What are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Flaws?

It doesn't seem unreasonable to hold the Capitol Police to a little bit higher standard, in terms of their ability to follow protocol & behave respectfully and responsibly in protecting high-status targets in a dangerous environment.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Tuesday, February 2, 2021 10:54 AM bookmarkflaglink

otm

Yeah, that part is particularly fucked up, and given the relative silence on that front I hope those cops are being looked at as closely as these more colorful crazies have been.

Other things besides women, josh in c., does not get seem to get:
video games
plots
antibodies
girls recognizing music

also important to mention that AOC feels like her life is actively in danger, possibly moreso than any member of Congress in history, which I think affects her decision to go public, particularly since it does look like they're trying to sweep this under the rug

lol Yerac got me figured out, because that more or less sums up my months in quarantine!

since MTG has recently harassed another member of congress in the hallway, and boebert carries a gun everywhere, and both would sue her for slander, or do something worse, maybe she has made a calculated decision not to name them. it doesn't matter to me what her reasons are, though. to suggest she should be doing more is shitty. it's not her job.

The FBI seems to be doing a pretty good job tracking down everyone implicated

Several very prominent figures explicitly named by AOC don't seem to have been tracked down yet.

Holding elected officials accountable for abetting a fascist coup is a threat to democracy iirc.

that's the most frustrating thing about this, people like Cruz, Hawley, MTG, and Boebert should all be immediately ejected from Congress and never be allowed into public life again but the Trump era kinda wiped out the entire notion that rightwingers should face any consequences for their actions, and if you're someone like AOC I dunno how you take your mind off "next time they might actually succeed"

The lesson AOC is demonstrating here: you have to have your own back, because sometimes nobody will speak up for you otherwise. What she has done is really fucking brave.

It just seems like getting them out of there ASAP would be a priority, and if there's not enough movement on that front I wish there were. Outright naming them would I think get the ball moving faster, but maybe not.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, February 2, 2021 4:12 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I know this is the AOC thread but I feel like screaming from the rooftops that Rep Cori Bush has NAMED MTG AS HAVING THREATENED HER IN THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE HER OFFICE and all that happened was that Pelosi graciously allowed Rep Bush to move HER OWN OFFICE somewhere else so she and her staff wouldn't be in danger from either covid or being shot by a fellow representative, take your fucking pick.

You speak up and try to make it hard for them to ignore what happened. Not the perpetrators, the people who don’t want to face it. Make it hard for them, make it bad.

I think if there's one thing all of the squad have learned by now it's that no one in the established Dem party is going to protect them, politically or actually physically, when the danger could not be more obviously announcing itself with stormtroopers. AOC is using tech that her elders don't begin to understand, in order to connect with people and tell the truth so she can't be muffled by her enemies OR her "allies."

So maybe less of the "maybe the junior representative from the Bronx doesn't understand the political landscape" doubts cast everywhere.

again, we had a President who openly committed dozens of crimes while in office & lied to the American public literally every time he spoke, and every single Republican member was basically fine with it. there isn't really a "political landscape" right now

a thing that makes me very sad to think about is how openly hostile democratic leadership has been to AOC and how eager they remain to ~bridge the divide~ with republicans even after the breach at the capitol

— Mary Ellen (@alissacaliente) February 2, 2021

reading between the lines she definitely seems to be implying that certain members of Congress were helping the rioters or at least were giving them directions. I know there was a lot of talk about a certain member (Boebert?) giving tours to the people who raided the Capitol the next day.

“openly hostile democratic leadership...” yeah okay pump the breaks maybe it’s is a bit of a stretch and morally questionable probably to force an equivalency here between her harrowing and legit scary experience of right wingers coming into where she works to harm her with disagreements she’s had with other representatives in her party. Keep in mind I don’t think these people were planning on having a nice friendly chat with Pelosi if they found her either.

Think I originally read about this on twitter so I forget what the source was, but here's at least one article reporting that the leader of the Oath Keepers was getting messages from inside the building about the specific whereabouts of officials, such as "Tom, the speaker has left the chamber" and others detailed here:

https://www.businessinsider.com/capitol-siege-far-right-rioters-used-facebook-to-hunt-lawmakers-fbi-2021-1

The implication aiui is that some of the intel had to be coming from fellow officials bc the invaders never actually saw Pelosi & others that day and wouldn't have known exactly where they were/when they were being moved.

She’s gotten good committee assignments and had establishment Dems co-sponsor bills w her. This angle isn’t necessary.

i don’t see how anyone with progressive ideals can maintain faith in electoral politics when a young woman who’s just a little more progressive than the bulk of the party gets so shut out and so consistently disrespected and undermined

— Mary Ellen (@alissacaliente) February 2, 2021

weird hill to die on, Don

Don has died on so many weird hills in his brief tenure!

posting from beyond the grave

which is on the hill

Am I supposed to know something about Mary Ellen (or Alissa Caliente) that makes her opinion particularly worth sharing multiple times itt. Not being a dick, just not sure why some apparently random twitter person with 8k followers is important.

Not really. Those tweets are deranged.

Q: how many twitter followers does it take to make someone important, and do you seriously use this as a metric w/r/t what opinions are "worth sharing" cuz that's fucked up buddy.

Idk who she is specifically but I follow her bc I like her content and she's also followed by storied former ilxors such as A. Hoos and several journalists I follow.

Re committees: I heard in interview last year w AOC and a former member of Financial Svcs, saying that she signed up for those committees because she discovered that reps had to buy their way into other, more desirable, seats, and she didn't have the war chest to fund that, so she went for what were considered boring seats on committees that hadn't previously been very active or influential. I'll try to find it.

Am I supposed to know something about Mary Ellen (or Alissa Caliente) that makes her opinion particularly worth sharing multiple times itt. Not being a dick, just not sure why some apparently random twitter person with 8k followers is important.

“openly hostile democratic leadership...” yeah okay pump the breaks maybe it’s is a bit of a stretch and morally questionable probably to force an equivalency here between her harrowing and legit scary experience of right wingers coming into where she works to harm her with disagreements she’s had with other representatives in her party. Keep in mind I don’t think these people were planning on having a nice friendly chat with Pelosi if they found her either.

Jfc I was just curious to know if she was someone in the know or not. She has no verified checkmark and her bio is very unhelpful.

I don't give a shit at all about follower counts, but I do at least like to weigh where the opinions are coming from. I don't think asking if anyone knows more about her is at all out of bounds, I was looking for context. Like is she a DC insider? Does she write for a specific outlet?

generally when you have to say "not being a dick" it means... you're gonna be a dick.

Someone shared a tweet that tried to frame this right wing insurrection event byproduct of their generic “Dems bad” gripes. Maybe that’s considered “good praxis” idk but I said that was a bad thing to do, for obvious reasons..

xp why post this comment in a thread with a bunch of randoms offering their opinions? If a comment is right, it’s right whether it’s someone on here or someone on twitter you’ve never heard of.

*as a byproduct

I have absolutely zero opinion on her because I genuinely have no fucking clue who she is, so I was hoping some ilxor might help me understand more. That's all. With ilxors I generally have context from their other posts about where they might be coming from. I'll leave.

Not remotely dickish to ask “who is she?”

You're not wrong. She's just a random.

The difference in her tweet and ILX randoms is that ILX randoms are posting here - they can be questioned or challenged on their posts.

It's actually Mary-Ellen and Alissa Caliente. They're twins!

AOC's words - but we should 100% give more credence to how a random has read the tea leaves of her committee assignments lol

I don’t know. I think I’ll have probably more answers as we get through transition, and to the next term. How the party responds will very much inform my approach and what I think is going to be necessary.

The last two years have been pretty hostile. Externally, we’ve been winning. Externally, there’s been a ton of support, but internally, it’s been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive.

Is the party ready to, like, sit down and work together and figure out how we’re going to use the assets from everyone at the party? Or are they going to just kind of double down on this smothering approach? And that’s going to inform what I do.

how an ILX random*

Big Don can roll in here to tell us how that's not actually her experience

You’ve contributed literally nothing to this thread except sniping at me and in orbit today, idk why you’re wasting your time pretending you’re a leftist.

Don has died on so many weird hills in his brief tenure!

Pretty sure this was the podcast interview in question.

who really knows what happened?

lots of ambiguity

safe to say everyone has limited info,including aoc.

Intercept Podcast Special: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Play • 40 min
Today we’re presenting a podcast special from our Intercept colleagues in DC. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joins Intercept reporters Ryan Grim and Briahna Joy Gray for an in-depth conversation about her fresh approach to politics, her thoughts on 2020, and her insurgent congressional campaign. As a new member of the House Financial Services Committee, she’s already shaping the conversation with her call to raise the top marginal tax rate to 70%. And former North Carolina congressman Brad Miller, a progressive Democrat who served for years on the committee, joins the conversation to talk about the challenges Ocasio-Cortez will face there.

I guess we can think of leftist reasons to pretend that’s relevant to right wingers trying to kill both her and her establishment Dem colleagues. I understand the recreational aspect of that, I honestly do.

They start talking about the committee structure and how you have to sign up and pledge to raise funds for the party in order to get on "good" committees at around 19:55. AOC:

"Very early after I won my primary, there was a lot of outreach from incumbent Democrats and the one question everyone kept asking was what committee do you want to be on? And I literally had just gotten elected and I was like Idk what committees are there?...

I spent one day in DC and I met with some folks, and it wasn't until the very end of the day that I was told, you know, if you want a good committee, you've got to raise funds. And I remember saying, well, because at that time I had raised funds for other progressive candidates... we had raised over $50 or $100k for other progressive, non corporate funded campaigns, so I was like, 'I am raising funds' and they were like, 'No, to the D-trip (DCCC).'

So I remember leaving it, like, 'I'm going to get put on some terrible committee,' and so...election time comes and we're just getting our assignments this week, January of the new term, but we've basically spent the last 3 months since the election lobbying--and this is a very opaque process--no one hands you a sheet of paper and says, 'This is how you get on a committee.' So a lot of freshmen are just babes in the woods, and you talk to a lot of people. But one of the interesting developments on Financial Services is, we were asking to be put on an Exclusive Committee, and for a freshman that doesn't normally happen. And then we started feeling much more reception to this request than we had anticipated, and were like, what's going on? And I had sat down with Chairwoman Waters, and it seems like we're in this very interesting moment where, after the financial crisis, all these activists and advocates really started zeroing in on the FSC, and because its members were getting so much more scrutiny than they had in the past, it no longer became the same kind of fund-raising committee because those members were getting targeted a lot, and so as a result a lot of the incumbent members on it had left to go to other money committees, and so it opened up this huge window. And so this year the FSC has actually been staffed with a lot of progressives on it."

There have been articles written about progressives doing similar things locally and running for, like, dog catcher and using whatever levers of power there to impact beyond the scope of the mission (dog shit impacts waste management, for example). The worst example pf this is the rando loon who wrote himself in for pennsylvania tax collector or whatever