The chaos that is American politics began to gel a little bit yesterday. It’s still not pretty and it’s never going to be — it’s more like those terrifying Jell-O recipes from the 50s, but at least we’re seeing some progress towards the final boss battle.
You know that Joe Manchin had previously announced that he wouldn’t run in 2024. Well, now Kyrsten Sinema has also bowed out. I’m going to have to recommend this obituary by Albert Burneko.
What a horrible nightmare of a person Kyrsten Sinema is. That she might end up having been the signal political figure of our time—a period in which the day-to-day work of elected officials has become so hopelessly divorced from the material conditions their work nominally governs that “Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns” can function as the full ideological expression and sum total contribution of an actual senator—does nothing to redeem her, personally. At a certain point you could extend her a kind of sour grudging credit, I guess, for having pioneered a new depth of undisguised cynicism in politics, a dark idiocratic abyssal layer where nothing has any value except to the extent that it demonstrably foils one’s own political party and sells out one’s own voters in service to one’s patrons. This is the kind of credit you give when you walk into an apocalyptically ruined public bathroom, freeze, and say, “Whoa, somebody took one crazy friggin’ dump in here.”Blessed by St. Collins. Now you know she’s evil.
This society’s total prostration could hardly find a better—which is to say worse—avatar than Kyrsten Sinema, the mandate that nothing may ever be allowed to disrupt its consumption (or even to facilitate the hope that it could be slowed) congealed into a sneering blonde Karen theatrically performing her own imaginary cuteness while she kills even mild and popular compromise initiatives toward a better future. It’s rare for a single person to hold that kind of power, and unspeakably awful and sad that it fell into the hands of an absolute F-minus of a human being.
In any case, if holding her spiteful, obstructive, nihilistic line turns out not to have benefited any electoral ambitions—there’s no real broad base for a program best described as “the most hateful possible centrism,” to the surprise of no one else—it’s also not clear that Sinema ever authentically had any, at least as such things might be said to exist separate from her own quest to get ahead. Which fits, since she also lacks any authentic political beliefs, convictions, or sympathy to or solidarity with humanity, at least as such things might be said to exist separate from her own quest to get ahead. Her constituents as electoral politics defined them hated her guts; on the other hand she all but explicitly did not consider them her real constituents. Her real constituency (assuming Literally Dracula doesn’t count here) is the class of rich freaks for whose benefit she will now even more openly serve. Few could promise to protect them with as little shame, or as much sheer sadistic glee. I wish her all the very worst, forever and ever.
In other news about hypocritical women flopping at politics, Nikki Haley has dropped out of the presidential race. Didn’t she announce last week that she was in it all the way? Unfortunately, even in defeat she didn’t manage the dignity of opposing the corrupt criminal who had stomped on her.
Trumpworld’s frequent insults of Haley—who the former president slammed as “birdbrain”—would indicate that the South Carolina governor is unlikely to be a surrogate or booster of the Trump campaign this election season.
Still, despite it all, Haley has already made the case that Trump is a better choice than Biden—even if she claimed both are dangerous. In an interview with NPR from Feb. 22, Haley said, “I have a lot of concerns about Trump regaining the presidency. I have even more concerns about Joe Biden being president.”
Mediocre.
In local news, Minnesota managed to cock a snook at stooge of the Israelis and Xian fundamentalists, Joe Biden, while still giving him enough votes to carry the state.
President Biden, who faces less prominent challengers, continued to win by larger margins than Trump. But as in Michigan last week, he ceded significant votes to such options as “uncommitted.”
That option was getting nearly 20 percent of the vote in Minnesota with about 85 percent of the vote counted, after pro-Palestinian activists sought to turn it into a protest vote again. The uncommitted share there should wind up being larger than it was in Michigan (13 percent) despite a less-robust effort — and despite Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) taking another 8 percent.
Biden’s current 70 percent overall share of the vote in Minnesota means it could be his lowest share in any state, apart from the 64 percent he took as a write-in candidate in New Hampshire.
Come on, Joe. Grow a spine and stand up against the terrorist state of Israel.
Are you kidding? They thrive on that stuff. Look at the stuff Trump said about Rafael Edward Cruz and his father and his wife. And who id Cruz endorsing?
“From the river to the sea” I see.
One need not be established member of Inner Party to understand “Object of power is power,” tovarish. Especially when one’s rhetoric celebrates Vaterland or mat’Rossiya to advance in power games, ignoring reality of medieval bigotry behind electoral nonsense. When Joe the Georgian gets here we will dance (recall Joe held “elections,” too, with much greater margins of “victory” for all correct candidates).
“It’s rare for a single person to hold that kind of power”
Thing is, the Senate is the clear exception to that. Now supposedly the Senate rules are to help make the body more “deliberative”, but the reality is that either things come out already compromised and bipartisan, or they are subject to one person’s procedural veto. Everything has come to one of those two extremes.
The system, the rules have been manipulated to get to this point, whether its Tuberville, Sinema, Manchin, Mitch, Paul (who should have had NO authority to block what he did), and yes, even Schumer and other Democrats though less often because usually they’re only blocking modifications to already agreed bipartisan bills (or a REALLY bad judicial nominee).
The Senate rarely pushes the ‘crazy’ (outside of judicial approvals)…but they make it all too easy for one person to block the sensible thing that the majority of Americans (of both parties as well as independents) want.
Okay, I understand the reference seversky is making. I think he’s wrong, but I at least understand it (I think).
What the heckity-heck is Jaws trying to say?
@ #5, antigone10: I think he’s referencing the novel 1984, along with Joe Stalin.
The Senate is nothing but a kill switch that shuts down democracy when needed.
Sinema demonstrated that she would deliberately undermine the Democratic Party’s public platform when she was in the House. (Same goes for Joe Manchin.) She still got endorsements from big-name Democrats when she ran for the Senate (because nothing beats having a scapegoat to avoid actually doing anything), and her campaign consisted of publicly saying she was a DINO (literally! She actually said this out loud and it was reported in the press!) to the rich while pushing her identity as an openly bisexual woman to get liberal votes, much as the lying warmonger Hillary Clinton pushed her gender rather than her policy and self-proclaimed “feminists” ate that up, too. Maybe voting for candidates who have proven histories of bad policy based on their demographic categories is a bad idea.
Nice to see that we’re implicitly admitting that “we can push him to the left once he’s in office” doesn’t work. Centrist Democrats are worthless enablers of the right wing. That’s all they’ve ever been. Of course, it’s too late to do anything about that, since they have total control of every single level of the party, but nice to see that at least the party faithful are starting to realize they’ve been duped and will never get anywhere.
@5 Should have mentioned Manifest Destiny too after Vaterland while parodying bad pseudo-Russian accents of Boris & Natasha (ignoring that real operatives of Committee for State Security often had better English grammar than FBI trying to catch them, it was diplomats who could not master English articles). Further should have included deprecated <sarcasm> or <parody> tag in code.
@5. antigone10 : In addition to what #6christoph & ^Jaws have noted I think it was a reference to Stalin coming form what was then a Soviet state and is now the independent nation of Georgia.