If you ever play poker, you’ve probably seen this scenario unfold a time or two. A player in love with their own mastery of the game pushes a bunch of chips into the center of the table, only to be immediately called by the person on their left. When the two flip their cards, it is revealed that the first player had nothing and the calling player had something lame like a high pair…but still enough to take the pot. At this point, the bluffing player might go on a rant about terrible donks and mathematical odds and even “idiots from Northern Europe,” depending on his predilections. It’s embarrassing, but it happens.
But even though the bluffing player may be right about the wisdom of calling a huge push with a single pair, the fact remains that players do that sometimes. Maybe it’s because they aren’t very good, maybe it’s just because they had a read on the bluffer. And maybe it’s because they just wanted to have a little fun and take a big risk. Maybe they thought that seeing the look on the other player’s face would add enough expected value to the pot to make it worth the unfavorable odds.
Whatever the case, the outrage is usually the same, and it’s the same kind of outrage we detected from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this week when she learned that GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell was bringing her Green New Deal up for a floor vote.
“The GOP’s whole game of wasting votes in Congress to target others ‘on the record’, for legislation they have no intent to pass, is a disgrace,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Sunday. “Stop wasting the American peoples’ time + learn to govern. Our jobs aren’t for campaigning, & that’s exactly what these bluff-votes are for.”
How rich. It is a “disgrace” and a waste of the American peoples’ time for McConnell to bring the Green New Deal up for a vote? Then what was it when you wasted our time coming up with the legislation in the first place? Is that what your New York constituents sent you to Washington to do? Write bills that would embarrass the climate change movement, bring shame down on the Democrats, and stand absolutely no chance whatsoever of being passed into law? That seems like a pretty strange use of taxpayer time and money, but then, Ocasio-Cortez is an expert on strange uses of those two.
“Just a good old-fashioned, state-planned economy. Garden-variety 20th-century socialism,” McConnell said of the Green New Deal recently. “Our Democratic colleagues have taken all the debunked philosophies of the last hundred years, rolled them into one giant package, and thrown a little ‘green’ paint on them to make them look new.”
And now he’s going to make them go on the record. They apparently plan to protest by voting “present” and whining about it on social media.
Bluff called.
