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OPINION

When AOC Bickers, Remember Lost Patriots

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
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AP Photo/Kathy Willens

Congresswoman AOC told Latino USA podcaster Maria Hinojosa recently that she’s in therapy after the traumatic years of the “fascistic” Trump administration and the Jan. 6 riot, which she described as effectively “serving in war.”  

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Fresh off the battlefield, AOC had already talked about the “extraordinarily traumatizing event” at the Capitol on her Instagram account, Feb. 1:

“Where is she?!  Where is she?!” the congresswoman said, reenacting her version of the ordeal with the talkative meanderings of a toothy 5-year-old.   “I can tell you that I had a very close encounter where I thought I was going to die.  I did not know if I was going to make it to the end of that day alive.”

Turns out that her office, blocks away from the Capitol, was never breached.  The angry screamer banging on her door was a Capitol cop, there to help.  She was never in an ounce of danger, but she was quick to bask in the stolen glory of pretending to be in danger.  Her Instagram video got over 6 million views and 28,000 comments, at last count.  Mission accomplished.   

Months later, the truth still couldn’t stop AOC from believing the fiction she created in her head.

“This was an attempted coup – an all-out coup attempt,” she told Hinojosa, saying that Mike Pence was removed from the Senate Chamber 60 seconds before “terrorists” and “insurrectionists” got there.  “… 60 seconds could have potentially meant the difference between what we have now, and martial law.”

And so goes the queen bee of the Lollipop Revolution – a childish mutiny with cream puff solutions to manufactured grievances that are completely disconnected from reality.  

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When I hear this pampered politician talk about “serving in war,” I think of the brave patriots who spilled their blood to give her the freedom she uses to constantly bicker against her own country.  

I think of my Marine Corps days.   

In 1994, I disembarked with others from the USS Belleau Wood (LHA-3) onto a landing craft waiting to take a group of us about a half-mile north across the Pacific Ocean toward the Island Iwo Jima.  We were there to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Battle of Leyte Gulf.  

As we made our way through the Pacific toward the southern edge of the island, I couldn’t quite grasp the fact that we were taking the same route, in a similar landing craft, that American troops took during the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945.  

About 70,000 Americans fought there.  Some 26,000 of them were casualties; 6,800 died.  Words can’t describe how sacred that black sand felt under my feet, with the blood of thousands of Americans beneath it somewhere.  Mt. Suribachi stood in the distance at the southwest tip of the island.

While waiting to be housed in one of the island’s Quonset huts, we spoke to a group of Americans who had not set foot on the island in 49 years.  They had war stories, of course.  For me, one stood out.  

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A former Marine who looked to be in his 70s talked about his first landing on Iwo in ‘45. He said he was chatting with a close buddy as they approached the island in Higgins boats from their ship.  The moment the door dropped down, his buddy was shot in the stomach and his intestines gushed out.  Very much alive, his friend ran around in the soft black sand of Iwo Jima, screaming and frantically trying to stuff his intestines back into his body.  That’s real war.  

Others told of seeing portions of their buddy’s heads blown off while still alive, body parts separated and flung over the battlefield, and the unbearable grief of seeing their fallen buddies being buried at sea in flag-draped caskets, thousands of miles from home. 

I also thought of a speech I heard at a POW commemoration about Air Force Fighter pilot Capt. Lance Sijan.  His F-4C fighter bomber crashed in a ball of fire over Vietnam in 1967 after a malfunction caused the plane’s ordnance to detonate prematurely.  With no survival kit, no food, little water, a fractured skull, a mangled hand, and fractured leg, he evaded capture for 46 days by crawling down a rocky limestone karst on his back.  He was captured on Christmas Day.  

“It didn’t take his captors long to figure out that without too much effort on their part – it was either prodding or poking or twisting or turning his arms and legs – that they could send shards of excruciating pain through every fiber of his being,” said Michael Goldware, a Southern California attorney.  “His fellow prisoners knew they could do nothing to help him, but he knew he could do something for them.  In all these torture sessions, Capt. Sijan could repeatedly be heard threatening his captors.”  

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Sijan died in captivity from disease, exhaustion, and malnutrition, but never gave up information to his captors.  That’s war.

Goldware also told of Lt. Cmdr. Mike Christian, who was beaten severely after his captors discovered he used a bamboo needle to sew an American flag on the inside of his shirt. Fellow prisoners used it to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at meals.  After being tortured, his cell mates cleaned him up as best they could.  Later, with both eyes nearly closed from severe beatings, they saw him with that bamboo needle, sewing another flag, straining to see his project in the dimly lit cell.

The love, bravery and sacrifices of these men – and thousands like them – puts the half-baked revolutionary rhetoric of AOC and her ilk into perspective. They’ve infiltrated centers of power in government, business, sports, and the media, and are making America unrecognizable with divisive gibberish about equity, social justice, imperialism, and equating an out-of-control protest with “serving in war.”   

“People want to think that this stuff [anti-Asian violence, border crisis, anti-Black racism] is disconnected because they want to believe in this mythology of America or the United States that we were fed as children,” AOC told Hinojosa.  “Capitalism is a colonial and imperialist economic structure. … Right now our education system largely teach[es] white people who they are, and everyone else is a supporting character.”

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When AOC, liberals, and leftists bicker against their own country, remember the patriots who gave their lives, and act accordingly. 

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