It’s pretty impressive of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, playing the victim card in a fight she started.
The flap arises from the recent House passage of the Senate’s emergency border-funding bill, without voting on lefty-favored amendments. AOC and three other radical freshmen women (Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley) voted against it — and AOC’s office started smearing the moderates who’d demanded action.
Specifically, AOC Chief of Staff Saikat Chakrabarti (in a since-deleted tweet) accused such Democrats of propping up a system that “fuels a racist ideology.”
That prompted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to hold a closed-door conference meeting where she warned, “You got a complaint? You come talk to me about it. But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is OK.”
She also spoke to The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, noting of AOC & Co.: “All of these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world . . . But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people, and that’s how many votes they got.”
Whereupon AOC whined to The Washington Post about Pelosi’s “explicit singling out of new elected women of color.”
Hello? The speaker was “singling out” the four members who were playing this specific game, and waxing indignant that other Democrats listen to their own constituents.
More, AOC also told CNN of the “singling out”: “Knowing the media environment that we’re operating in, knowing the amount of death threats that we get, knowing the amount of concentration of attention, I think it’s just worth asking why.”
Death threats are contemptible (as is the grotesque vulgarity of far too much internet commentary on AOC), but getting them doesn’t mean no one can criticize you, and it certainly doesn’t mean Pelosi’s comments invite such threats.
By the way: We’d bet that Pelosi received her first death threat while AOC was still in diapers.
On top of all this, AOC and her Justice Democrats allies (Chakrabarti co-founded the group, which actually recruited her to run for the House) are gunning for multiple House Dems in the 2020 primaries, including Hakeem Jeffries (D-Brooklyn), William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), Yvette Clarke (D-Brooklyn) and Eliot Engel (D-Bronx).
If AOC is going to keep throwing bombs at other Democrats, she shouldn’t be shocked to get some blowback.