Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) chastised Washington Post columnist Max Boot Tuesday for comparing her unfavorably to former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Naturally, the same week we kick-start a nat’l convo on marginal tax rates endorsed by Nobel-Prize winning economists, I’m being described as “vacuous.”
If you’re allowed to characterize female politicians as “unlikeable,” are we allowed to describe takes like these “resentful?” https://t.co/cMikVKcJ5U
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 8, 2019
Boot — a self-described conservative who has defected from the Republican party out of opposition to President Trump — wrote that, like Palin, Ocasio-Cortez is a “talented young communicator who made a big splash in national politics before having her lack of knowledge painfully exposed.”
Following her shocking upset victory over former Representative Joe Crowley, a powerful six-term incumbent, in the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th district, Ocasio-Cortez garnered a wave of national media attention unusual for a previously unknown congressional candidate. The outsized media attention, which Boot laments in his column, has continued now that Ocasio-Cortez is a freshman congresswoman, allowing her to make a public case for deeply progressive policy proposals like tuition-free higher education and Medicare-for-all.
Given a platform by the media, Ocasio-Cortez has made a habit of responding forcefully to critics on Twitter. Most recently, on Monday, she attacked CNN’s Chris Cilizza for a tweet in which she believed he quoted her out of context. She also questioned on Monday the process by which media outlets fact check lawmakers’ claims, after she was confronted with a negative Washington Post fact check during an interview on Sixty Minutes Sunday.
Facts are facts, America. We should care about getting things right. Yet standards of who gets fact-checked, how often + why are unclear.
This is where false equivalency+bias creeps in, allowing climate deniers to be put on par w/scientists, for example.https://t.co/87c6kVzIuI
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 7, 2019