Op-Eds

After Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) used “concentration camps” and “Never Again” together — a unique reference to the Nazi death camps — and then retweeted leftist Jews hoping to justify the linkage while she simultaneously denied that she ever connected them in the first instance, I honestly thought it couldn’t get worse. I was wrong.

Every politician knows you can’t needlessly offend ethnic and other constituencies. The idea that you can make a career out of bigotry towards a particular minority is a notion America was supposed to have discarded 50 years ago.

This is not a matter of making “political hay” – it is a matter of diluting and distorting the Holocaust. Liberals such as NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders condemned AOC’s remarks, as did NBC’s Chuck Todd. While I am not fan of these men’s politics, their position on this matter should be lauded, as they realize that the issue is apolitical and that a serious wrong was committed by AOC.

AOC is the product of a broken education system that deconstructs facts and reality, teaching instead that there are no facts at all. Rather, I have “My Truth,” and you have “Your Truth.” If college professors can spout any foolish, false narrative they wish, safe in the knowledge that their life tenure grants them a safe harbor to mislead, to lie, and to brainwash their defenseless minions who must get good grades in their courses, it is not surprising that O-Cortez emerged as she did.

One comes away with the impression that the now former Young Israel of Toco Hills (YITH) is a normative Orthodox shul that simply wants to be apolitical, and that National Council of Young Israel is simply too vocal in its political opinions for Rabbi Starr & Co. But there is more than meets the eye.

When Twitter erupted, Ocasio-Cortez provided a series of mutually contradictory defenses. She could not decide whether she meant to compare the southern border to Auschwitz, whether they are in fact comparable, or whether it was appropriate to make the connection at all. So she tried all three within just three hours on Tuesday morning.

In a world now sullied and tarred by vicious name-calling in politics, a responsible conservative is duty-bound to pause before calling a Left-extremist a “Communist.” That term has been abused and misapplied, often in terrible ways, so should be employed but gingerly. Nevertheless, the time has come. Basically, Bernie Sanders is a Communist.

If Donald Trump were a bit more circumspect and understood that sometimes it really is OK to be circumspect, he either would not have spent two days openly and casually conversing with a Clinton Communications Director, or would have answered the question about accepting opposition dirt research from a foreign government by saying “I first would ask my legal team, the finest legal minds in America, whether such activity is lawful, and I would proceed from there.” But Trump, G-d bless him, shoots from the lip and prefers the unfiltered to the menthol.

She was not initially on my radar. I follow the news like a hawk, but she always was so politically lightweight — make that bantamweight — that she did not register. Here in California, “register” is a term we often use for earthquakes. The Northridge shaker registered at 6.7. A solid 3.5, give or take, will wake you up. Gillibrand registers at 0.0, give or take a zero.

The more the Democrats come up with nothing, the louder the drumbeat for impeachment will become. This is not about justice. It’s about mob justice. And America will be putting up with it until the 2020 election, because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can neither silence nor satisfy the mob