This new year is not even a month old, and already I feel like I’m six months behind on mocking the boatload of ridiculous goofballs who are so far infesting 2019.
To start with, I have four thoughts about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And I know what you’re thinking: that may be a half dozen more thoughts than she has, about anything at all.
First, I understand the impulse behind the “AOC” moniker. Because I totally agree – with all right-thinking Americans – that saying “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” is a colossal waste of syllables. I get it — “LBJ” and “JFK” were acceptable shortcuts – but I don’t like it.
It’s one thing for an ambitious and bombastic rapper to call himself the Notorious BIG. It’s another thing for sad, leftist fan-boys and fan-girls to call ancient far-left justice Ginsburg “RBG.” And even a third, more ridiculous thing to call the ex-bartender AOC.
In fact — if you’ll allow me the first rambling diversion of 2019 — I’m not thrilled with extra names, either. John Wayne… that’s a fine cowboy actor. But John Wayne Gacy was terrible. As was Lee Harvey Oswald, and Henry Lee Lucas. Jerry Lewis did some decent work with Dino, but Jerry Lee Lewis is the kind of guy who’ll elope with his 13-year old cousin.
John Booth, he’s a guy you can play poker or golf with. But John Wilkes Booth? That’s a homicidal Democrat who’ll kill a Republican president who just freed the slaves.
Come to think of it, one-namers are usually pretty unstable, too: Cher, Madonna, Prince. And don’t get me started on name-repeaters like Sirhan Sirhan, or Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
Where was I? Oh yeah. She-Guevara and her cutesy initials nickname.
Ugh. I guess I’ll end up referring to her as AOC. But I’d like CO nation to know that when I use those letters, I’ll be thinking, “Annoying, Obtuse & Callow.”
Second, I initially agreed with whoever it was who said that AOC was the left’s Sarah Palin. That comparison had a ring of truth, as both are attractive, female pols who burst on the national scene suddenly, and who soon proved themselves to be gaffe prone, and less than the deepest of thinkers.
But the more I thought about it, I realized that that comparison gives AOC too much credit, and Palin too little. Whatever else you think of Palin, she paid some political dues before her national debut; she entered politics by getting elected to a city council, and then won a mayoral race, and then became a state Governor, before McCain picked her as his VP running mate. Sure, she’s not exactly Disraeli when it comes to brilliant public speaking, but some of her most famous gaffes were actually invented by Tina Fey, and the rest were picked up on and emphasized by a relentlessly hostile media.
Compare that to AOC, whose entire pre-election cv comprised a brief role as “hot dancer #4” in a rooftop video shot during college, and a stint as a bartender. Reports that she was less than a world-class mixologist cannot be confirmed, though anecdotally, if you ordered a rum and coke from her you were equally likely to get a tequila and hydrogen peroxide, or a gin and rubbing alcohol.
On the other hand, as a political thinker, she makes a hell of a bartender.
Third, it’s ironic to me that leftists have flocked to her at least in large part for the most anti-feminist of reasons: because she is young and attractive. After all, is she saying anything that Bernie Sanders isn’t? Or that Hugo Chavez didn’t? Or that the grizzled guy with the hygiene issue and the methadone habit at your local library who talks to himself isn’t?
No. But those cheekbones, and that red lipstick! I see her dancing in that rooftop video, and I find myself thinking, “Maybe a 70% top tax rate isn’t so bad. I mean, look at her little black skirt…” Then my wife clouts me across the back of my head, and I come back to my senses.
I think Ogden Nash said it best: “It’s always tempting to impute/Unlikely virtues to the cute.”
And here’s a sobering thought for those who are beguiled by her fresh face: Ashley Judd and Alyssa Milano were both pretty attractive not that long ago. But their bilious thoughts seem to be seeping to the surface, and transforming them into haggard, aged-before-their-time harpies who are becoming as unpleasant on the outside as they are on the inside.
Fourth, Annoying-OC is a potent combination of someone who thinks stupid thoughts, and then says them stupidly. In her case, she’s got a teenie/valley-girl delivery that the MSM has somehow managed not to notice.
In recent interviews, she made Ta-nehisi (gesundheit) Coates, a whitey-hating African-American pseudo-intellectual look like Immanuel Kant, and she made Anderson Cooper look reasonable. She sprinkles “like” into her sentences, and she talks about people being at the “tippy top” of income earners. She whined about how unfair it was to get too concerned with being “factually and precisely, semantically correct,” when we should be concerned with being “morally right.”
Because when I’m looking for moral instruction, I skip Aquinas and Augustine and Christ, and look for a youngster who can’t get a drink order straight.
Speaking of not being a slave to factual, precise correctness, in one recent tweet, she alluded to $22 trillion in military spending that “could not be traced, documented or explained.” Some pedantic critic pointed out that that’s more money than the military has spent from the time of George Washington to George W. But I guess he’s morally wrong.
There are so many things that she needs to – but cannot – explain. Such as how we can possibly go to 100% non-polluting cars within 10 years. And where she would get the $32 trillion required to pay for her Medicare-for-all proposal for only one decade. And why table 2 ordered a pitcher of Bud Light, but she gave them a bottle of liquid soap and a Pez dispenser.
She complained about the way Trump “manufactures crises” — I give her a point for getting the plural of “crisis” right, but deduct a point for parroting a stale leftist talking point – but within two weeks made news by announcing that the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t stop climate manbearpig. Also, people in Alabama have ringworm because the government hasn’t taken over healthcare. Stupid Trump!
But AOC is not the only mockable lefty out there. Not when Nancy Pelosi is doddering around the House.
My favorite moment so far this year was when Trump waited until the Dem leadership and their entourage were on buses heading for the airport for the greatest vacation getaway ever, and then he said that they couldn’t use the airplanes because of the government shutdown.
Ouch! If Nancy’s withered head didn’t contain enough Botox to kill a former-first-lady-sized Clydesdale, I’m sure she would have had a very angry expression on her almost lifelike face.
As part of my “Look on the bright side for 2019” resolution, I feel compelled to point out that one stop on the Dems’ itinerary was to have been Egypt, and that could have been a disaster. Because if Pelosi had visited the pyramids and some locals had seen her, there was a very real risk of a panicked stampede, among cries of, “The curse is alive! Flee! The mummy walks among us!”
My second-favorite moment of the year is a tie between Chuck-and-Nancy’s disastrous PR debacle/American Gothic recreation as they woodenly responded to Trump’s wall speech, and Lizzie Warren’s catastrophic home video (#wemustneverstopmockingher).
In a “what was she thinking?” moment, Warren followed in the footsteps of the hip kids these days by attempting a selfie video. The whole thing was artificial and painful, but the best moment was when the highly educated Paleface Powhatan attempted a white working-class accent, saying, “I think I’m a gonna get me a beer.”
On the bright side, she did manage to open and drink from the bottle without breaking it and accidentally stabbing herself in the neck with the jagged edge and then covering the camera with arterial spray before bleeding out on the floor.
On the other hand, not since another phony old white lady (CAW CAW) attempted a black accent (“Ah don’t feel no ways tah-rd, I come too fa-uhr…”) has an ethnic group been so defamed by an outsider.
I feel terrible for American Indians right now. I don’t know which is worse: Liz Warren pretending to be one of them, or the fact that that creepy old non-Vietnam vet fraud who slandered the Kentucky high school kids at the March for Life IS one of them.
Martin Simpson 