Look who just woke up and smelled the coffee burning. After taking a beating in virtual meet-ups over her hypocritical silence on border conditions under Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez finally criticized the status quo late yesterday — while still pulling her punches:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday night finally slammed the overcrowded conditions for immigrants at the US-Mexican border under President Biden as “inhumane”, “horrifying,” “unacceptable” and “barbaric.”

She also blamed decades of US foreign policy with countries in neighboring Central America as contributing to the perpetual crisis of desperate residents from poor, violence-torn countries flooding the border.

AOC unloaded on the border crisis during a virtual town hall meeting Wednesday night.

Yes yes yes, the conditions are “inhumane”, “horrifying,” “unacceptable” and “barbaric,” Ocasio-Cortez finally admitted, after two months of almost total silence on what had been one of her main causes during the Trump administration. Even so, AOC tried to let Biden off easy:

“The fact that this keeps happening is a political failure of both parties,” Ocasio-Cortez said. …

“I’ve been in contact with the Biden Administration personally. What is different is they’re trying to figure out … how to find the resources to end his problem,” AOC said..

It is a political failure of both parties, but Ocasio-Cortez is a large part of that failure as well. Just like most of the elected officials in her Democratic Party, AOC used the previous four years for grandstanding stunts at the border, demonizing enforcement agencies (remember “Abolish ICE”?), and demanding her maximalist open-border policies rather than work toward a bipartisan solution. Republicans, now freed from any real responsibility at the border, will likely spend the next couple of years grandstanding at the border while demanding their own maximalist positions be adopted, too.

And both sides will tear their own colleagues to shreds for even suggesting compromises that might allow the nation’s broken immigration, asylum, and border policies to get fixed in a rational manner. The lesson from the Gang of Eight was that governing was fatal to political ambitions, and that stunt work was the safest route for members of Congress with higher ambitions. Ocasio-Cortez spent the last four years enthusiastically engaging in that kind of demagoguery, which makes this answer every bit as hypocritical as her silence.