For once I have to agree with ubiquitous freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Not about her winning a Nobel Prize in physics (even though that award has been handed out to some pretty dubious honorees) but about the strong likelihood that she will be condemned at least for the balance of her political career to wear a scarlet D.
But her predicament is entirely of her own making. She should never have run for, much less been elected to, the job currently entrusted to her, which is above her “pay grade.” This is not to suggest there aren’t other low-intelligence members of Congress but rather that none display it with quite as much frequency.
For example, last Friday she returned to her old job, tending bar for a day, as a show of support for the federal Raise the Wage Act, which abolishes below-minimum wage salaries for tipped workers in New York. The whole idea was pretty half-baked from the start since the catastrophic effects of a $2 minimum wage increase last December for restaurant workers in the Big Apple are already known.
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But Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t content just with backing the wrong pony. She also used her bully pulpit to go off on a tangent about how restaurant workers are sexually harassed and how it is somehow the employer’s fault:
Is this woman for real??? @AOC says it is the employers fault that you “might” get sexu@lly harassed on the subway on your way home.
Liberalism truly is a mental disorder. pic.twitter.com/tW0pDemEl9
— ❥ Tee ?? (@TeeLovesUSA) June 2, 2019
Countless other examples abound, many of them demonstrating her inability to grasp the most rudimentary principles of economics, which she reputedly majored in at Boston University. In April she tweeted this:
Croissants at LaGuardia are going for SEVEN DOLLARS A PIECE ?
Yet some people think getting a whole hour of personal, dedicated human labor for $15 is too expensive??
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 1, 2019
The tweet predictably generated scorn from her critics, one of whom tweeted back:
How come, when I worked as a bartender at a concert arena, a single domestic beer was $11, but you could get an entire 12 pack for $10? I don't get it! ? pic.twitter.com/SHD1Id52zM
— Ashley Rae Goldenberg (@Communism_Kills) April 1, 2019
Ocasio-Cortez compounds her problem by lashing out at those who call out her flubs, even suggesting at one point that there is a vast right-wing conspiracy out to make her look stupid. This came after the rollout statement of her New Green Deal was posted on her website, then rapidly deleted because of the many absurdities it contained. Rather than taking it on the chin and moving on, she insisted that the original text had been “doctored” by someone out to make her look bad.
There’s an old adage that Ocasio-Cortez might want to follow that harks back to her days as a waitress — something about staying out of the kitchen.
