Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez (“Don’t cry for me/ Westchester County/ the truth is/ I never left you”) didn’t grow up in a blue-collar neighborhood. But I did. In fact, just a couple miles from the Queens part of Cortez’s Bronx-heavy district. Let me give you some local color, from an old piece I published in 2008:

I’d grown up in the congressional district of benevolent, pro-life, Mafia-connected Democrat Mario Biaggi. He’d done a good job, as far as we could see. He’d voted right. Made key phone calls in support of the tenants association started in the tenement where we lived, a group run by my mother: a Hell’s Kitchen-Irish chain-smoking agoraphobic compulsive gambler who somehow found a way to lose tens of thousands at church bingo — and a genius at grass roots politics. People begged her to run for City Council, and she considered it, until she found out the job included going “into the City” (Manhattan). She hadn’t been there for 30 years. If I ever write a memoir, mom’s chapter will be called “Angela’s Ashtray.”

With Biaggi’s help, my mother faced down our slumlord, and forced him to start providing heat and hot water to bewildered Greek immigrants. Then she organized the tenants to schlep out the pee-soaked mattresses and liquor bottles in the gardens, and plant hundreds of rose bushes and poplar trees. When the landlord threatened to start bringing in tenants on welfare, she told him “That’s blockbusting!” and promised a rent strike. He backed down. A crusader for tenants rights. The most effective segregationist in Queens. Mom was little of both.

She also bore a disturbing resemblance to Geraldine Ferraro, from the cheesy Helen Reddy haircut and sharp red fingernails to the scrape-down-the-chalkboard New Yawk accent. In the early 80s, redistricting had peeled away Archie Bunker’s Astoria from Biaggi and given it to Ferraro, which presented our Catholic neighborhood with a whole new kind of politician. Long the congressman for upscale, secular Forest Hills, Ferraro had signed on with the leftist platform that the Democrats adopted after 1968. But she still knew how to pander, old school — in her party’s grand tradition.

Mr. Crowley, You Are No Mario Biaggi!

Biaggi was the kind of Democrat who used to represent Queens. So when I read about Joe Crowley, I figured he might be in Biaggi’s mold. Corrupt? Sure, why not. But basically in line with the rough economic interests of the people who lived in his district. Pro-big government, naturally. Still patriotic and sane.

Could Crowley be more anti-American if he were actually a registered agent of a foreign government? Or secretly working for human smuggling cartels?

Crowley, you might remember, is the old-line machine politician who lost the Democratic nomination to the Evita from Westchester, Senorita Ocasio-Cortez. Many took her victory as a bellwether. A signal gun shot into the sky announcing how leftist the Democrats are becoming. And that makes for a handy narrative. But it masks just how crackpot the Democrats already were. With some fading exceptions, they are no longer even a properly American political party.

This week, the retiring Crowley reminded us how extreme the “mainstream” Democratic machine has become. It’s only that now Americans are finally starting to notice it.

Big Lawsuits from Illegal Aliens?

According to The Washington Examiner:

Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., suggested Wednesday that families who were separated at the border as a result of the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy should be financially compensated for the trauma and inconveniences experienced in the process.

“To have these children ripped apart and separated is one of the most reprehensible things I’ve witnessed in my 20 years of service here in the House of Representatives,” Crowley, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said during a press conference at the U.S. Capitol.

“The damage that has been done to these families will be lifelong as well. And in fact, I suggest that they need to be compensated for what this administration did to them. And the first form of compensation needs to be the full reunification of these families,” said Crowley, who recently lost the primary race for his seat.

Clock Boy, Times Ten Thousand

Let’s get this straight. Every one of the families whose children ended up in temporary custody entered the U.S. illegally. Now Crowley expects us to pay for the emotional boo-booes they suffered while trying to break our laws. Bring on George Soros’ lawyers! Let’s tie up the U.S. government in court. Bring on the frivolous, multi-million dollar claims. Think “Clock Boy,” many thousands of times over.

Could Crowley be more anti-American if he were actually a registered agent of a foreign government? Or secretly working for human smuggling cartels? How would he act any differently?

Trump Was Protecting Children, and Us

In fact, the Trump administration separated adults from kids whom they claimed as their in part to detect human smugglers with kidnapped children. Don’t think that’s a problem?

Read what African-American leader Bishop Aubrey Shines wrote in The Daily Caller.

As the Huffington Post reported, eighty percent of women and young girls who make that journey are raped along the way. That is why “rape trees” with their torn and bloodied clothes profane our southern border.

Human smugglers linked with gangs like MS-13 corral these immigrants like animals, exploit the women and often steal their children. Then those children enter the nightmare world of slave labor, sex trafficking and child pornography. How do such smugglers get these children into America? By posing as their parents. And until the U.S. government started splitting adults from children at the border, these criminals were getting away with it, on a massive scale.

As The Washington Post reported, “The Obama administration failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers, a Senate investigation has found.

“The Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations.”

How many of those children ended up in the hands of sex traffickers? We may never know.

That’s the price we paid for leaving the U.S. border uncontrolled. Even the Obama administration saw that this wasn’t working. That’s why it started separating children from adults among illegal immigrants — to protect them.

If anything, the foreign kids who might justly sue our government would be those whom Obama’s people sent into slave labor with strangers!

Little Get-Out-of-Jail-Free-Cards

Now maybe Bishop Shines was being a little too generous. The Trump administration also acted to protect Americans, from the flagrant abuse of our laws. From letting human traffickers use bewildered, dehydrated kids as “get-out-of-jail-free” cards for the migrants they’re charging $5,000 per head to smuggle.

That’s the President’s first job. To look out for America First, if I might coin a phrase. But Trump also acted humanely and responsibly. He’s trying to impose order instead of chaos, to reclaim our southern border as sovereign U.S. (not cartel) territory. That’s quite unlike Rep. Crowley, whom Republicans should call “the distinguished gentleman from MS-13” for the next few months, until he really does retire into well-deserved oblivion. The Democratic party deserves to follow him there.