The left’s primary tactic in debate has nothing to do with marshaling facts or using reason and logic to outpoint their opponent.
Their main tactic is exaggeration. The goal is to make the opponent’s position so bad, that it suggests one should be ashamed for even thinking of it.
There’s a method behind that madness. Ocasio-Cortez gave Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes a chilling explanation for her lies. She was trying to explain why she received four Pinocchios from the Washington Post for saying there was “$21 trillion in waste at the Pentagon.”
“If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees,” she said. “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.” [Emphasis added]
There is objective truth and then there’s relative truth, where my facts are “truer” than your facts because of my morally superior argument.
It’s positively Orwellian, but it’s where our reality is today. Hence, we have AOC making this ludicrous statement on Twitter:
My family relied on food stamps (EBT) when my dad died at 48.
I was a student. If this happened then, we might’ve just starved.
Now, many people will.
It’s shameful how the GOP works overtime to create freebies for the rich while dissolving lifelines of those who need it most. https://t.co/WOrYvhfPj4
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) December 5, 2019
No, her family would not have “starved” or even been denied benefits.
The rule applies to able-bodied adults between the ages of 18 and 49 who do not have dependents.
The rule wouldn’t apply to parents with minor children, the elderly, or disabled people.
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) December 6, 2019
Is it that AOC is just plain ignorant — a shallow, intellectually lazy politician who doesn’t bother to check her facts before hitting the “publish” button in Twitter?
Yes and no. In an age when the world has been shrunk to the size of 140 characters, exaggeration works. Even if she was unaware of the specifics of the new rules, she was completely cognizant of the effect of assuring us that many people will “starve” because of them.
Her statement evokes images of African kids with bloated bellies walking naked around a moonscape. This is nonsense and she knows it.
There is hunger in America, no doubt about it. About 2o percent of children in the U.S. are malnourished and in danger of suffering the physical effects of that condition, which include stunted growth, eye problems, diabetes, and heart disease. There is also a correlation between hungry kids and lower achievement in school. It’s a tragedy that is easily preventable and those kids and their mothers are in zero danger of being taken off the SNAP rolls.
But using the term “starve” is an instant debate-winner because of the images it evokes. So AOC doesn’t care if people call her out for her factual inaccuracies. No one will remember the Heritage Foundation correcting her.
But everyone will remember her accusing the Trump administration of wanting to kill poor people.
