They just can't quit her
When it comes to Ocasio-Cortez, conservatives are either wanking or cranking
© 2018 Mark Dillman used under a Creative Commons license
Conservatives remain caught in the widening gyre of their pretty lady socialist mood swing. The Alexandria Ocasio-Lopez dancing thing, as I mentioned in a previous edition, got the brethren claiming that they WERE SO NOT trying to smear AOC with that video of her Breakfast Club dance from her college days. Fox News even reported that “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dance video spurs false media claims of conservative outrage.” They badly wanted us to know they were not creepily focused on the pretty Puerto Rican girl at all, actually it’s you who were creepily focused on their lack of creepy focus.
But they insisted so stubbornly that, as often happens with the socio-sexually maladroit, their denials became creepier than any confession could be. Take RedState’s story, “The Mystery Of The Conservatives Who Cared About Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s Dance Vide[o].” This thousand-word-plus disavowal of interest was one of a half-dozen recent RedState stories about the freshman Congresswoman, including “An Inconvenient Truth Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez Can’t Dance Around,” “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Lives In A World Of Fact-Free Politics,” “Yes, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Like Trump…And Republicans Better Learn From That,” “WATCH: Whoopi Goldberg Rips Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Over Her Infighting With Democrats,” etc. Maybe AOC can solve the high-rent problem she was famously complaining about by moving into the rent-free pad reserved for her in RedState’s head.
And I must applaud Inquisitr’s Nathan Francis who put it succinctly: “Ben Shapiro is mocking the idea that he and other conservatives are obsessed with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a freshman congresswoman who he has tweeted and written about dozens of times in the last few days.” Here’s one such Shapiro-AOC billet-douche:
Save it, you other Democrat bitches — my boner doesn’t care about your feelings! Then Jim Hoft, who may have gotten his signals from Wingnut Central crossed up, ragged on AOC’s dancing, robbing the movement of yet another wicked burn on liberals.
But that wouldn’t have lasted anyway: the boys were bound to find and seize other occasions to go after her, and they did. Last weekend AOC had the nerve to tell Anderson Cooper that she meant what she said about a 70% marginal tax rate on people who make over $10 million, and that Trump is a racist. The latter sentiment only the White House disputed — maybe because, for his fans, Trump’s racism is a plus — but boy were conservatives flipped out that someone wanted to tax the rich and other people were taking her seriously.
GOP Rep. Steve Scalise lied that Ocasio-Cortez wants “70% of your income,” in which he was joined by Grover Norquist and other idiots, such GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw (or, as Louder With Crowder likes to call him, “the newest GOP superstar”), who tweeted, “What is scandalous is increasing income taxes to 70%. It’s wholly unethical for anyone to work a majority of the year just to give their money to the government.” Back home Crenshaw’s constituents shuddered because thet there Messican gal was a-gonna take near three-quarters of their money and spend it on sharia and who knows what all.
Dumber still is National Review’s house Brit, Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke, who runs through the usual tired rightwing explanations for protecting the assets of their rich contributors: First, lefty ruffians want to unfairly exploit defenseless multimillionaires (“Almost nobody earns ten million dollars per year, which makes this one of those perfect ‘do this to them, not me!’ policies”); next, that the rich will just cheat anyway so it’s hopeless to try and tax them at all (“Most people who make tens of millions of dollars rarely derive the lion’s share of their money from traditional income — and, should such a bracket be added to the books, the few who do would quickly restructure”); then, the non-sequitur: You like European socialism so much, well, European socialists tax their middle classes, so “if the Democratic party wants the United States to be more like its Anglosphere cousins” — because, presumably, that aspiration is the only reason why we’d want to tax the rich — “it needs to stop talking stupidly about ‘the rich,’ and begin making the case for the considerably higher middle-class taxes that will be needed to pay for the considerably higher social spending it covets.”
This is neither what AOC et alia want nor ask for, but that’s what conservatives are much more comfortable arguing with, so Cooke goes on as if that were Ocasio-Cortez’s idea rather than his — “it is tough to tell people that they’ll have to hand over more of their money if they want what you’re telling them they should have,” he sneers at his straw Latina, and says that Democrats are “eventually going to have to come clean” about their secret plan to tax the middle class.
All this was to be expected; even worse in a way was the passive-aggressive mush from neoliberal types like Mark Cuban, who here tries to set the little lady straight with some billionairesplaining:
Don’t you get the feeling that these jet-set, Canada-Goose-clad, private-yoga-trained, has-Malcolm-Gladwell-contact-on-iPhone doofuses — probably the same people who think AOC’s colleague, new Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, went too far calling Trump a motherfucker — have begun to feel, and are fighting like hell to tamp down, an unaccustomed twinge of fear that maybe the kids don’t actually think their market-friendly TED talk hegemony is the least bit cool — and that they share with their conservative brethren an even worse fear-twinge, indeed a prodrome of panic, that they can’t just dismiss these kids because the kids are in fact taking over?
The general media coverage of AOC has been, well, interesting is one word. Whatever the lowliest shitheel on the Right throws out, the media immediately grabs and tries to run with until they realize the absurdity of it. The photo of AOC not wearing rags and a trashbag on her first day in Washington was the start as CNN first gleefully grabbed the meme of "Look! She's not really working class because she owns clothes!," only to belatedly figure out that most people do, indeed, own clothes.
And this extends even to the latest bit. I watch Anderson Cooper tying himself into knots as AOC gently explained to him that, no, a 70% top marginal tax rate would not apply to the average postal worker. Cooper, however, dutifully clung to the "but you're insanely radical!!11!!" script even as AOC undercut the script at every turn.<br>
Much to my dismay, my wife (who gets way too much of her new from NPR), was very upset that AOC wants to raise everyone's taxes to 70%. She knew this because she'd heard it on Morning Edition, where whatever Rightwing trope is making the rounds is duly sanded and polished before being fed to the listeners.<br>
As long as the media is committed to mal-informing America, we're doomed.
Great takedown as usual. So Scandinavia, Germany and democratic Europe are part of some “Anglosphere”? The same Anglosphere the Tories now want to leave? Dan Crenshaw, sporting the pirate look is the usual hate the foreigners, love the racists type, despite the fact that he spent a significant part of his youth growing up in Latin America. He obviously has brains but like virtually all conservatives wallows in the lazy trough of vicious hate spewing. These people are all secretly fearful of AOC and her colleagues because they know that they, the righwing, have no solutions to any of the nation’s problems and don’t even try (we saw that in the last Congress).