Abby Phillip Bends Over Backwards to Whitewash AOC Gaffe in Hacky Partisan Hitjob

CNN NewsNight host Abby Phillip has at last gotten around to covering Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) disastrous, meandering answer to the preeminent foreign policy question of the 21st century at the Munich Security Conference.

Here’s how Phillip ran cover for the gaffe in transparently partisan, self-parodic fashion on Tuesday night.

First, she played a clip of the exchange in which Ocasio-Cortez was asked if American troops would and should defend Taiwan in the case of a Chinese invasion of the island nation. The congresswoman and potential presidential candidate replied: “You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, this is of course a very longstanding policy of the United States. And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point. And we want make sure we are moving in all of our economic, research, and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.”

“MAGA is having a field day with this one,” complained the player-posing-as-referee.

Then came the pivot.

“A flub for AOC, but the question is also, what happens when the president, the actual president of the United States, does very similar things on the world stage?” Phillip wondered aloud before playing a sizzle reel of President Donald Trump misspeaking.

“So, look, I’ll give you that AOC probably should have been more ready for that question,”  she conceded after the reel’s conclusion before posing the following question to a right-leaning guest: “But are we going to really pretend that the actual president of the United States has not made similar or perhaps worse flubs on the global stage?”

You wouldn’t be able to make it up if it hadn’t happened.

Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most most influential figures in the country, and widely-regarded — including by this author — to be a contender for the White House. She herself chose to accept an invite to this event, a conference about international security policy, and faced a simple inquiry about not some niche issue, but the single eventuality most likely to incite a third world war.

She proceeded to betray the fact that she not only knew nothing about the topic, she had scarcely even considered it.

“This is a very longstanding policy of the United States,” explained Ocasio-Cortez. It’s entirely unclear what she meant by “this,” but the closest thing to an antecedent is “the United States would permit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan in the case of an attack.”

Wrong. America has for decades pursued a policy of “strategic ambiguity” — or not saying one way or another whether it willy intervene militarily in such a conflict — on Taiwan.

The rest of her answer was pablum (“moving in all of our economic, research, and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise”) that nodded toward the idea of deterrence, but, critically, failed to acknowledge that one’s answer to the question she was posed is paramount to establishing it. It was a massive swing-and-a-miss.

Abby Phillip, journalist, discerned that the real story in all of this was the hypocrisy of conservatives who called it as much.

And the examples she marshaled to prove her point were not even substantive gaffes of the kind Ocasio-Cortez had committed (and that Phillip herself did later in the segment when she insisted Trump had misidentified a European Union official as U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer even though he was, in fact, standing next to Starmer), but the president tripping over his words  — despite the abundance of substantive Trump gaffes she could have used!

This wasn’t just brazen hackery meant to distract from an inconvenient subject, it was thrown together so lazily as to insult the intelligence of her audience.

Among the wisest observations of our age is that for many in the industry, “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.”

With Abby Phillip emerging as one of the faces of her network, it ought to consider adopting this axiom as a motto.

Watch above via CNN.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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