Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, our favorite socialist from the Bronx, hasn’t been having the best of weeks. It’s only Tuesday and she’s already had a televised disaster and a Twitter meltdown.
It began with an interview that aired Sunday on “60 Minutes.” Asked how her patently absurd “Green New Deal” was going to be paid for, Ocasio-Cortez responded that a 70 percent marginal tax rate would be levied on the very wealthy.
This didn’t go over so well, nor did Ocasio-Cortez’s response to House Majority Whip Steve Scalise that Republicans are all super-dumb for (allegedly) not knowing what marginal tax rates were. This didn’t even address why high marginal tax rates still retard entrepreneurialism and hurt those who don’t actually pay them, but whatever.
I’m not going to sit here and fact check her, because apparently, she doesn’t very much like fact-checking.
See, that was another big problem with Ocasio-Cortez’s interview. When “60 Minutes” correspondent Anderson Cooper confronted her about her woefully inept suggestion that $21 trillion in poor Pentagon accounting could be used to fund most of “Medicare for all,” he pointed out that The Washington Post fact-checkers gave her “four Pinocchios” — indicating a whopper of a lie.
I’m not going to sit here and fact check her, because apparently, she doesn’t very much like fact-checking.
See, that was another big problem with Ocasio-Cortez’s interview. When “60 Minutes” correspondent Anderson Cooper confronted her about her woefully inept suggestion that $21 trillion in poor Pentagon accounting could be used to fund most of “Medicare for all,” he pointed out that The Washington Post fact-checkers gave her “four Pinocchios” — indicating a whopper of a lie.
“If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees,” Ocasio-Cortez shot back. “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”
Except, as The Post pointed out after the interview aired, that really wasn’t what was being questioned.
“The first problem here is that Ocasio-Cortez is really minimizing her falsehoods,” the Monday article by Aaron Blake read. “Four Pinocchios is not a claim that Glenn Kessler and The Post’s Fact Checker team give out for bungling the ‘semantics’ of something. It’s when something is a blatant falsehood. It’s the worst rating you can get for a singular claim.”
He also noted “that $21 trillion estimate isn’t necessarily waste; it’s just sloppily accounted for, according to that study. It’s also not just money the Pentagon spends; it includes money coming into the Pentagon. And that $32 trillion price tag is an estimate for the first 10 years of Medicare-for-all, while the Pentagon number accounts for a 17-year period. Ocasio-Cortez’s numbers weren’t just wrong on the margins; her conclusion made no logical sense in light of the actual facts.”
There were other articles in this vein, and you know what that meant: It was time for a veritable Nor’easter of a Tweetstorm from Ocasio-Cortez.
Read more HERE
