Is there a doctor in the house? Newly minted Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to think so. After the rollout statement of her New Green Deal was posted on her website, then rapidly deleted, she claimed that the original text had been “doctored” by someone out to make her look bad. The seeming mystery of how a phony blog entry purporting to detail her “Green New Deal” proposal had found its way onto to her website was explained two days later by AOC’s Chief of Staff Saikat Chakrabarti, who tweeted:
We did this in collaboration with a bunch of groups and offices over the course of the last month. As a part of that process, there were multiple iterations, brainstorming docs, FAQs, etc. that we shared. Some of these early drafts got leaked.
— Saikat Chakrabarti (@saikatc) February 9, 2019
Shortly after that, Chakrabarti introduced new confusion, tweeting:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
There separately IS a doctored FAQ floating around. And an early draft of a FAQ that was clearly unfinished and that doesn’t represent the GND resolution got published to the website by mistake (idea was to wait for launch, monitor q’s, and rewrite that FAQ before publishing).
— Saikat Chakrabarti (@saikatc) February 9, 2019
Expect to see more of this as Ocasio-Cortez moves into her second month in Congress. She is no stranger to the dog-ate-my-homework excuse that her policy statements are being “doctored,” obviously be her detractors on the Right. She offered up the same rationalization last month when she was challenged on unseemly comments she had made in July regarding the Israeli “occupation of Palestine.” Back then in an interview with PBS, she said:
I also think that what people are starting to see at least in the occupation of Palestine is just an increasing crisis of humanitarian condition. And that to me is just where I tend to come from on this issue.
Her explanation now?
The ‘Firing Line’ [interview got] doctored and then the doctored video was the one that ended up on Fox News, and then, like, everyone just sees the doctored version instead of the actual exchange.
But as The Daily Caller’s Molly Price notes:
Days after the interview aired, conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey created a mock interview where she juxtaposed herself asking questions against Ocasio-Cortez’s answers from the Firing Line interview.
Stuckey defended the satirical interview, but Ocasio-Cortez alleged that Republicans were faking videos of her comments because they were afraid of her and “can’t deal with reality.”
Ocasio-Cortez specifically claimed her comments about Israel were doctored. … However, the Stuckey’s parody interview does not mention either Israel nor Palestine. Those comments only appear in the original “Firing Line” interview.
