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Progressive panelists clashed over their response to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s viral foreign policy comments after one attempted to defend the “Squad” member on Monday.
YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen and “The Young Turks” commentator Ana Kasparian joined a panel on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” where they discussed Ocasio-Cortez struggling to answer whether the U.S. should commit to sending troops to defend Taiwan.
“Um, you know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a um — this is, of course, a, um, very long-standing, um, policy of the United States,” she stammered before answering the question.
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Though both conservative and liberal commentators have criticized Ocasio-Cortez’s comments, Cohen called the backlash “super unfair” considering the topic.
“I think what she’s basically being asked here is if the U.S. should, like, engage in what may be tantamount to a war with the other biggest global superpower on Earth,” Cohen said. “And like, that’s not an easy question.”
“I actually think, yeah, she stammered in the beginning, and God knows that we’ve all stammered in the beginning of difficult questions,” he continued. “But I think that her answer was that we need to engage in diplomacy so that it doesn’t get to that point is a perfectly acceptable answer and frankly, a much better answer than Donald Trump saying, ‘No, we do need to like, annex Greenland or bomb Cuba or take over the Panama Canal.’”
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Cohen repeated that he would “a thousand times out of a thousand” accept Ocasio-Cortez’s response over President Donald Trump’s “era of imperialism.”
“I think that’s a false choice, and you know that,” Kasparian interrupted. “I think we need to have higher standards for Democrats.”
Although Kasparian said she agreed with Cohen’s criticism of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, she argued that it was not an excuse to ignore the flaws in Democratic candidates.
“In regard to Democratic candidates, we have to stop providing cover for their mediocrity. That answer was terrible and you know it. So don’t provide cover for it,” Kasparian said.
“So tell me what you think would have been a more acceptable answer,” Cohen asked.
“A sensible answer would have been exactly what you said, which you claim she said, but she didn’t say that. You read that from her statements, but her statement was more than just clamoring. It was just a bunch of word salad nonsense because she’s not an expert on foreign policy. This is a weak spot for her,” Kasparian said.
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She continued, “So this is an area where she should have done a lot more homework before deciding to speak at the Munich Security Conference as she did at this panel. She didn’t know what she was talking about. She was blindsided by the question, and it doesn’t look good. Let’s just be honest about it rather than providing cover for it.”
Several moderate and liberal commentators have admitted that Ocasio-Cortez’s comments were “not great,” with some going as far as to call them “one of the bigger mistakes” of her career.
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Talking to The New York Times about the reaction to the trip, Ocasio-Cortez said she went to Munich “not because I’m running for president, not because I’ve made some kind of decision about a horse race or a candidacy, but because we need to sound the alarm bells that a lot of those folks in nicely pressed suits in that room will not be there much longer if we do not do something about the runaway inequality that is fueling far-right populist movements.”