Ocasio-Cortez tweets and other news

when Chris Cillizza calls you sloppy with facts, you are in trouble

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/07/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-facts/index.html

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's very slippery slope on facts

Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large
Updated 4:21 PM ET, Mon January 7, 2019

(CNN)New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a talented, charismatic young politician who has struck the political world with a force and impact rarely seen among even those who have been at it for a much longer time. That said, she is very new to all of this -- she had never run for anything before she beat Rep. Joe Crowley in a primary last summer -- and she makes beginner's mistakes.

She made a big one during a sit-down with Anderson Cooper that aired on "60 Minutes"on Sunday. Here's the exchange:

Cooper: One of the criticisms of you is that— that your math is fuzzy. The Washington Post recently awarded you four Pinocchios—

Ocasio-Cortez: Oh my goodness—

Cooper: —for misstating some statistics about Pentagon spending?

Ocasio-Cortez: 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.

Cooper: But being factually correct is important—

Ocasio-Cortez: It's absolutely important. And whenever I make a mistake. I say, "OK, this was clumsy." and then I restate what my point was. But it's— it's not the same thing as— as the President lying about immigrants. It's not the same thing, at all.

Let's start with some context. At issue is a December tweet in which Ocasio-Cortez said that $21 trillion in the Pentagon's financial transactions "could not be traced, documented, or explained" -- and noted that such an amount of money could cover two-thirds of the total cost of Medicare for All.

But as The Washington Post's Fact Checker noted, the $21 trillion claim was quite, well, fuzzy. "It's unconvincing to try to pass this off as a rhetorical point being misread," wrote the Fact-Checker in awarding Ocasio-Cortez four Pinocchios. "She cited the $21 trillion figure and said '66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.' That's a direct comparison. It's badly flawed."

Which, OK. We all make mistakes. Ocasio-Cortez likely skimmed the study from which the $21 trillion figure comes and saw it as a way to make a broader point about how our government is totally fine spending trillions of dollars -- much of which is not well accounted for -- on defense, but blanches at the cost of creating a national insurance program to cover all Americans.

But Ocasio-Cortez's explanation of why she said what she said -- and why she wasn't really wrong -- misses the mark. Again...

"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," she said to Cooper. "I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right."

Here's the thing: Being factually accurate and morally right isn't an either/or situation. You can do both!



And as it relates to the broader point Ocasio-Cortez is raising, which is, essentially, you know what I meant, so stop obsessing over a single data point, I would respond this way: Would she -- or any Democrat -- say the same about the White House's made-up fact that upwards of 4,000 known or suspected terrorists have attempted to enter the US illegally through the southern border?

As Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace pointed out to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, those people have been apprehended at airports, not the southern border. "The State Department says there hasn't been any terrorists found coming across the southern border," said Wallace.

Sanders' response -- "It's by air it's by land it's by sea, it's all of the above" -- employs, essentially, the same logic Ocasio-Cortez is using: My specific fact may be wrong, but the broader point I was making still holds.

The problem with that thinking is that it says that the underlying facts don't matter as long as the bigger-picture argument still coheres. Which is a very dangerous, slippery slope to tread at any time but especially in an age in which the President of the United States is actively seeking to undermine the idea that objective facts actually exist.

Fudging the facts in pursuit of "being morally right" -- as Ocasio-Cortez puts it -- assumes that moral righteousness is an agreed-upon thing. As Trump's decision to institute a travel ban or build a wall around the country show, it's not.

Ocasio-Cortez is new to all of this, yes. But the high profile she already enjoys caries with it some responsibility. Namely, to get the facts right. And when you get them wrong, to correct it as quickly as possible rather than trying to justify the error.

​

 

wow, right-wing rag WaPo ganging up on AOC about the lying . . . um, "falsehoods"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...casio-cortezs-very-bad-defense-her-falsehoods

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s very bad defense of her falsehoods

By Aaron Blake
January 7 at 9:57 AM

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has made a bigger splash than any freshman in the 116th Congress — in either the House or Senate. And a big reason is an often-overzealous conservative effort to knock her down a few pegs. The congresswoman has put on a PR master class in using those efforts to build her profile and social media following. (Her retort to the overblown dancing-video kerfuffle last week has been viewed nearly 20 million times.)

But she’s also shown a tendency to exaggerate or misstate basic facts. And her defense of this in a Sunday interview with “60 Minutes” was very bad.

When Anderson Cooper confronted her with The Washington PostFact Checker’s Four-Pinocchio verdict on her claim about $21 trillion in waste at the Pentagon, Ocasio-Cortez offered this (emphasis added):

The first problem here is that Ocasio-Cortez is really minimizing her falsehoods. Four Pinocchios is not a claim that Glenn Kessler and The Post’s Fact Checker team give out for bungling the “semantics” of something. It’s when something is a blatant falsehood. It’s the worst rating you can get for a singular claim.

In the case of the $21 trillion, Ocasio-Cortez was suggesting that this was all Pentagon waste and that cleaning it up could pay for two-thirds of the estimated $32 trillion price tag for single-payer health care, which she and others are referring to as Medicare-for-all.

“$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions ‘could not be traced, documented, or explained,’" Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet that still appears on her timeline and has been shared more than 26,000 times. "$21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T. That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.”



But that $21 trillion estimate isn’t necessarily waste; it’s just sloppily accounted for, according to that study. It’s also not just money the Pentagon spends; it includes money coming into the Pentagon. And that $32 trillion price tag is an estimate for the first 10 years of Medicare-for-all, while the Pentagon number accounts for a 17-year period. Ocasio-Cortez’s numbers weren’t just wrong on the margins; her conclusion made no logical sense in light of the actual facts. What’s more, this isn’t the only claim she’s made that has been debunked; The Post’s team documented five false claims she made during an August media blitz following her primary upset of Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.).

What might be most problematic about Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, though, is the idea that people should care less about specific facts and more about being “morally right" — as if this is a zero-sum game in which the two can be weighed against one another. She’s practically saying, “Well, maybe I was wrong, but at least my cause is just.”

But this is the slipperiest of slopes — the kind of attitude you can use to justify pretty much anything to yourself. And it also just so happens to be the underlying ethos of the entire Trump presidency.

Trump has made more than 7,000 false claims as president, and to the extent his base of support processes those false claims, it has essentially dismissed them as unimportant in the scheme of things. Most recently, this has taken the form of saying or suggesting terrorists are flooding the U.S.-Mexico border, despite Trump’s own State Department saying there is no evidence that even one has crossed. Trump’s base would probably argue that this stat is nitpicking — that it’s unimportant since his underlying goal to build the border wall and protect the American people is “morally right.” But the fact remains that this claim leads to a badly skewed sense of the actual dangers Americans face and could lead to a misplacement of priorities.



And you can apply this approach to many of the biggest Trump falsehoods. If the ends justify the means and the policy is “right,” you can excuse pretty much anything.

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. But just because something is worse doesn’t mean something else can’t be bad. People need to recognize that “morally right” is a subjective definition, and there need be no choice between making your case and using actual facts. Using exaggerated or made-up facts actually suggests your cause is weak — and that you haven’t done your homework. If politicians misunderstand these very basic and crucial distinctions, how can we trust them to know what’s best about the underlying policies? How much have you really studied this thing?

Taking Trump “seriously, not literally" has always been a false choice, and that’s true for Democrats, too.
​

 

wow, Whoopi Goldberg opening up a can of whoop-ass on AOC

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...ob-before-you-start-pooping-on-incumbent-dems

Whoopi Goldberg slams Ocasio-Cortez: Learn the job before you start 'pooping' on incumbent Dems
by Katelyn Caralle
| January 07, 2019 01:04 PM

Television host Whoopi Goldberg warned freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., that she should learn her job as a congresswomen before she tells others what to do.

“You just got in there, and I know you’ve got lots of good ideas, but I would encourage you to sit still for a minute and learn the job, because there are people in that party who have been working their tails off for this country. They know a lot, and you could learn some stuff from them,” Goldberg said while co-hosting "The View." “Before you start pooping on people and what they’ve done, you’ve got to do something, too.”

Goldberg was reacting to Ocasio-Cortez’s "60 Minutes" interview, which aired Sunday, in which the newly sworn-in congresswoman explained her intentions to support Democratic primary candidates who seek to unseat incumbent Democrats.

“It’s absolutely risky. It requires risk to try something new, but also ... we know so much of what we’ve tried in the past hasn’t worked, either,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Ocasio-Cortez won her primary in an upset against then-incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley. She was sworn in to the 116th Congress on Thursday.

Goldberg lauded other Democrats, like Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who she said have done plenty for the Democratic Party.

“There are a whole bunch of people in the Democratic Party who have been busting their asses to make sure that women get what they need, people get what they need, children get what they need,” Goldberg said.

Before and directly after taking office, Ocasio-Cortez has not been shy about voicing her socialist policy positions, including imposing a 60 to 70 percent income tax on the highest American earners to pay for the “Green New Deal.”​

 

Alan Greenspan opens up a can of whoop-ass on AOC

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/07/ala...ez-70percent-tax-plan-is-a-terrible-idea.html

 

Dem strategists predicts AOC won't be an effective legislator:

Democratic strategist Kristen Hawn said on Monday that she did not believe Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) would be an effective legislator.

"The way she's going about the legislating process, I don't think she's going to be that effective. I really don't," Hawn, a senior adviser at Agenda Global, told Hill.TV's Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton on "Rising."

"I would actually pose that she has already had a major defeat. She came out immediately against the pay-go rules being reinstated in the rules package, was soundly defeated behind the scenes when more moderate members of the caucus, including members of the Blue Dog coalition, went to the Speaker and said 'we have the votes to take this rules package down if you do not include it,' " she said. "It was a huge defeat. Nobody's talking about."​

https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/4...ocasio-cortez-wont-be-an-effective-legislator