism.  Is the GOP – conservatism’s current vessel – smart enough to know what to do with them?

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13 responses to “A For Facts, C+ For Premise”

  1. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Is the GOP – conservatism’s current vessel – smart enough to know what to do with them?

    It doesn’t matter how smart or deft conservatives are. Countering the overwhelming media control by the left is like pushing on a rope. You can say a lot of things – but other than the conservative base, no one will hear you.

    As much as Trump’s use of Twitter annoys me, it is one channel that seems to get through to the public.

  2. Swiftee Pinochet Avatar
    Swiftee Pinochet

    Although her cohort is too young to remember him, I suspect commie Cortez may be basing her public personna on the Mexican comic actor, Cantinflas.

    Same clueless expression, same leftist champion of the low IQ, uneducated proles by day, patron of haute couture and bon vivant by night. I’m pretty sure the Nobel committee is drawing up the necessary paperwork as we speak.

    Realizing (a bit late) the far left identity politician slot has thus been filled, Warren has given up her claim to exotic ethnicity. She didn’t need it any longer anyway; her student loans are long since paid and her peers in government never went with the gag from the start.

    Now she’s the angry, foul mouthed, entitled twaat male and female millennials hope to be when they grow up. Don’t be surprised if she drops in on Cat Von D for a spot of ink sometime soon.

    Since the current crop of GOP elected can’t muster a solitary testicle between them, and since my gamble on Trump has already paid off handsomely, I’m going to sit back and enjoy the Punch and Judy show.

  3. MacArthur Wheeler Avatar
    MacArthur Wheeler

    It will be worth monitoring the financial disclosure statements of both AOC and Ilhan Omar over the next few years. I’m willing to wager they both advance from $1,000,000.00 by the end of their second terms in congress. They’re both grifters of the first order so don’t expect them to show moderation in their personal accumulation of wealth. Both have the advantage of representing districts where their incumbency is secured so they can fund raise like crazy and then use that money, much as Pelosi does, to support candidates of dubious provenance in other districts.

  4. MacArthur Wheeler Avatar
    MacArthur Wheeler

    “they both advance from less than $100,000.00 personal net worth to more than“

  5. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    If you want a good, long laugh, read Der Spiegel journalist messed with the wrong small town

    The German weekly Der Spiegel sent Claas Relotius, their top reporter and CNN’s Journalist of the Year, to Fergus Falls, Minnesota, to unravel the mystery of why the hicks supported Trump.

    What he came back with is pure fiction and now Mr Relotius is out of a job, exposed as a fraud.

    It was the same with Stephen Glass at The New Republic. Glass and Relotius exploited the ignorance and unsophistication of people who pride themselves on being educated and sophisticated.

    I like to call these people, urban hicks, because they isolate themselves in the hoots and hollers of the big city and know absolutely nothing about the world – yet they pride themselves on their sophistication.

  6. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    It will be interesting to see what happens to Relotius. Job mobility in Germany is not what it is here, and leaving a job in disgrace does not uniformly qualify you for a great position at their liberal think tanks as it does here. He has learned the hard way, I guess, that people in small towns are interested in how they’re portrayed in the media, and that many there also are willing and able to call “BS” on those who slander them. Well done!

  7. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    Worth noting as well is that if a journalist doesn’t “truly matter”, like Dan Rather does, he can even get on the bad side of life here. Jayson Blair, infamous for his fraudulent stories in the NY Times, is now a “life coach” after having gone through a couple of stints of rehab. In other words, nobody that matters will touch him.

  8. Swiftee Pinochet Avatar
    Swiftee Pinochet

    Greg, I read the story and the tone of the piece seemed to suggest that, while the author was upset about the false narritive, what *really* pissed him off was he and his minority leftist community was slandered by being lumped in with rural conservative hicks…it was the personal affront the lies represented; not the lies themselves.

    Also, I have to wonder how a guy who claims to value the give and take with conservative neighbors, he has the balls to say of them:

    You see, we’re definitely not perfect here in Fergus Falls, and many of us feel a lot of responsibility right now, considering that our friends, family and neighbors voted against their own interests in 2016.

    I don’t live in Fergus Falls, but as a small town Rube, I think I can speak for Ol Jake’s neighbors when I suggest he go f*ck himself.

  9. Swiftee Pinochet Avatar
    Swiftee Pinochet

    “…it was the personal affront to his sense of superiority the lies represented…”

    FTFM

  10. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Swiftee, I caught that tone too, but hey, it is Medium.com that we are talking about here. Medium is a medium for people who spent $90,000 to get a journalism degree to save the world but now can only self-publish and by God, they aren’t going to do that on WordPress because of all the peasants that post there.

    But frankly, I am good with small town liberals. They are kinda like snail-darters, you got to protect the few that remain.

    You know….. I couldn’t think of a better case for diversity. I mean like the real intellectual diversity kind. Rather than a newsroom dominated by white liberals, black liberals, asian liberals, gay liberal and trans liberal (all women of course), a real conservative might just say, “Uh, something stinks about that story.”

  11. Swiftee Pinochet Avatar
    Swiftee Pinochet

    I couldn’t think of a better case for diversity. I mean like the real intellectual diversity kind.

    I understand your point, but do you really want to be around people who genuinely believe they know more about what’s in your best interest than you?

    It’s not impossible to de-program a reprobate, but only once they are isolated from the continued contamination of their ilk.

    Remember; liberalism is a disease. And it’s highly contiguous.

  12. Emery Avatar
    Emery

    Cortez beat a Democrat to win office. Let me know when she can beat a Republican to win office.

  13. bikebubba Avatar
    bikebubba

    Technically, Ocasio-Cortez beat Anthony Pappas in the general election, Emery. However, safe district, and Pappas didn’t actually campaign.

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