AOC makes an ass of herself - today's edition

In her zeal to tie together an array of mostly imagined occurrences and pin them on a supposedly greedy capitalist who happened to be a captive audience, she got in way over her head. All the guy on the receiving end of her incoherent attempt at a pillory job had to do was - well, what he did.

She sits on the House Financial Services Committee. It's now headed by Maxine Waters, who has long had it in for the banking industry, even though she has some questionable connections with it herself. 

Waters had arranged a hearing the point of which was to skewer the head of Wells Fargo. One wonders whether committee chairwoman Waters feels that her protege made the best use of her grilling time as this exchange unfolded:

As the Daily Wire pointed out, AOC began by accusing Wells Fargo of caging children, an accusation to which Sloan was awfully confused about.

“Why was the bank involved in the caging of children and financing the caging of children to begin with?” Ocasio-Cortez asked.

“I don’t know how to answer that question because we weren’t,” Sloan said simply.

“Uh, so in finan–, you’ve, you were financing, involved in debt financing in CoreCivic and GEO group, correct?” Ocasio-Cortez responded.

“For a period of time, we were involved in financing one of the firms, we are not anymore,” [Wells Fargo CEO Timothy] Sloan said. “I’m not familiar with the specific assertion you are making, we were not involved in that.”

Our favorite democratic socialist then moved on to trying to nail Wells Fargo with environmental damages from oil pipelines. This also confused Sloan, seeing as how there have been no damages due to leaks from pipelines. This forced Ocasio-Cortez to ask him if Wells Fargo should be responsible if it happened “hypothetically.”

“Should Wells Fargo be held responsible for the damages incurred by Climate Change due to the financing of fossil fuels and these projects?” Ocasio-Cortez asked.
“I don’t know how’d you calculate that, Congresswoman,” Sloan responded.

“Say from spills, or when we have to reinvest in infrastructure building sea walls from the erosion of, um, from the erosion of infrastructure or cleanups, wildfires, etc…,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

“Related to that pipeline?” Sloan replied. “I’m not aware that there’s been any of what you’ve described that’s occurred that’s related to that pipeline.”

“How about, uh, the cleans up from the leaks of the Dakota Access pipeline?” said Ocasio-Cortez.

“I’m not aware of the leaks associated with the Dakota Access pipeline that you’re describing,” Sloan responded.

“So, hypothetically, if there was a leak from the Dakota Access pipeline, why shouldn’t Wells Fargo pay for the clean up of it since it paid for the construction of the pipeline itself?”

Sloan, once again, had a simple answer.

“Because we don’t operate the pipeline, we provide financing to the company that’s operating the pipeline,” he said. 

What if pigs could fly, Sandy?

The exit question here is whether grilling someone about how he would respond to a hypothetical situation dependent upon all kinds of contingencies is seen by most people as a ridiculous polemical approach, or whether a critical mass sees it as a valid way to take someone down.