OPINION:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democratic Socialist-Brooklynistan, makes $174,000 a year. That puts her in the top 5% of all Americans.
She drives a Tesla (with auto-drive and nice wheels, about $64,000 — about twice what the average American spends for a car) and lives in a luxury building in a posh D.C. neighborhood where even a studio apartment rents for more than $2,000 a month (she’s got an infinity pool, but that still doesn’t match her ego).
And that’s not enough, apparently. The 33-year-old former bartender decided she wanted to rub elbows with the rich and beautiful people in Manhattan at the 2021 annual Met Gala. But she didn’t want to pay. (What socialist does?) A pair of tickets cost $70,000 — if you could get them. It was pretty much a by-invitation-only deal.
But the socialist has, once again, proved her deep hypocrisy and even deeper sense of entitlement. She had begged for tickets, stiffed the makers of her dress as well as the hotel where she had stayed for months, and then sought to cover up the whole mess, according to House investigators investigating her for alleged ethics violations.
Of course, at the Gala — the world’s No. 1 social event for the rich and famous, attended by the top 0.000002% — she famously wore a dress emblazoned with a slash of red that said “Tax the Rich.” Hypocrisy alert!
She said it was all on the up and up. But new documents from the Congressional Ethics Committee investigation of her attendance revealed that her lawyers had cautioned her against attending the Gala, noting that she couldn’t accept a gift that large.
The docs show the media darling traded off her position to get an invite — helped along “after much prodding by her campaign staffer,” the New York Post reported. She cozied up to Vogue’s Anna Wintour, who runs the Gala, and got an invitation for herself and her boyfriend that said they’d be “guests of Vogue.”
In a message to her staff before the Gala, an attorney for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez advised her how she could attend legally. “‘The Congresswoman could accept an invitation from [the Met], but not from Vogue,’” he wrote, according to the Daily Mail. “‘Since Advance Publications is a registered lobbyist, we’ll need to be extra careful!’”
That seems pretty clear. I mean, she graduated cum laude, so she’s got to understand that, right? But Ms. Ocasio-Cortez attended anyway, making a splash with that dress. Shortly afterward, the documents show that she (or maybe her staff) sought to downplay it all. And the cover-up began, the Daily Mail reported.
“The day after the gala, however, Vogue staffers reached out to AOC’s office to inform them they had received a number of media inquiries about the nature of the congresswoman’s attendance and to say they were telling outlets she had been Wintour’s personal guest instead of saying she was a guest of the magazine.
“‘Hope the congresswoman had a great time last night!,’ a Vogue staffer wrote. ‘We have had a number of inquiries re: AOC’s invitation and if she paid for her ticket. Mainly from Page Six’” of the New York Post. “We also alerted the museum. Given that she was a guest of Vogue, we were planning to say on background that she was a guest of Anna’s. Of course, wanted to check with you before responding.’”
But there’s so much more that has emerged from the House inquiry that shows the congresswoman’s true nature.
The documents also show that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was billed $1,300 for her dress, but her staff was able to cut $1,100 cut off the price tag, along with getting the price of her $635 shoes knocked down by listing them as rentals, too, the Daily Mail reported.
The socialist then failed to pay back thousands of dollars in bills from the Gala night, including $344.85 in makeup costs that had to be passed on to a collections agency as “extremely overdue.”
So many unpaid bills:
• $477.73 for hairstyling.
• $1,000 for transportation.
• $4,602.92 in bills at the Carlyle Hotel.
That and other bills added up to “$5,579.99 worth of unpaid goods and services [that] had been provided to Ocasio-Cortez and her partner for the event,” NBC News reported.
It’s worth noting that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez paid her bills only after House investigators began their inquiry.
As liberals do, she passed the buck. It wasn’t her, it was her incompetent staff.
“I just never, ever, ever would have allowed that to happen knowing what I have learned, but that I wasn’t privy to the invoices, wasn’t privy to the ones that had been sent,” she told investigators, the Daily Mail reported.
The other Democratic socialist in Congress, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Vermont independent, owns three houses and is a multimillionaire.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is well on her way to following in his footsteps.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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