“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. I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”
—Socialist Democrat and Progressive rock star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in response to “60 Minutes” interviewer Anderson Cooper’s question about her many gaffes and mistatements.
Bingo. There it is, the smoking gun. Proof that Ocasio-Cortez is so self-involved and eager to talk that she isn’t paying attention, even to her own party’s narratives and talking points. Proof that she is ethically ignorant. Proof that she cannot be trusted. Proof that she is a charming demagogue whose passionate assertions can’t be believed or trusted. Writes the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake, whose orientation is “Please, please don’t make mistakes like this, because we need you to be successful!”,
“She’s practically saying, ‘Well, maybe I was wrong, but at least my cause is just.’”
She isn’t practically saying that; she is saying that. She’s also saying that the ends justify the means, and if the ends are sufficiently righteous, what’s a little bit of fudging on the facts? This is classic “truthiness,” the term invented by Stephen Colbert to mock conservatives and the Bush Administration in 2005 (he has, oddly, never used the word to tweak Democrats, and won’t use it against Ocasio-Cortez, I guarantee…because, as he has now proven, Colbert has no integrity, and is only interested in advancing an ideology, not in even-handed satire).
Her statement is also an endorsement of the philosophy that the ends justify the means, that misleading the people for their own good is “morally” justifiable (because they can’t be trusted to act rationally if the have the facts), and that she should be trusted to know when misrepresentation is virtuous and when it isn’t.
It is especially damning for Ocasio-Cortez to say this, as it essentially duplicates the attitude the news media has attributed to President Trump. This puts journalists in a bind, for they cannot aggressively pursue the “Trump lies” narrative while the newly anointed “face of the Democratic Party” endorses his methodology. Thus the Post couldn’t get through its reprimand of Ocasio-Cortez without making sure to point out,
“None of this is to compare Ocasio-Cortez’s falsehoods to Trump’s; she’s right that there is no comparison. Trump’s are both exponentially more numerous and more impactful, coming from the president of the United States.”
Baloney. There is a very valid comparison, and while Trump’s falsehoods may be more numerous (so far), the vast, vast majority of them are trivial, or the typical puffery of the salesman he is. Both Trump and Ocasio-Cortez share the trait of stating as fact what they believe, choose to believe or want to believe based on their gut feelings or misunderstood data. In the same interview, for example, the New York Rep pronounced the President a racist. This is just repeating a party talking point. There is no substantive evidence that the President is a racist, nor that he “lies” about “immigrants,” another assertion Ocasio-Cortez made on “60 Minutes.”
Following “60 Minutes” and the resulting criticism, Ocasio-Cortez went on a Twitter rant about how unfair the factcheckers were to be so hard on her. She’s a child, and she’s not going to make it. Her credibility will be so shredded within a year that her influence, except with the completely gullible, will be nil.
Ethics Alarms 
I hope this Facebook exchange gets posted here. I don’t know that I am doing it right, but it is a series of comments about factcheckers and AOC’s responses. The comments to my post are fascinating were they not so depressing.
Oddly enough, I was able to copy and paste this post as a comment to one of the bozos who objected to my comparisons of AOC and Trump. Facebook did not block it, it appears.
jvb
Well, that is weird. My post is still up on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/john.v.burger?__tn__=%2CdlC-R-R&eid=ARDBfHGPL2ROrF1jW4zmNCtmJN-jCzRmAwAfzgab7MsoLABaJ8s31udiCf7K92jNXVRjcYcPkjqdM3K3&hc_ref=ARTR1m2QcwycpWGkbsgrwJCUAGLi_RsPpT5OHEtqfA3qjgbWw6U5yN8aguXKA6KduK4
Clicking the link works to my Facebook page. You will see lots of Rush references and photos of my pooch, Remington.
jvb
Hi John! Your page is only available to friends, so no way to check the post. Bear in mind that Facebook almost always allow YOU to see what you post, and perhaps your friends, but will not distribute it to your friends. Also, as an admin for a business page, I sometimes ban Facebook commenters. Here’s the genius: they can still see their comment, and I can allow their friends to see it. It is, however, expunged from the distributed post, and never seen by anyone else. So the commenter isn’t offended, maybe just wondering why no one ever replied…
Oh. That makes sense.
If Facebook allows me as an admin a tool like that, they certainly have the ability to ban, or choke distribution of anything originating from Ethics Alarms. Their text recognition ability is probably up to date enough so that if you actually retyped one of Jack’s posts, it would recognize it, even without the original metadata, and treat it according to Ethics Alarms rating on their
censorship scale.
Ugh. I thought my Facebook friends were hopeless…
You have no idea. Sheesh. That thread went into Lunacyville quickly.
jvb
Jack, maybe you could begin a new feature called “The Daily Ocasio-Cortez?”
As with Trump’s tweets, it’s too easy, AND repetitious. But she has been so blatantly ethically clueless and prolific that its nice to know she’ll be available on slow days.
In talk radio and air-to-ground combat, that’s known as a “target-rich environment.”
“The Daily OKoz” has a nice ring to it.
Hah. Or “shooting fish in a barrel.”
This seems to be the year of the leftist empty suits. Watch for some of Beto O’Rourke’s comments coming up.
Whew! Now there’s a winning ticket and slogan for 2020: “I’m with Beto and Alexandra!” Oh, wait, she’s not old enough. Maybe she should introduce a law in Congress to change the age requirement for being President. That will solve it!
Lefty doesn’t want to set aside funds to pay for the border wall/barrier/fence.
Why? Medicare for all, free college for all, and the Green New Deal will require what, DEEP 14 figures?
Honestly, who the fuck listens to her and really believes she’s in possession of anything remotely resembling a clue?
I said it before, I’ll say it again: Keep_A_Hot_Mic_In_Her_Face.
Rush Limbaugh had an interesting comment this afternoon (I sometimes listen to him while doing lunchtime errands). Limbaugh was referring to a similar piece by Chris Cillizza over at CNN. Rush speculated that these stories are probably no accident and that they were planted into a compliant media by Dem leadership in order to bring their cute but overly rambunctious puppy to heel.
In other news, an ex-colleague – a guy for whom I once had huge respect – is king-hell in favor of Tennessee Dem Steve Cohen’s idea of abolishing the electoral college or reapportioning electoral votes based on state population. In pointing out WHY all states have two senators, he informed me “I don’t give a damn about what people in South Dakota think. There are only eight states the government should be paying attention to.” Unfortunately, he was dead serious. Depressing.
I’m starting to wonder if maybe this isn’t the long-promised the zombie invasion, in a slightly better looking form.
Hey, I just used the zombie analogy in banning Orrin! Great minds. Of course, the Electoral College isn’t going anywhere, and getting excited about such “reforms” is like getting excited about the prospect of finding the Fountain of Youth.
Democrats in Maine, empowered by a newly-elected long-term D apparatchik as governor and recapture of both chambers of the legislature, have essentially proposed funding that search.
“…There are only eight states the government should be paying attention to.”
There you have it. The tyranny of the mob, coming soon to a nation near you. How does Mr. Stupid think states like Massachusetts or Maine would think of that?
As an aside: which states does he think belong in the Great Eight? If he would denigrate any based upon anything BUT raw population, his opinion is hypocritical as well as stupid.
“exponentially more numerous”
What does that even mean?!
It bothers me more than it should, and I’m the guy who has given up on “begging the question”. Some idiot thought “exponentially increasing” sounded ominous and now every two-bit journalist is using that word incorrectly. This is Gell-Mann Amnesia in a single sentence.
/end rant
Wow, I feel so much better now. 🙂
They forget that you can raise something to a fractional exponent.
Fractional exponential growth asymptotically approachs 1. Now negative exponential growth….
Lol.
Math jokes
Off topic, but a Happy 96th Birthday to Larry Storch, who lit it up as the irrepressible Cpl Randolph Agarn in the ahead-of-its-time-yet-far-too-short-lived kitsch Classic F Troop.
Agreed on all counts. F Troop is an all time favorite, one of the most inspired silly shows of all time. A dying genre: Get Smart, Car 54, I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster, Police Squad…not much in the last 30 years.
Met Storch a few years ago when our local Oldies station brought in some classic TV actors. What a nice guy! He was impressed that I remembered him as Chumley the Walrus from the “Tennessee Tuxedo” cartoons (starring the late Don Adams).
Also a highlight in “The Great Race” as an Old West bandit. And don’t forget the original, pre-film “Ghostbusters,” with Forrest Tucker and a guy in a gorilla suit.
I struggle to understand the kind of thinking that would assert you can care about what is right, without caring what is true.
Perhaps because you’re using the term thinking with extreme caution and you have operational synaptic connectivity?
She is fancying herself a Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth or Martin Luther King Jr, as the standard-issue SJW-type instinctively does, without realizing that she is cut from a very different cloth, and will never be them.
Those guys (and most other courageous actual reformers of past generations) were as interested in “factual correctness” (truth) as they were “being right” because their moral certainty about their social reforms came from a belief system that demanded devotion to both. They also had a basis for their moral mandates other than “it makes me feel superior and smart and stuff, and I like to hear myself talk.”
Cortez is a LARPer, a shallow, selfish phony, appropriating the language and demeanour of a reforming preacher.
Heh!
“Cortez is a LARPer”
After watching AOC dance to a Breakfast Club theme, this gave me a vision of her running around a hotel in makeshift tinfoil armor yelling things like ‘Ray of Enfeeblement’ and ‘Finger of Death!’
I think she really believes this. I think she is a true believer. You need to remember that this has been spouted by Democratic politicians and leftist professors for decades. The difference is that the previous generation knew it wasn’t true, but AOC’s generation has known nothing else.
Remember JFK by Oliver Stone? The argument Oliver Stone and several of the actors made in defending this movie’s use in history classes is that it may not be the way it happened, but it is the way it SHOULD have happened. It may not be the ‘truth’ in the terms that this is what happened, but it would be better for society if it had happened this way, so we should teach that it did. The leftist line is that facts and objective truth are concepts of Western Civilization, we should shape the ‘facts’ to the betterment of society. This attitude is all AOC has known. This is what she has been taught is right by her parents, her public schools, and her university training.
She has been taught that bringing up ‘facts’ is racist.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/at-berkeley-inconvenient-data-are-rejected-as-racist-sexist-hate-facts
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/10/math-racist-university-illinois-professor/
(please note the professor in the story above is on the committee that determines the national math standards)
She has also been taught that the very concept of absolute truth is also racist.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/progressive-college-students-claim-truth-is-racist-in-new-letter
Saw an article the other day about South African mathematicians who claim mathematics is racist.
Translation: “Facts don’t really matter, feelz do. The end.”
Moral preening is now the default look for the Democrats, and shamelessly so. AOC and her fellow Democrats are saying exactly what they think will be popular to their target audience — wealthy liberals, the news media, urban professionals, women, racial minorities and the young.
The intellectual bankruptcy embodied in this statement is peerless. It rejects the intellect in favor of, essentially, anything but. It is an example of the kind of thinking a rational nation would utterly reject as reckless and destructive to the common good.
Which brings me to the ugly conclusion — we deserve her, and the others like her. We have elected a bunch of empty-headed people who are certain they are morally and intellectually superior to the people who put them there, and who are determined to prove it without regards to process, law, tradition, or the world as it is.
AOC is who a too-large percentage of Americans are, or think they are. Look upon the face of your destruction, America — it is young, attractive, utterly ruthless, and is likely to represent the harbinger of an end-stage terminal disease of our country.
“young, attractive, utterly ruthless…”
Gonna be a LOT of good looking corpses (except for the bullet holes) before the socialists win. The heartland objects.
Heh. I feel that.
When do we just accept that complete ignorance of reality is aJulie Pronciple thing with AOC?
It isn’t just her, it is her supporters. They have been taught lies by people who knew they were teaching lies. The students, however, do not know they are lies. The students are then confused and infuriated when they are called to account for the lies they tell and their ‘incompetence’.
I wonder if this is what has happened with polling. Pollsters have skewed the polls for decades to help Democrats get elected. People like to support a winner, so if you can make it look like the Democrat is ahead, more people will pile on. They justified the methods they used as ‘statistically sound’ even though they knew they weren’t. These methods were taught to students, and you can’t say these are here to skew the data for leftist values, so the students don’t know they are lies. When digging into a poll, I found that it was based on the idea that simply polling people (roughly) between the ages of 18 and 24 in Columbus, OH gives you a sample representative of the US as a whole. So, Ohio State students are ‘representative’ of the country? I’m sure the group that pushed this idea knew it was false, but the students that learned this didn’t. Most of the methods are more subtle that that (I hope), but the point is, why can’t we get a poll that accurately reflects public opinion these days? Look at the polls for the 2016 election? Why were they so wrong? Why didn’t the Democrats know the real values (if the polls are intentionally skewed, why couldn’t the Democrats get the real numbers)? I think it is because all the people who knew how to actually conduct a poll are retired or dead. All we have left are the lies.
No doubt she too is a product of an education system under control of people who dramatically want to change America towards a worldview that has consistently failed everywhere it was tried. And, no doubt anyone who supports socialism as an objective is proof that education isn’t working well in America.
”people who dramatically want to change America towards a worldview that has consistently failed everywhere it was tried.”
CHEAP SHOT. Sure, some mistakes were made and the wrong people were in charge ALL the other times. But it’s evolving and the next time should be money!
And why concentrate on the negative? Focus on Socialism’s strong-suit: Population Control!
RE: why polls are wrong
A lot of pollsters employed people who were progressive drones over the past decade. These drones actually berated those they called when the ‘correct’ answers were not given. This was so common many ordinary Americans quit answering polls, or lied to forego the beating then voted how against the progressives resentfully.
Not all the reason polls are wrong, but significant. What I describe here is commonly known outside the Coastal and Urban centers.