Arrogant Ocasio-Cortez Trashes Fact Checkers After They Got Her, So They Brutally Even the Score
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.
“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.
Facts are facts, America. We should care about getting things right. Yet standards of who gets fact-checked, how often + why are unclear.
This is where false equivalency+bias creeps in, allowing climate deniers to be put on par w/scientists, for example.https://t.co/87c6kVzIuI
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 7, 2019
For example, it looks like @PolitiFact has fact-checked Sarah Huckabee Sanders and myself the *same* amount of times: 6.
She’s been serving for almost 2 years. I’ve served 4 days.
Why is she fact-checked so little? Is she adhering to some standard we don’t know about?
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 7, 2019
Or why did @washingtonpost give my confusing tweet on military accounting offsets the same “Pinocchios” as Trump’s flat denial of how many Americans died in Puerto Rico?
These are legitimate questions not intended to attack. Who makes these decisions? How? Is there a rubric?
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 7, 2019
Another question for @politifact: some officials’ statements (ex. Andrew Cuomo) get rated “true” frequently.
I say true things all the time – I’d hope most do. When does Politifact choose to rate true statements?
Is there a guide? I’d be happy to repost if there is.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 7, 2019
I guess the staffers in Ocasio-Cortez’s office can keep the “Number of days since a workplace meltdown” calendar at zero, since it looks like Monday was just as good as Sunday for Ocasio-Cortez.
There’s so much rant here it would be impossible to address it all — and, indeed, some of it is so prima facie absurd that it doesn’t need to be addressed. So let’s start with the most obvious takeaway: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is still minimizing that infamous Pentagon/”Medicare for all” tweet.
Ocasio-Cortez is trying to sign people up for what’s inarguably the largest government usurpation of private American health care in our history, something that would make Obamacare look minnow-like in comparison. To make her case, she took a figure that involved all Pentagon transfers with sloppy accounting — money coming in, money coming out, money simply being moved from one place to another — and presented it as government waste, money that was lost.
The argument was very clear: If you eliminate this waste, you can have “Medicare for all” with virtual fiscal painlessness. Except a quick fact-check on her part would have revealed that the nation has spent $18 trillion on defense since the ratification of the Constitution and the article she was citing made it clear her interpretation was beyond wrong.
As for Ocasio-Cortez’s theme that she is being checked more vigorously than the Trump administration, I’d have a good rhetorical laugh at that, except the WaPo’s fact-checking guru already did — even if it was a bit of a dry one — when he decided to even the score.
And even though it was terse, it was brutal. And it showed, by implication, just how spoiled Ocasio-Cortez has been by the constant adoration of a generally adoring liberal media.
We have fact-checked you twice. We have fact-checked 7,645 Trump claims. –> https://t.co/odthgByvgL
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) January 7, 2019
Well, how about that.
Anyway, a new day is dawning. Will AOC just accept this is going to be a bad week and just grin her way through it, or is she going to dig the hole deeper?
I’d like to think it’s the former. I’m probably wrong.
Oh well. At least I’ll have something to write about tomorrow.
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