You know, I have to wonder if the Fox News Obsession Strategy just might fail in this case.
Bear with me here.
As an outside-ish observer of US politics, I have to note that, absent Fox News and the other right-wing media harping on about her, I’d likely have never even heard of her. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t name many other brand-new Representatives (the exception would probably be Ilhan Omar, who again, I probably only know about because of Fox News and their ilk). But, having heard of her, and looked at what she’s actually talking about, it’s clear to me that all the terms highlighted above are at best hyperbole.
Sure, she’s leftist, but she’s no further left than most Canadian politicians. She may have misspoken a few times, but I’ve never seen her say anything “outrageously stupid”, particularly when compared to some of the things I’ve heard Republicans say, and in fact, most of what I’ve heard her say has been entirely reasonble. And I haven’t heard of any of my Democratic friends who are “embarrassed” by her. In fact, they all seem to agree with the Foxpublican assessment that she’s got a great future in the Democratic Party.
So, thanks largely to the Fox obsession with her, I see quite clearly that pretty much everything they say about her is complete bullshit.
This reminds me of the time a couple of weeks ago that my co-worker said that Cory Booker wanted to outlaw eating meat. That sounded utterly absurd to me, so I looked it up – it turns out that he said pretty much the opposite, that eating meat is a personal choice and should never be banned, but he talked about the environmental impact of meat production. It turned me on to a very reasonable discussion Booker had had about the environment and our eating habits, and at the same time made me sad that a nice guy in my office is accepting, apparently without question, such easy-to-refute bullshit non-facts from conservative infotainment lie-factories.
Right-wingers focus heavily on Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar because they want them to be perceived as the new face of the Democratic Party. The more their far-out and/or bigoted statements can be emphasized, the more fear can be generated among voters. And as long as there’s serious promotion of the Green New Deal, Supreme Court stacking, slavery reparations etc., they’ve got plenty of fuel.
Democrats (and Dopers) have often used this strategy to paint Republicans as extreme and dangerous (and frankly, there’ve been considerably more semi-loonies on that side of the aisle in recent years). I can recall countless threads here on dopes like Michele Bachmann (“See - that’s what They are really like!”).
It’s a bonus now that Republicans can point to splits between the Democratic old guard and radicals, just as Democrats have gleefully exploited the divide between Trumpites and big business-as-usual GOPers.
Reich wing media loves to play on AOC and Omar because they represent the scary “other” that you can only protect yourself against by voting for the White Jesus Party. “See? AOC is whacky! That’s what you get when you let those brown people in the country, sooner or later they get voted into office thanks to illegals voting and then they’re so stupid they’re going to fuck everything up! Keep voting white!” Or with Omar: “OMG, a Muslim! She’s responsible for 9/11! She can’t mention 9/11! OMG you gotta keep the perpetual victimhood alive by voting for the guy who bragged (falsely) about having the tallest building in NYC as the towers fell, who stole $150,000 in federal grants meant for small businesses impacted by 9/11, who falsely claimed to see Muslims celebrating in NJ, and who falsely claimed to have seen people jumping from the towers from miles away. That’s the kind of true American wallowing in 9/11 that we want leading us, no some snooty Muslim!”
You aren’t the target audience for the attacks. It is the moderates who are scared of such rhetoric. The far left love her, but they will never vote Republican anyways.
This is no different than saying that Trump is a Nazi or that Republicans want children and the elderly to die in the streets. Parties take positions and distort them for low information voters. Nothing new here.
This is also to be expected when the discussion from those on the far left seem to imply that certain steps need to be taken against farming livestock.
Agreed – nothing new. But what’s sad is that my coworker, who’s a decent and seemingly intelligent guy, glommed onto this complete nonsense with no apparent reticence or skepticism whatsoever.
Like a carbon tax or similar? It’s not reasonable to consider a carbon tax, or any similar policy, anything close to a ban on eating (or producing) meat.
Raping them? Breaking their legs? Forcing them to watch a Pauly Shore marathon? Send them to bed without supper?
Would you mind telling us what the hell you are referring to?
Again, though, the imbalance between the normalization of such rhetoric on the two sides of the political spectrum is quite striking. The deranged conservative obsession with AOC is playing out on Fox News, which is the right-wing’s idea of rational mainstream media.
Liberal mainstream media are not making comparably hyperbolic claims about Trump’s actually being a Nazi or Republicans actually wanting children and elderly to die. We’re not seeing chyrons on news channels asking “IS TRUMP IN FACT A NAZI?”
That level of hysterical distortion is more fringe on the left but more mainstream on the right.
But that’s the thing: I pretty much am the intended target audience. I’m a middle-class white guy who just turned 50, and who voted Conservative for most of my life. Right up until the Canadian Conservative parties started embracing the “Party of Stupid” ethos that they saw the GOP going with.
And despite that, their whole AOC shtick is just falling flat for me.
I guess the Republicans were so terrified of her bold new ideas that they fought like heck to keep them from a vote. They feared that Democrats and moderates would see her plans as the major step forward in reducing the GOP to terrified irrelevance.
Certainly it would never be the case that not even one single solitary Senator, Democrat, Republican, socialist, or other, would vote for the plan.
The GOP is really playing with fire here. They are trumpeting AOC’s proposals in order to expose them to sunshine so that they can be debunked (or so goes their thinking), but in fact, what’s likely happening is that they are making her ideas more and more mainstream by giving it more publicity. They’re pushing the Overton Window for her.
You mean Senators didn’t support a plan that wasn’t debated or endorsed in committee, or significantly debated on the floor, and was brought up entirely for political purposes? What a shock! This is my shocked face.
Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. This was such a blatantly political move to try to stifle any actual progress on the GND that I’m literally amazed that anyone with a functioning brain could be fooled by it, or think that it would fool anyone else with a brain.
And yet, despite it being pointed out again and again how this is just a stupid ploy on the part of the GOP, their supporters seem to keep bringing it up, like it somehow doesn’t make them look like fucking morons.
Maybe we should stop pointing this out, since they clearly can’t figure it out for themselves, and we might just (purely by accident, I’m sure) get one of them to actually learn something, to our own detriment.
I don’t know much of anything about her background aside from this post, but don’t Puerto Rican parents make her a natural-born American citizen? How is she an “immigrant”?