Are we still pretending that New York’s Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who upset incumbent Democrat Joseph Crowley in the primary, is a transformational politician?  Are we still doing the thing where we act like she’s a deep, reasonable thinker with leadership potential?  Because at some point we just need to be honest.

Take for instance her rambling, confused response to a fairly straightforward question from MSNBC’s Chris Hayes who asked “what’s your plan” when you get to Washington, D.C.?  Her answer:

“Well, I think a lot of it has to do with changing our strategy around governance. There’s a lot of inside baseball and inside the beltway. You always hear that term thrown around, but there are very few organizers in Congress. I do think that organizers operate differently. It’s a different kind of strategy. What it is, is really about organizing and really thinking about that word, organizing, segmenting people, being strategic in their actions in really bringing together a cohesive strategy of putting pressure on the chamber instead of only focusing on the pressures inside the chamber.”

If you can find her plan in there, you’re doing better than me.  But given that Hayes responded to this mess not by saying, “Umm, wut?” but by gushing, “That’s a really interesting thought,” it’s apparent there are a number in the national media still willing to play the game with her. 

And as a result of their continued fawning over her, propping her up, and failing to hold her to any basic standard of competence, we are all treated to this persistent procession of her bizarre takes on seemingly simple political realities.  The most recent example of which came on the pet liberal political cause of climate change.  Giving her plan for dealing with it, she went to what she apparently sees as a comparable challenge – defeating Nazis.

“So we talk about existential threats, the last time we had a really major existential threat to this country was around World War II.  And so we've been here before and we have a blueprint of doing this before.  None of these things are new ideas.  What we had was an existential threat in the context of a war. We had a direct existential threat with another nation, this time it was Nazi Germany, and axis, who explicitly made the United States as an enemy, as an enemy.”

And apparently carbon dioxide has explicitly made the United States “as an enemy” in a similar fashion.  Thus we must commit our national resources, economy, military, intelligence, and families to the cause of defeating cow flatulence. 

“It may seem like really big, it may seem really ambitious, it may seem really 'radical' as us [inaudible] like to say.  But the fact of the matter is we are dealing with a radical truth and a radical reality, and the more we choose to ignore it the worse we are doing by our children, and our grandchildren, and frankly ourselves.”

Some have postulated that Ocasio-Cortez’s refusal to endorse a Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign jeopardizes her popularity and political coalition.  I’m going to say a bigger threat to both is her ability to continue maintaining the charade that she’s a serious candidate with serious thoughts and serious ideas about serious issues.