OPINION:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is emerging, for the Republicans, as the gift that keeps on giving.
How so?
Well, when one of the co-founders of Greenpeace calls you out on Twitter as a “pompous little twit” for your Green New Deal, as Fox News noted — umm, perhaps it’s time to rethink your political positions. Greenpeace, after all, is the organization labeled by Scribol in 2008 as the runner-up in its “Top 4 Environmental Extremist Groups” list, bested only by the likes of domestic terrorists Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. In other words: It’s not exactly a friend of conservatives.
Of course, Greenpeace has distanced itself from co-founder Patrick Moore, who left the outfit some time ago over disputes about its radical direction.
But that doesn’t take the sting out of Moore’s anti-AOC tweets — of which there were many.
“@AOC Pompous little twit,” he began. “You don’t have a plan to grow food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels, or get food into the cities. Horses? If fossil fuels were banned every tree in the world would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating. You would bring about mass death.”
Nicely said.
But that was a warm-up.
Responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s recent likening of climate change to World War Two, Moore wrote: “Isn’t @AOC a bit young to talk about WW2? It was Hell & more than 60 million died. It’s her @GND [Green New Deal] that would be worse than WW2. Imagine no fuel for cars, trucks, tractors, combines, harvesters, power-plants, ships, aircraft, etc. Transport of people & goods would grind to a halt.”
Oh yeah; there is that. Right?
Moore went on: “I suspect @AOC is a flash in the pan. Her @GND is so completely crazy it is bound to be rejected in the end. But she does have wind in her [sails] due to the political situation. 2020 will be even more interesting now.”
He also scolded her for possessing “ZERO expertise at any of the things” she “pretend[s] to know,” and slammed her as a “garden-variety hypocrite,” flying off here and there, Uber-ing and Lyft-ing for this and that — all the while ignoring the call of the far more environmentally friendly subway system.
The hypocrite charge hit her office just a couple of days earlier, too, when her chief of staff was photographed scarfing down a burger as he lunched with Ocasio-Cortez in a restaurant — just shortly after Ocasio-Cortez spoke of the need for Americans to curb their beef intake.
“In the [Green New Deal],” she said, in a February interview on Showtime, “what we talk about is — and it’s true — that we need to take a look at factory farming. … It’s not to say we’re going to force everybody to go vegan or anything crazy like that, but it’s to say, listen, we’ve got to address factory farming, maybe we shouldn’t be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”
And then she called for women in America to stop birthing babies.
“Is it OK to still have children,” she wondered aloud, in the context of discussing climate change.
Moore’s very likely right: Ocasio-Cortez is going to prove a “flash in the pan.”
She’s serving a Democratic Party purpose right now by making the progressive, far-left Democrats who’ve entered the presidential race seem moderate, by comparison. But in the end, she’s going to prove a liability. Democrats who don’t condemn her special brand of crazy — who don’t go on record as Moore did, and boldly distance themselves from her rhetoric, policies and politics — will find themselves falling to Republican challenge.
If politicking is a road journey, Ocasio-Cortez, ultimately, will be the U-turn that sensible — winning — politicians will take.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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