If you want to know what happens when you send an over-schooled, undereducated former bartender to Congress, look no farther than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the celebrated democratic socialist who represents New York’s 14th District.
The 14th’s voters, Powerline’s Scott Johnson noted, elected an overgrown child.
She believes her socialist fantasies with the innocence of a little girl who puts her first lost tooth under the pillow, and likewise innocently believes she’s unique and courageous and forward-thinking.
Speaking to her for 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper inadvertently divulged what a shallow mind is at work. All will be well if we stop using fossil fuels, tax the rich at 70 percent, and by the way, President Trump is a racist.
No Oil, High Taxes
“You’re talking about zero carbon emissions,” Cooper noted of her totalitarian Green New Deal, “no use of fossil fuels within 12 years…. How is that possible? Are you talking about everybody having to drive an electric car?”
“That is the goal. It’s ambitious,” the ambitious young socialist admitted. “It’s going to require a lot of rapid change that we don’t even conceive as possible right now. What is the problem with trying to push our technological capacities to the furthest extent possible?”
What those “technological capacities” are she did not explain, but at any rate, a Green New Deal won’t be possible with higher taxes. “Do you have a specific [number] on the tax rate?” Cooper asked.
She’s going after the “tippy tops!”
You look at our tax rates back in the ’60s and when you have a progressive tax rate system. Your tax rate, you know, let’s say, from zero to $75,000 may be ten percent or 15 percent, et cetera. But once you get to, like, the tippy tops — on your 10 millionth dollar— sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent. That doesn’t mean all $10 million are taxed at an extremely high rate, but it means that as you climb up this ladder you should be contributing more.
So Cooper asked about socialism: “When people hear the word socialism, they think Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela. Is that what you have in mind?”
“Of course not,” she laughed. “What we have in mind — and what of my — and my policies most closely resemble what we see in the U.K., in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden.”
So “how,” even Cooper wanted to know, “are you going to pay for all of this?”
She had no answer. After all, “no one asks how we’re gonna pay” for any number of things. Why ask about this?
When Cooper observed that some of her claims are so silly that the Washington Post gave her four Pinocchios, she didn’t concede that she should get her numbers straight. Rather, she earnestly explained, facts don’t matter.
People worried about numbers are “missing the forest for the trees,” the 20-something socialist said. “There’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”
And besides, her mistakes aren’t as important as Trump’s “lying about immigrants.”
Trump’s a Racist
She did not elaborate on what lies Trump has told, but she did explain that he is a you-know-what. “The president certainly didn’t invent racism,” she opined. “But he’s certainly given a voice to it and expanded it and created a platform for those things.”
But is Trump a racist? “Yeah. Yeah. No question,” the budding totalitarian said:
When you look at the words that he uses, which are historic dog whistles of white supremacy. When you look at how he reacted to the Charlottesville incident, where neo-Nazis murdered a woman, versus how he manufactures crises like immigrants seeking legal refuge on our borders, it’s — it’s night and day.
Underestimated … Not
Then Cooper divulged just how deluded she is, noting that some people think she doesn’t “know how the game is played.”
The political ingénue laughed. “I think it’s really great for people to keep thinking that.”
Asked Cooper, “You want folks to underestimate you?”
“Absolutely,” she replied. “That’s how I won my primary.”
Actually, she won her primary because voters overestimated her, just as she overestimates her own powers, as Powerline’s Johnson explained. “She is an idiot’s idiot with a little girl voice that gives expressive form to her thoughts and dreams,” he wrote. “If only she were given absolute power, she could produce the kind of rapid change (to borrow another expression) that has reduced Venezuela to poverty and starvation.”
Photo: Clipart.com
