Kevin McCarthy Wins the Prize for Most Ridiculous AOC Attack of the Week

By Rafi Schwartz  |  June 19, 2019 | 5:34pm
Congress

The painfully stupid argument over whether Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was right to label the government’s migrant internment centers “concentration camps” (she extremely was) continued unabated on Wednesday, with Republican Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy demanding AOC apologize to the entire damn planet for her extremely accurate description.

“I think Congresswoman AOC needs to apologize,” McCarthy told reporters during a press conference on Wednesday. (Yes, he called her “Congresswoman AOC.”) “Not only to the nation but to the world. She does not understand history.”

The world? The whole, entire, world?

While it’s unclear what McCarthy was actually envisioning (AOC standing in front of the UN General Assembly and writing “I’m sorry” 100 times on a blackboard?) he nevertheless pressed on, insisting that America’s incarceration of families from marginalized communities has no historical relevance to any other incarcerations of families from marginalized communities.

“To take something that happened in history where millions of Jews died and equate that to somewhere that’s happening on the border—she owes this nation an apology,” McCarthy said.

As many, many, many people have pointed out, AOC was decidedly not comparing federal detention centers with dedicated Nazi death camps like Auschwitz—a crucial distinction that opportunistic conservatives seem eager to gloss over in the service of scoring cheap political points (assuming they even know the difference at all).

Perhaps McCarthy should learn some history, and make an apology of his own.

 
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