In another example of the Democrats keying their own car, Squad leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered her own rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last night. But perhaps the sight of her own party members’ reactions to the announcement that Ilhan Omar would be giving a rebuttal caused her to significantly lower the temperature of her own observations. She ended up taking Biden to task on a number of items from the speech, but the harshest language she included only rose to the level of saying that Biden’s agenda “left a little bit to be desired.” (Ouch, AOC! That’s gonna leave a mark.) So what did she find disappointing? In general terms, the far-left agenda of the House Progressive Caucus was largely left out of the speech or at least significantly watered down. (NY Post)

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that President Biden’s State of the Union speech Tuesday “left a little bit to be desired” because it didn’t go far enough to push progressive policies on student loan debt, immigration and energy policy.

The socialist “Squad” leader picked apart her own party’s commander in chief shortly after his speech ended — eclipsing the more widely anticipated but ultimately less-critical “rebuttal” to Biden from leftist ally Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).

“The piece on immigration was really just glossed over and we have over 10 — you know, anywhere between 10 to 13 million immigrants in this country that feel desperate for a path to citizenship,” Ocasio-Cortez said on MSNBC.

AOC is still banging on about a full amnesty for the more than ten million illegal aliens currently living in the United States. (A number that continues to swell on a daily basis thanks to the Biden border crisis.) I’m not sure if she thought that Biden would use last night as an opportunity to declare a general amnesty, but that was never going to happen. She also had apparently been hoping that Biden would declare that he was canceling all student loan debt, but that idea was left on the cutting room floor as well.

In an odd twist, AOC went on to criticize the president for something where she and I actually agree, though for starkly different reasons. She denounced the idea of Biden releasing even more oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Of course, unlike my assertion that the SPR needs to be preserved for an actual emergency rather than one of Biden’s own making, Ocasio-Cortez complained that the President was “missing an opportunity” to shift further away from gas-powered vehicles and toward electric ones, particularly for mass transit. It’s unclear how she thinks Biden could magically make all of the required infrastructure (not the mention the actual vehicles) appear quickly enough to address the current crisis, but then again, I honestly have no idea what color the sky is in AOC’s world.

Overall, it would appear that AOC remains clueless as to the likely reason that Biden not only failed to embrace the Progressive Caucus’ agenda but even flatly rejected some of it. (Biden received a standing ovation from nearly everyone when he decried calls to defund the police.) Biden has begun to figure out (or at least some of his handlers have) that most of the radical left progressive agenda is simply not popular. Recent polling done as part of the measurements of Biden’s tanking approval ratings has shown that strong majorities of Americans see that agenda as, at best, something they don’t care about, with most others finding it totally toxic.

The Democrats are already panicking over the possibility that an anticipated red wave in November could still turn into a red tsunami. To his credit, Joe Biden appeared to try to steer the ship back a bit closer to the center last night and whitewash the way he has completely kowtowed to the progressive wing of his party since taking office. The memo clearly hasn’t made it to Ilhan Omar, AOC, and the rest of their crew, however, and last night’s Democratic rebuttals showed that quite clearly.