No, politicians vary, like everyone else. They obviously have tendency to sugar-coat their own position and overcriticise the opposition, but it is simply wrong to imagine that the average politician is as epistemologically challenged as Donald Trump.
You realise both those stories are made up, right?
He kept digging that hole because he's incompetent.
Made up is a bit far. They're exaggerations of exaggerations. AOC routinely does the most literal political theater on the internet, and then her critics blow her nonsense even more out of proportion. Should she be mocked for doing a photo-shoot looking sad at a fence outside a detention center? Yes, yes she should. That is dumb. Are her live streams comically stupid? Yes, yes they are. Are those stories precisely accurate? No. Are they made up? No, they definitely derive from the antics of someone behaving as an instagram influencer /US Representative.
So made up, then.
They're comical antics to dinosaurs disconnected from modern youth (which with the rate of social change due to the internet is a large percentage of over 40s - and thus most Republicans). Take a look at Instagram, the success of influencers, the ubiquity of smartphone recordings, and all the yoof getting their information from Reddit and YouTube. She's a politician who knows her key audience are young adults and how to reach them. She's vastly more savvy than the majority of her peers, who are pretty much still in a mode of going out on the streets shaking hands and kissing babies like its still 1960. Critising AOC for being wildly successful at connecting with her core demographic is a bit like being a grumpy old guy saying the youth of today don't know they're born and refusing to buy a smartphone because it's too damn complicated to work out how to make a call on one.
I don't not like AOC. I have reasonable hopes for what she might become given time to actually have her own opinions publicly. The problem with "influencers" is that they aren't actually influencers, they're people following the popular trends to get attention for themselves, they are the most influenced people on the planet. Cortez doesn't really have influence in her "core demographic" as you put it, quite the opposite, she's popular largely for repeating the internet's favorite talking points, and would likely be dropped like a rock if she deviated too far from those anytime soon. It's not any particular coincidence that AOC once publicly suggested she was excited to work with Ted Cruz on a bill where they had genuine agreement about the policy, and now she's made a hobby of angrily responding to his tweets to make reddit headlines. The first strategy got poor reviews from the population that supports her, and she cannot deviate from their opinions. And to be completely fair, all of that would be perfectly reasonable if her congressional district was reddit.
Well, here's the thing. If politicians don't pay attention to what their constituency wants, they tend to put themselves at risk of removal. One might note the vigorous attempts to remove Liz Cheney for having the temerity to challenge Donald Trump, for instance. In fact, most of Trump's strongest Republican critics throughout his presidency were those resigning, dying, or otherwise lucky enough to be safe, because nearly all the other chickenshits who secretly resented him wouldn't dare risk the consequences of overt opposition.
Then isn't it, from your perspective, just a question of whether the average politician is deserving of criticism for the pandering they do?
a) I gave a specific example.
What, that she was mean to Ted Cruz once?
OK, but AOC doesn't express support for "every single popular opinion". Her platform is just a broadly popular quasi social-democratic one.
Japan has 83 deaths per million from covid, the US has 1,755 per million (21 times the difference btw). Also, if you apply Japan's deaths per million to the US population that's 27,000 deaths and an average amount of deaths by the flu in a given year. In Japan, the government literally can't shutdown business so bars were open there the entire time. Schools were also open nearly the entire time. People were masking well enough in the US, especially in the blue states (that didn't do any better than red states really) that made masking next to godliness. Tons of other countries masked too. There's something else that's going on in Japan that nobody cared to study.Oh yeah, they're doing fucking great
Probably because they know well enough to fucking wear a mask when people are sick and not trawl the bars just because they're fucking bored.
Japan Declares 3rd State Of Emergency, 3 Months Ahead Of Olympics
New restrictions are being imposed in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Hyogo prefectures as Japan sees a sharp rise in new coronavirus cases.www.npr.org
Are you seriously using *migrant farmers in California* and other essential workers, me fucking included, as an excuse for why people should just be allowed to hang out in bars on "personal responsibility" grounds? In the land of "I'm going to lie about fictional lung conditions to avoid wearing a mask indoors for a few minutes because the wuhan flu is fake"?
Fucking delusional.
She is regularly skewered on the internet by her base for her stances on Israel, Venezuela, Biden "exceeding expectations", how much she should have asked in return for voting for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House, and probably some other things that aren't coming to mind at the moment.
No rule required him to release tax returns either - it's another of those things that's a norm (and not a terribly old one either - it was started by Nixon in reaction to a scandal) rather than a rule.
a) You're not her base. Her base thinks you're a "tankie."
The ultimate job of a politician (in my view) is to govern well: which I would define as getting the most benefit to the most people. How they do that it is not something that necessarily has strict "rules".
On the other hand, it was Bush I, so he wasn't doing good either way.
