There was a time when the idea of someone with a room temperature IQ running for president of the United States was laughable, the plot of some awful movie. Since Joe Biden, all bets are off. For Democrats, having an IQ larger than your waistline is an obstacle, making it difficult to advocate for policies that have failed everywhere they've been tried with a straight face. Luckily for them, there aren't many Democrats who have a double-digit IQ, so it's not much of an issue, and their Queen is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In what has to be an attempt to see if there is anything a rabid leftist can do to alienate an audience, Stephen Colbert has had an endless stream of progressive politicians, journalists and activists on his show recently. It's almost like performance art where the artist is trying to see if there is a point at which the audience realizes they're being played for fools, but they never do. No amount of pandering, however obvious and ridiculous, dents their psyche and registers as mockery. It would make a great sociology experiment if sociology weren't a field more worthless than late-night "comedy" shows.
Just as an aside, remember when those comedy shows were about comedy? When hosts told jokes – set up, punchline? Now, all of these shows are rejected daytime speeches from the Democratic National Convention. Gone are the punchlines, replaced by applause lines. "Republicans sure suck, don't they?" and the audience of barking seals claps like they're hoping to be thrown a fish. Pathetic.
In the course of doing to comedy what Joe Biden did to Tara Reade, Colbert (who was totally cool with what Joe did and what Hunter did to all those obviously trafficked Russian girls) had Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on and nearly begged her to run for president in 2024.
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Cortez, someone who gives Eric Swalwell a run for the title of dumbest human being ever elected to Congress, downplayed the idea because you have to while the president is of your party and not term-limited out of reelection.
Maybe AOC remembered when Swalwell actually ran for president and how that went over like a fart in a crowded elevator? Whatever the case, she played it as if she weren't interested. I, however, wish she would run.
She won't. In fact, she can't. She may not realize it, but someone around her eventually will. And if not, because stupid people do run in packs, someone in the party itself will let her know, in single-syllable words, why her running would damage not only her but the Democratic Party as a whole.
How? It's pretty simple, actually.
Right now, AOC is "powerful" among feckless backbench Democrats that no one but their constituents have ever heard of. They fear her social media wrath and labor under the delusion that Twitter is real life. Democratic members of Congress who hate AOC (and there are a lot of them) go along with her because they don't want to be attacked by her and alienate the radical base of their party. That base is small, but they are motivated. And in a year when it's not good to be a Democrat, every vote is going to matter. AOC's army of flying monkeys being turned on a Democrat could be the difference-maker in many races.
There isn't respect for AOC; she's an embarrassment who regularly gets the most basic of basics about American government wildly wrong. But to the party establishment, she is the ultimate tool, an assassin to keep everyone in line. If she were to run, she would lose, and she'd lose badly – even most Democrats see her for the idiot she is.
Once AOC goes the way of Howard Dean, her brand is ruined; her usefulness is over. The "Green New Deal" will have been literally on the ballot and rejected by Democrats. Every single one of the asinine ideas she's floated to an adoring press will have been tossed aside by a majority of the very people we've been told were desperate for them. Where would the party go from there? Who will be their next unwitting enforcer?
A useful idiot is just an idiot once they outlive their usefulness, and an AOC rejected by the party outside of her safe New York enclave would be the ultimate useless idiot. The party can't let her run for president for that reason, but boy, would it be fun if she did it anyway.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily nationally syndicated radio show, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly "Week in F***ing Review" podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter
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