WASHINGTON – If Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, were a conservative, all anyone would be talking about is how uninformed she is. She would be facing trick questions from reporters designed to expose her lack of knowledge, and brutal sketches on “Saturday Night Live” mocking her intelligence and fitness for office. Instead, SNL fawns over her, while CBS’s “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert – far from making jokes at her expense – eats ice cream with her and asks how many “f – s” she gives about her critics.
Boy, it’s good to be a socialist.
It’s not that there is a lack of material. For example, Ocasio-Cortez recently declared that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” She has 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 sitting around in a Pentagon vault.
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. We can’t start doing the work that we were elected here to do. It takes the green stuff. And those workers are furloughed.” That’s wrong. Last September, Congress passed the 2019 Legislative Branch Appropriations bill, which funds 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 managed to open offices in their districts. 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.