Although I almost hate to write this out loud, it’s time to tell “the others” the truth: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is just messin’ with you.

    I hate to tell you because it’s hilarious when y’all get all high horsey about how “dumb as a box of hammers” the freshman from New York’s 14th Congressional District is because you honestly believe she is terrified of her own garbage disposal.

    I mean, hell, you’ve had a garbage disposal ever since you were just a wee angry conservative incapable of recognizing irony and humor in its most hilarious form. What’s her problem?

    I repeat: She’s messin’ with you. I imagine she got the idea after y’all went ape doodoo about a video showing her dancing at a party when she was a student at Boston University. Not nekkid dancing, just dancing. Somehow, this moment of utter normalcy threatened y’all down to the bitter marrow in your crackling bones.

    Sorry, not sorry.

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is having a moment. And, every now and then, it’s just for fun.

    The now-famous Snapchat of her over-the-top horror at the ghostly growls coming from the garbage disposal in her new D.C. apartment wasn’t real. But it was real funny.

    Unfortunately, as we all know by now, “nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that humor excites in those who lack it.”

    I have that George Saintsbury quote wood-burned on a plaque in my office and I need to read it and breathe deeply at least eleventy times a day.

    Yes. I know there’s no such word as eleventy. Stand down.

    The conservative pundits, bless their tortured, tangled hearts (thanks Dixie Chicks) didn’t get the joke and were off and runnin’ like the gun show had just set up shop over at the National Guard Armory.

    Cue NRA misplaced outrage.

    The humor-impaired, irony-resistant strain of conservative is particularly annoying because, let’s be honest, their default is a cocktail of fearmongering and pious outrage. Humor? That’s a plot by the Hollywood elite and anyone who has ever done a juice cleanse.

    They are ALL the preacher in “Footloose” (before he sees the light). The very worst motives are assigned to progressives. At one point, Fox & Friends were “thiiiiissss close” to saying AOC would have to pry their garbage disposals from their cold, dead hands.

    AOC’s insistence on breathing in and out every day is enough to incite hate among the far right. But now, this! This mocking of a purely optional appliance (which was outlawed in New York for many years) whose sole job is to grind leftovers to bits, why…it’s un-American!

    But there’s no lightness in the hearts of AOC’s loudest critics. Perhaps they should give her the old witch test: Bake a cake with rye flour and the urine of her enemies, feed it to a dog and if the dog dies, she’s a witch. Look for that recipe and many more in the Barefoot Contessa’s next cookbook: “Jeffrey’s Favorite Quiches & Spells.”

    That was a joke.