Marc A. Thiessen: If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Were a Conservative

If Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., 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. This week, for example, Ocasio-Cortez 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. She opined that “just last year we gave the military a $700 billion dollar budget increase, which they didn’t even ask for” — unaware, apparently, that the entire Pentagon budget is $716 billion. She wrongly claimed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement “is required to fill 34,000 beds with detainees every single night and that number has only been increasing since 2009” — when ICE is required only to have that number of beds available and that number has remained flat. She has declared that “unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs” — which is flat untrue. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are only 6 million to 7 million Americans with two jobs and 148 million with just one.

More