In an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, fellow Fox News pundit Brit Hume gifted Carlson and his viewers with a condescending swipe at freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), calling her “adorable,” according to a report in HuffPost . The pair of talking heads bantered back and forth about Ocasio-Cortez, belittling her relative youth as well as the ambition and energy she brings to Congress.
“She’s kind of adorable in sort of the way that a 5-year-old child can be adorable,” the 75-year-old Hume said.
Since she was sworn into office in January, Fox News has been having a field day berating AOC, as she is known to her legions of supporters. Ocasio-Cortez presents a juicy target for her opponents on the right. As one of the guiding architects of the Green New Deal, a sweeping resolution proposing a national mobilization to fight climate change, economic inequity, and create jobs, AOC earned special opprobrium from numerous right-wing figures who are loath to admit that global climate change is real.
As Carlson and Hume riffed on how elements of the Green New Deal “are impossible, and undoubtedly would be impossible to pass,” Hume grudgingly gave Ocasio-Cortez her due as at least being “compelling,” although he did it in perhaps the most patronizing way possible.
“And that’s why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for all of her callowness and arguable shallowness is able to become so prominent,” Hume said. “She makes news.”
Carlson responded with concern over whether AOC may overstay her welcome.
“But she’s also really arrogant. I wonder if she’ll wear well?”
Ocasio-Cortez’s most recent transgression in the eyes of Fox News talking heads and viewers is that she had the temerity to announce that she is paying her interns $15 an hour, a rate that works out to some $52,000 a year. As pundits on another Fox News show noted, paying a living wage to her interns – most of whom on Capitol Hill are expected to work ridiculously long hours for lawmakers for free while living in one of the most expensive metro areas in the U.S. – meant that her chief of staff’s pay would be capped at $80,000, not the typical $125,000-plus such a position usually garners.
But even as right-wing figures like Hume hyperventilate over Ocasio-Cortez, when you read between the lines, there appears to be more than a little fear driving the way they seem to despise her and her policy proposals. Even Hume and Carlson grudgingly had to concede that AOC has become one of the most prominent figures in modern Democratic Party politics in just a couple of months.
“And she is, for the moment, I think it’s fair to say she’s the de facto leader [of] the Democrats in the House of Representatives,” Hume said.
“I think that’s right,” Carlson agreed. “And she is brave, I will say that. She says things nobody else will say.”
