Murder! she tweeted.

We’ll say this about Sandy Cortez: She has a flair for the dramatic. Whether it’s changing her name to the far more important-sounding “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” or saying, in the wake of the January 6 Capitol uprising, “We came close to half of the House nearly dying,” she knows how to titillate.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what our fractured politics don’t need right now. And yet yesterday, AOC outdid her histrionic self when she accused Texas Senator Ted Cruz of … attempted murder. Seriously.

And what did Cruz do to warrant such an accusation? Well, he agreed with her.

Cortez, always eager to let her 12 million Twitter followers know that she’s paying attention, weighed in on the GameStop kerfuffle currently roiling Wall Street. “This is unacceptable,” she tweeted. “We now need to know more about RobinhoodApp’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit. As a member of the Financial Services [Committee], I’d support a hearing if necessary.”

To which Senator Cruz, in what can only be seen as a good-faith effort to find common ground, tweeted, “Fully agree.”

That’s it. That’s all Ted Cruz said, and all he did to warrant an accusation of attempted murder from Cortez.

“I am happy to work with Republicans on this issue where there’s common ground,” she hysterically tweeted back, “but you almost had me murdered 3 weeks ago so you can sit this one out. In the meantime if you want to help, you can resign.”

Ah, unity.

The Dying Darknessers of Democracy at The Washington Post took it from there. “Open hostility broke out among Republicans and Democrats in Congress on Thursday amid growing fears of physical violence and looming domestic terrorism threats from supporters of former president Donald Trump, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi leveling an extraordinary allegation that dangers lurk among the membership itself,” raved the Post’s Colby Itkowitz and Mike DeBonis, before finally running out of prepositions.

As to those “lurking dangers,” there’s exactly zero evidence that Cruz “almost had [AOC] murdered” on January 6 or any other day. But there’s plenty of evidence that operatic behavior like hers is thwarting whatever wafer-thin hope Joe Biden had of building unity in the Beltway. To be fair, the eye-popping and record-shattering 40 executive orders he’s issued in just his first week in office might’ve had something to do with these heightened tensions.

Not surprisingly, though, the tension is most pronounced on the Left. No less a tranquilizing tone-setter than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for example, told her colleagues during a Thursday morning conference, “The enemy is within the House of Representatives, a threat that members are concerned about, in addition to what is happening outside.”

Pelosi was referring to newly elected Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. In a rather less than charitable characterization of Greene’s previous career in talk radio, Pelosi screeched, “Assigning her to the Education Committee when she has mocked the killing of little children at Sandy Hook Elementary… What could they be thinking, or is thinking too generous a word for what they might be doing?”

Way to lead by example, Madame Speaker.

Update: It turns out AOC wasn’t even in the Capitol building during the riot. Other than that, her hysterical screeching was accurate.