Come and get me, AOC.
I’ll be waiting.
That’s my message to Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, Robert Reich, the Trump Accountability Project and all the other left-wing zealots who want to go after people who supported Donald Trump.
Talk about shades of disgraced President Richard Nixon and his enemies list. These people make the Nixon crowd look like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
At least Nixon was president when he compiled his list of enemies. This crowd of crazies has not even ousted Trump from the White House, and they are blacklisting, censuring and insulting people who campaigned against China Joe.
And they are doing it even after China Joe has promised to be president of all Americans, and not just only those who voted for him. That is pretty big of him.
These nasties even include Michelle Obama, wife of the sainted Barack Obama, who demonized 71 million Americans who voted for Trump. She said: “Let’s remember that tens of millions of people voted for the status quo, even when it meant supporting lies, hate, chaos and division.”
She used to say of Obama critics, “When they go low, we go high.” That now has morphed into, “When they go low, we go lower.”
Now these zealots are out to punish people who supported Trump. Reich, a leftist professor who once ran for governor of Massachusetts — and thankfully lost — and served in the Clinton administration, wants to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to ”erase Trump’s lies” and expose those who “enabled” them.
Those found guilty, rather than face a firing squad, would be sentenced to ride the MBTA without a mask and, when caught, pay a $300 fine. That will teach them.
A ringleader in all of this is AOC, who has urged her supporters to create an archive of “Trump sycophants” for future reference in the purge of Trump supporters, all of whom will be dragged before Reich’s commission.
That is why I am challenging AOC to come get me. I am not deterred by her political fame or that she bears the names of two military conquerors, Alexander the Great, who conquered Persia, and Hernan Cortez, the conquistador who wiped out the Aztecs and claimed Mexico for Spain.
It is beside the point that they killed or enslaved thousands of innocent men, women and children. They were men of their times. And there are no statues of them around to topple anyway.
Since both AOC and I are graduates of Boston University — in different eras, or course — I am letting her know that I will be at a corner table at the Dugout, the famous BU basement watering hole on Commonwealth Avenue across the main campus.
I haven’t been there for a long time, but hopefully they still serve pitchers of beer and free popcorn.
Back in the day, the late Jimmy O’Keefe, who owned the joint, was a run of the mill old school Democrat who would give you the shirt off his back, and sell you beer to go out the back door after closing time.
And if he were around today and AOC walked in, he would probably look up and say, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” But Jimmy is not around anymore.
Anyway, AOC, who was a bartender at Flats Fix, a taco and tequila bar in Manhattan before elected to Congress, must know about the Dugout, and although a dive, it is our dive.
But having gone to BU and graduated in 2011, AOC must have hung out at the Dugout. There are reports that you cannot graduate unless you’ve hoisted a few at the Dugout.
If AOC wants to get me, I’ll be there waiting even though, as Groucho Marx would have said — there are times when I wouldn’t drink in a bar that would have me as a customer.
The last woman I invited for a beer at the Dugout — a long time ago — was Anne Sexton, the poet. We were in Robert Lowell’s poetry class. She and Lowell were smoking Gauloises. I was transfixed. I told her what a good idea it was if we went across the street to the Dugout for a beer.
She gave me a look and wisely turned me down.
But I’m back, AOC. So come and get me.
Email comments to: luke1825@aol.com
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