She’s the darling of the far left, and most likely will be elected to Congress in November when a notoriously liberal New York district votes to send her to Washington.
But “democratic socialist” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a problem that goes far beyond her extreme leftist politics — she struggles with the basic truth!
Even the left-leaning fact-checking websites have called her out, and not just for minor misspeaks and half-truths.
She’s told some whoppers, flat-out fabricating numbers and even passing around ugly urban legends from the darkest corners of the Internet as “facts” for her truth-challenged supporters.
PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning website that goes over statements by politicians, has rated four statements by the 28-year-old Bernie Sanders protégé.
Just one got a “true” rating, and even that one was “mostly” true rather than entirely true.
Two of the others were called “FALSE.”
And one claim was given the lowest rating of all: “PANTS ON FIRE!”
Ocasio-Cortez made a false claim about unemployment numbers earlier this year on the PBS show “Firing Line.”
“Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs,” she told host Margaret Hoover. “Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.”
PolitiFact found not just one lie in that statement, but at least two.
“Fewer than one in 20 employed Americans holds a second job of any type, and the people who might be working as much as 70 or 80 hours a week represent a tiny fraction of that tiny fraction,” the website noted. “The rates for either statistic are not high by historical standards.”
The number of people holding two jobs was far higher in the mid-1990s – in the economy of former President Bill Clinton – when it was at 6.5 percent, when compared to the 4.7-5.2 percent range of today.
And the average work week in America is holding steady at 34.5 hours a week… not “60, 70, 80 hours a week,” as Ocasio-Cortez claimed.
PolitiFact didn’t rate her other claim, but there’s no evidence that working Americans “can barely feed their family” either.
Another whopper was an anti-military statement, in which Ocasio-Cortez claimed the Defense Department was gifted with a “a $700 billion dollar budget increase, which they didn’t even ask for.”
The department got no such increase. That $700 billion is the entire budget, a $61 billion increase, which is higher than what the Trump administration settled on but exactly what they asked for in their annual “wish list” to Congress.
Whoops!
She’s struggled with the truth so often that even the Democratic-friendly pages of The Washington Post tore into here recently, nailing her for five big lies.
In addition to that big fib about employment, the Post busted her for lying about Medicare… lying about ObamaCare… and lying about a supposed decline in the upper middle class.
But the biggest one of all may have been an ugly piece of anti-law enforcement rhetoric.
Ocasio-Cortez is among the leftists trying to abolish US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka ICE.
One reason?
She claimed the agency has a policy where they are required by law to “fill 34,000 beds with detainees every single night and that number has only been increasing since 2009.”
The dark implication is that the agency’s officers are acting like some evil secret police force, looking every night to fill that quota. The guilty and innocent alike get swept up in a desperate rush to make sure every bed has a body in it.
Just one problem: ICE is required to have at least 34,000 beds.
They are not required to fill them!
The language in the law requiring the beds was written to ensure the agency actually spent certain money on building that capacity and not on other expenses, The Washington Post noted.
“In any case, the language was eliminated in the 2017 and 2018 appropriations bills,” the Post wrote. “So it’s not even an issue anymore.”
It’s going to be pretty awkward when Ocasio-Cortez gets to Congress and tries to cancel out “rules” that don’t exist!
–The Horn editorial team