Alexandria ocasio-cortez

When my grandmother Masha was liberated by the British Army from the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, she was 19 years old and weighed 83 pounds. It was the last of more than half a dozen camps she would survive before finally being freed. The first camp that she, her mother, and her then-11-year-old sister arrived at was in Estonia. She saw an unfamiliar sight: Jewish women like herself with their heads shaven, wearing strange prison pajamas infested with lice. She once explained to an interviewer from the Jerusalem Post that at the Stutthof concentration camp she had to convince her mother, my namesake, to 'hide in the outhouse during a roll call: exposing the swollen leg to the camp’s savage SS women would have been her mother’s death knell’.

Watching parts of the Watergate hearings again recently, I was struck by just how dry they are as a spectacle. This momentous national occasion, with all its historic consequences, appeared to be conducted with all the torpor of a group of chameleons sunbathing on a tree branch. If you were to compare Alexander P. Butterfield’s restrained, emotionally strangled testimony with Jon Stewart’s showboating appearance before a House Judiciary Committee yesterday, you would think an enormous change in human nature had occurred in the decades between then and now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeQXopJ5U-Q Stewart was attending a hearing for a bill that would protect the health benefits of 9/11 first responders.

Since the release of the Mueller report, with each passing day comes a new and increasingly strident demand to impeach Donald Trump. The New York Times, Washington Post, and various prestige magazines are cluttered with such demands, casting impeachment as an imperative for the survival of American democracy. Mueller might have affirmatively concluded that no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia ever came close to being established, but that hasn’t stopped Democrats and their journalist allies from barreling full-steam ahead down this rabbit hole.

They don’t have jobs, they can’t afford a house, but millennials have one thing going for them: They’ve finally found their Ronnie and Maggie, the political match-up to define their era. British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have held what the latter calls ‘a lovely and wide-reaching’ phone conversation and followed it up with some Twitter gushing about progressiveness and stuff. Quoth Corbyn: https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1092174819154710528?s=21 And the reply: https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1092210825228636161?s=21 One of the benefits of centrism collapsing is that left-leaning politicians no longer sound like human resources consultants.

Love her or hate her, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has proven that she can command a news cycle and use it to her advantage. She has an astute understanding of how not just to capture the attention of audiences, but to keep it. But she wasn’t the first candidate to lean on a knack for getting noticed – and she certainly won’t be the last. Being an ‘attention candidate’ isn’t necessarily a good thing, however. Consider Aaron Schock, the former Republican congressman . His story should stand as a cautionary tale for what happens when a candidate or elected official relies too heavily on attention as a political currency.

When the new class of Congress officially began this month, the Democrats dominated the airwaves — perhaps for the first time in the Trump era. The Democratic rainbow coalition of women were front and center of the public conversation. Many of these freshman congresswomen are young and come from diverse backgrounds. Some of these women support wildly erratic forms of leftism, including socialism. But, despite the silly and dangerous ideas of incoming congresswomen such as Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, they are adored by the media. Such naked identity politics might annoy conservatives, but there is no denying the logic: when the electorate is so diverse, having diverse politicians is effective.

Americans are not obliged to take the advice of a meddling Brit but nonetheless I feel compelled to offer a polite suggestion to my conservative cousins: do not underestimate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Conservatives are in danger of misreading the 2016 election. Americans were not dubious about Hillary Clinton because they disliked the Democratic party half as much as because they disliked Hillary Clinton. The Democrats’ 2016 candidate was extraordinarily shady, extraordinarily inept and extraordinary uncharismatic. Voters had no such qualms with Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and might have no such qualms with future Democratic candidates. These could well include Ocasio-Cortez.

The 116th Congress opened this week with little fanfare in the Senate, where all eyes were on whether there was still some hope a partial government shutdown could be prevented or at least concluded quickly. Things were very different in the House of Representatives, where a change in control led to a lot of children running around and pumping their fists in celebration. I do mean children literally — I’m not trying to characterize the Democrat-controlled House and its 101 new members as juvenile, even if that day one called the president a ‘motherfucker’ (Rashida Tlaib) and another taunted Republicans on Twitter with ‘Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas’ (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who else?).

Socialist know-nothing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the future of the Democrat Party. Nancy Pelosi is its past, but she’s probably its present too despite threats to deny her another Speakership. The Ocasio-Cortez contingent in the party has determined that Nancy Pelosi simply isn’t radical enough. That will be news to many on the American Right for whom she has served as a longtime bête noir and whose strident advocacy of San Francisco values provided fodder for countless Republican campaign ads and fundraising letters. For Republicans she’s a radical who favors amnesty, citizenship, and voting rights for illegal aliens, government funded abortion on demand, and impeaching the president. But in the current Democrat Party she’s a mushy moderate.

I can't actually believe that Democratic ‘It Girl’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a Republican mole, any more than I really believe that Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael What’s-his-name is. But is the idea really so far fetched? Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court seemed to be foundering, buffeted as it was by a tsunami of groundless charges reaching back into his high school days. None was ‘credible,’ pace the talking points of Senators Feinstein, Spartacus, et al. But what sent that narrative into a tail spin was the Julie Swetnick Show, brought to you by the latest casualty of the memory hole, Creepy Porn Lawyer Something Avenatti.

Another woman accuses Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct. A third says she was at multiple parties in the Eighties where women, including herself, were drugged and gang raped by the Supreme Court nominee and his friends. But she kept going back. And never complained until two days before an important Senate vote. And, coincidentally, Christine Blasey Ford’s attorney was her attorney in a sexual harassment suit 10 years ago. And we’re supposed to believe all this. Only the media – ever credulous when it comes to stories about Republican bad behaviour – and hardcore #Resistance types buy it. Unfortunately, even Fox misreports the story when it says that Blasey Ford has four people who will corroborate her allegations. It’s just not true.