Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

In after Baud. Damn.

When we show up, we win.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Let me file that under fuck it.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

You are here: Home / Politics / Such Sad News, Sinema Not Running for Senator!

Reader Interactions

153Comments

  2. 2.

    WaterGirl

    If I ever see her, I will not punch Sinema in the face.
    If I ever see her, I will not punch Sinema in the face.
    If I ever see her, I will not punch Sinema in the face.
    If I ever see her, I will not punch Sinema in the face.
    If I ever see her, I will not punch Sinema in the face.
    If I ever see her, I will not punch Sinema in the face.
    If I ever see her, I will not punch Sinema in the face.
    If I ever see her, I will not punch Sinema in the face.

  6. 6.

    WaterGirl

    In case you can’t bear to listen to her “I am so awesome which is why I’m not running” speech – 3 minutes that you can never get back – she doesn’t even say what she’s going to do.

    Shorter Sinema:

    “Both sides” care more about sticking it to the other side than they care about helping the people we were elected to serve.

  8. 8.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Bye, Felicia.

     

    Don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya.

     

    Buh-bye.

     

    So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye.

  10. 10.

    misterpuff

    Shorter Sinema:

    Fuck You, I Got Mine.

    And don’t ever talk to me again.

    I can’t stand the likes of you.

  14. 14.

    WaterGirl

    @Jackie: As soon as we finish our Montana fundraising, we are heading to AZ.

    So glad Sinema is not running!  This should put some pep in our step as we raise funds for AZ through Worker Power and Four Directions.

    Boots on the ground, baby!  It’s all about boots on the ground.

  18. 18.

    ArchTeryx

    I got nothing to say but good riddance to terrible rubbish. What a sock puppet that troll was. Ain’t nobody from any side save Mitch McConnell that’s going to miss her.

  25. 25.

    Nora

    I’m at work so I couldn’t listen to her voice (probably a good thing), but I couldn’t help noticing the weirdly cheerful expressions she had while talking about how terrible things are when BOTH SIDES are retreating to their extremely partisan corners. Just this weird disconnect between what she was saying and what her expressions were saying.

  27. 27.

    Old School

    “I believe in my approach, but it’s not what America wants right now,” Sinema said.

    But No Labels was almost ready to call!

  29. 29.

    SiubhanDuinne

    I don’t think I’m being lookist — I hope I’m not; it’s not my intention — but I really had to laugh just now when some MSNBC reporter, talking of Sinema’s sometimes impoverished background, said “She struggled with homeliness.”

  31. 31.

    scav

    @WaterGirl:

    “Both sides” care more about sticking it to the other side than they care about helping the people we were elected to serve.

    Oh, really?  Good thing you were there sticking it to all sides with a self-serving mission of self-aggrandizement thus demonstrating to all how it should be done.

  35. 35.

    Fair Economist

    Eh, we can be polite to her now. Might make her a bit more cooperative in her last months in office.

    I’ll still never understand her behavior. Do her job, don’t piss off the base; she had an easy path that would probably had led to a lifetime position. A noncontroversial Sinema would have been a huge favorite over Kari Lake; even more so after having helped written the border bill.

  36. 36.

    eversor

    @ArchTeryx:

    I dunno I get the feeling she and Manchin served a purpose.  Being from VA I know that neither of our senators want to get rid of the filibuster and ultimately VA is blue but it is upper middle class and rich blue.  Socially liberal and fiscally conservative.  Democrats in the sheets Republicans in the wallet.

    Someone else will step into the role to cover for the others.  And thus it will always be.  That’s both your meritocracy and democracy at work!

  37. 37.

    Eolirin

    I thought polling suggested Sinema took more from Lake than from Gallego.

    I still like our chances if Lake’s on the ballot though.

  41. 41.

    Xantar

    I deleted Twitter long ago so I can’t read the responses. Is Sinema still getting hit with the ratio on every single post?

  42. 42.

    Splitting Image

    I came here to read the outpourings of heartfelt gratitude for her service which I assume will begin appearing any minute now.

  43. 43.

    misterpuff

    @WaterGirl:

    In case you can’t bear to listen to her “I am so awesome which is why I’m not running” speech – 3 minutes that you can never get back – she doesn’t even say what she’s going to do.

    Shorter Sinema:

    “Both sides” care more about sticking it to the other side than they care about helping the people we were elected to serve.

     

    More like “One Side” was trying to accomplish shit while Manchin and I hid behind the Filibuster except when we could screw up Global Warming approaches and Affordable Drugs for our paymasters.

    Bub bye!

  44. 44.

    Mousebumples

    @WaterGirl: I thought this news might be worthy of a celebratory thread!

    (related, can Cole claim residency in AZ for the Nov 2024 election?)

    Now, back to work. Celebratory baking maybe later tonight…

  45. 45.

    Brachiator

    A message for Arizonans from Senator Kyrsten Sinema

    A stupid speech from a stupid individual.

  48. 48.

    coozledad

    Same old “both parties are the same” Naderite shit. I’ve never seen anyone fully crawl out of that Leninist hole. The mental framework of dipshit contrarianism is itself a pathology.

  49. 49.

    Yutsano

    @Eolirin: ​ I don’t have time to look for it now, but there is polling that suggests Gallego beats Lake in a two-way race. Let’s go Arizona!

  52. 52.

    Shalimar

    @WaterGirl: I think Sinema sees her future getting wealthy doing almost nothing by sitting on different corporate boards.  We will see how that works out for her.  I grew up in those environs and I don’t think she has the appeal to the old money people that they have been telling her she has when they were courting her vote.

  53. 53.

    eclare

    I come home from voting to find this?  What a great day!  Alas, no kiddo bake sale at the school where I vote.

  56. 56.

    MisterForkbeard

    I went to Twitter just to thank her for dropping out. And to note that she’d done a lot of good but had also publicly enabled and congratulated the worst and most bad faith actors in the country. So thank you for your service, and thank you for dropping out.

    Also: Twitter is a huge goddamn dumpster fire. I don’t know why, but ALL of the “for you” stuff was from whackjobs like Stefanik, Trump Jr, Richard Grenell, Jim Jordan and the House We Really Wanna Impeach Biden For Anything committee.

    It’s really gross. The whole thing is truth social now

  58. 58.

    Harrison Wesley

    @Nora: She may actually be sick of it all, and is on her way to join John Boehner for happy hour.  A 24/7 happy hour.

  61. 61.

    Dangerman

    Roughly like my flatulence after a big meal …

    … but at least my farts serve a useful purpose.

    Makes scents to me anyway.

     

     

     

    @Mai Naem mobile:

     

    ETA: OK, how did I mess THAT UP?

    sorry for the TMI.

  63. 63.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Nora: Just this weird disconnect between what she was saying and what her expressions were saying.

    Sinema doesn’t only ratfuck for the money, she does it for the joy of it.  I can’t be sure, not a mindreader, but this is the first potential insight that makes actual sense of her behavior.

    Edited for typos.

  65. 65.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @MisterForkbeard: Even Youtube knows not to push right wingers at me. My blocked list is all hard left and contrarian centrists. Except, oddly, advertisements.

    Edited to include Bill Maher and CNN.

  69. 69.

    eclare

    @MisterForkbeard:

    Click on “following” do not click on “for you” and all of that stuff goes away.  I do not let the algorithm pick any of my stuff for me, and I don’t see any of that stuff.  I just see who I choose to follow.

  70. 70.

    MisterForkbeard

    @eclare: I used to find that if I stuck to “following” I got into an echo chamber of sorts and I tried to stay away from it

    “For You” is infinitely worse

  71. 71.

    Zzyzx

    My twitter feed is still pretty much the same but I’ve still moved over to Bluesky except for when Phish are on tour or something.

  72. 72.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Fair Economist: One would think Youtube would have tools to better match advertisers to the politics of the eyes they reach since they accomplish this with video recommendations. Just think of the advertisers and their needs!

    Breadtube watchers don’t want a Trump branded survival gear or bobbleheads

    Edited for clarity.

  73. 73.

    Marcopolo

    @WaterGirl: apparently one of the participants in the Iditarod punched a moose on the trail in the face today/yesterday. that’s not the end of the moose’ story but a later musher was (the end of the moose). also sad!

  74. 74.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Harrison Wesley:

    She may actually be sick of it all, and is on her way to join John Boehner for happy hour. A 24/7 happy hour. 

    Zombie-eyed granny starver Paul Ryan isn’t part of that group?

  75. 75.

    Bill Arnold

    @Xantar:
    Yeah, in this case the ratio is currently about 3-1.
    I added to it, then deleted because the point was made above that she’ll be in the Senate until next year.

  77. 77.

    Cacti

    I don’t know if I’ve ever seen so brazen an example of a politician winning office, then turning around and immediately telling their voters to fuck right off.

  79. 79.

    Bill Arnold

    @MisterForkbeard:

    Twitter is a huge goddamn dumpster fire. I don’t know why, but ALL of the “for you” stuff was from whackjobs like Stefanik, Trump Jr, Richard Grenell, Jim Jordan and the House We Really Wanna Impeach Biden For Anything committee.

    I still have an account (for tracking Ukraine/Israel and a few other things), and never ever look at “For you” (just an assortment of browser tabs), but just checked, and it’s reasonably clean except for Mr. Musk’s very smelly brain farts.

  80. 80.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Cacti: It’s nice to see actions have consequences for politicians, even if it’s only for erstwhile Democrats.

  81. 81.

    Lyrebird

    @Jackie: Nice take!

    I’m not going to watch the video, and I am going to stubbornly give her credit for doing something good for AZ and for the US of A by this decision.

    She’s a better person than Nikki Haley, and Nikki Haley is a better person (per Omnes) than Ted Cruz, and no I don’t have to like any of them.  Eyes on the prize, and she did something helpful today.

  86. 86.

    Baud

    @WaterGirl:

    “Both sides” care more about sticking it to the other side than they care about helping the people we were elected to serve.

     
    Sticking it to the other side is helping the people!

  88. 88.

    BR

    @MisterForkbeard:

    Twitter really is awful now. I’ve been really happy with the diverse and global mix of folks on Mastodon. Been using it for over a year now. Initially started thinking I wouldn’t keep using it, but it’s become my daily destination. Just got to remember to follow lots of random folks.

  89. 89.

    azlib

    Sinema did at least stick with voting for Biden’s judicial choices. I am still astonished how badly she missed the current political moment.  Her touted accomplishments were all Dem initiatives, BTW. She of course showed her real colors by blaming both sides and not pointing out that she would run third in a 3 way race which would have been a more honest assessment of why she is not running.

  90. 90.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @WaterGirl: At the start of every episode’s credits, Bart would be writing a unique line on the chalkboard stating he would not do whatever, something weird and random.

  93. 93.

    JML

    I believe she thought she could set herself up as everyone’s independent darling and be a real power-broker. But she sold out her base, grifted up a bunch of cash from people that were never going to really support her and would throw her under the bus at a moments notice, and completely misread where her own state was going. I don’t think she ever believed there would be any consequences and that the party needed her far more than she needed it, and that she was the Manchin of AZ.

    Except democrats can get elected in AZ as democrats. Whoops.

  94. 94.

    lowtechcyclist

    @PaulWartenberg:

    John Cole must be running naked through the streets of Arizona in celebration right about now.

    Nah, he’s probably nakedly mop(p)ing about the house. ;-)

  96. 96.

    WaterGirl

    @Bill Arnold: Watching her and listening – for 3 whole minutes – was like fingernails on a chalkboard.

    Which may be what led me to think that I needed to write that on the blackboard 10 times.  I still couldn’t do it – I see that I only got to 8.

  97. 97.

    Chris

    @WaterGirl:

    “Both sides” care more about sticking it to the other side than they care about helping the people we were elected to serve.

    The people who say this are invariably people who have literally no politics other than sticking it to a side.  Sometimes both, and always “theirs.”

    I mean, Republicans have things they actually care about.  White supremacy, subjugation of women, the eradication of gay and trans and any orientation other than Straight Cisgender, the relegation of nonwhite immigrants to unperson status, the pillaging of public resources for private grift, the use of the federal government as a cash spigot for Republican loyalists.  They’re horrible things, but, y’know, they’re recognizably things that these people, when elected, try to achieve.  Sinema didn’t even have that.  She didn’t even do enough to be a good Republican plant.  She didn’t even do enough to carve out a little fiefdom for herself as the favorite pet senator of some bunch of lobbyists.  Her entire term in office was just “shit over everything everywhere because that’s what keeps the cameras on me.”  

    Insert Walter Sobchak’s quote about the tenets of National Socialism.

  98. 98.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Bill Arnold: I have an account for checking trans-related news. I find that aggressive liking stuff I want to see and insta-blocking trolls and ads keeps my For You tab fairly sewage free. Still mostly just use lists, but I do like the serendipity aspect of For You to discover posters I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

  102. 102.

    Manyakitty

    @Marcopolo: and now the captions about moose in the very beginning of Monty Python and the Holy Grail are running through my head. “moose bites can be pretti nasti.”

  103. 103.

    cain

    @BR: It’s definitely less anxiety building than twitter. I do follow a few folks on twitter that will never move. So there is that. But I found it very difficult to follow threads on twitter because it keeps inserting ads or it abruptly ends and then you have to push something to keep the comments going

  105. 105.

    Chris

    @Fair Economist:

    I’ll still never understand her behavior. Do her job, don’t piss off the base; she had an easy path that would probably had led to a lifetime position. A noncontroversial Sinema would have been a huge favorite over Kari Lake; even more so after having helped written the border bill.

    Other than just being a spotlight-grabber?

    As near as I can tell, she was that disaffected “both sides suck” Gen Xer who actually believed the whole “we need bold bipartisan solutions from maverick senators who will cross the aisle and stand up to partisanship!” shit the media’s been peddling for decades, and thought throwing herself into it headfirst would make her some kind of star.

    And she apparently never realized that for all the John McCain or Joe Manchin type “mavericks” that the press idolizes as examples of this, 1) it’s about 90% bullshit, good propagandizing and media fluffing rather than reality, and 2) what looks like a “brash maverick” from the outside is actually a very carefully calculated niche these people have carved out for themselves which makes sense for their specific context.

  106. 106.

    WaterGirl

    @Marcopolo: You know, I did hear a passing reference to that somewhere last night, maybe on a podcast?  But I don’t think that influenced what I wrote.

    She really did have a punchable face – she looked like a bobblehead – as she spoke, all smiles for the camera as she talked  about terrible things º so I chose that one instead of “I will not run her down if I see her in the parking lot”.

    That’s my go-to when someone is being really shitty to someone I care about.  (Virtual go-to, I do not actually punch people in the face or run them down in the parking lot.)

  107. 107.

    cain

    oh shit!

    https://mastodon.social/deck/@[email protected]/112044432771647508

    Dartmouth men’s basketball team votes to unionize, shaking up college sports

    The Dartmouth men’s basketball team voted 13-2 to join SEIU Local 560, making it the first unionized college sports team in the country. Dartmouth believes the election should not have gone forward. #press

    https://www.npr.org/2024/03/05/123587765

     

    Bwhahaa – that’s gonna really panic some folks.

    🎶 you better watch out, you better not cry – unionization is coming to sports 🎶

  109. 109.

    Chris

    @MisterForkbeard:

    I’ve never had Twitter, but Facebook is like this for me.  I now regularly get extreme-right stuff from people I don’t even know shoveled into my feed by The Algorithm at the same time as its basic functionality (i.e. such things as “inform me of somebody’s birthday on their birthday, don’t inform me on the day after that yesterday was their birthday”) plummets.  And that was before the site just totally crashed today.

  110. 110.

    BR

    @cain: ​

    Agreed. And now that I’ve found that several of the open source Mastodon apps are really good, I don’t get annoyed over the default UI.

  111. 111.

    sdhays

    @Chris: The way I best understand Sinema is that she is someone who skimmed the cliff-notes of John McCain’s career and decided she would be the female Democratic John McCain and also be Senator from Arizona for life. And, because she wasn’t John McCain and hadn’t the faintest clue about what made his (actually very) occasional flights of heterodoxy possible, she totally fucked it up.

    Oh, and she likes the good life, too. Obviously, that distracted her from being more serious about being the John McCain of mid-21st century.

  112. 112.

    cain

    @BR:  I expect that corporate sponsored instances to join – I don’t think bluesky is going to be able to out compete in the end simply because community run spaces tend to be much better overall than corporate one.

    You can bet with absolute surety that your posts on bluesky and twitter will be run through an AI training for profit.

  115. 115.

    TooManyJens

    @cain:

    Jesus Christ, what a dumpster fire.

    I think what you’re reacting to is that, at the moment, Biden is an unpopular president seeking a second term while Trump is a popular figure inside his party who is winning primary races. I wouldn’t necessarily compare the two.

    You could literally swap the names “Biden” and “Trump” in that sentence and it would still be true, but they have to make sure to spin it against Biden.

  116. 116.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Manyakitty:

    and now the captions about moose in the very beginning of Monty Python and the Holy Grail are running through my head. “moose bites can be pretti nasti.”

    Gotta dig out your character map so you can write properly about the majestic møøse. ;-)

  117. 117.

    NotMax

    BTW, five years is the minimum time to become vested in Congressional pensions. There are also age requirements attached to eligibility for receipt of money but once she crosses the age threshold she’ll be getting a pension from then on.

  118. 118.

    piratedan

    @Cacti: pretty much the case.

    I will not lament her passing on running, I will note that sometimes access to money and power changes people.  If she had remained a quirky Congresswoman from the University district in Arizona, she could have likely low-keyed her grift for a lifetime.

    When she ascended to the Senate, all of those quirky traits morphed into a motley pistache of selfishness, naivete and shallowness.

    we won’t miss her, now to get Gallego elected.

  119. 119.

    Hoodie

    @sdhays: Reminds me of the saying to the effect “just because Ezekiel also baked his bread on dung doesn’t make you a prophet.”   McCain’s maverick schtick was a contrived ploy to get him out from under the Keating 5 scandal. He probably was able to pull it off because of his status as a war hero, which kept him pretty solid with GOP voters. Sinema simply comes across as a self obsessed goofball.

  120. 120.

    Chris

    @sdhays:

    Yeah.  McCain was able to get away with heterodoxy about once every ten years because he was a rock-solid Republican 99% of the time, and even that got him a ludicrous amount of flak from the party mainstream for being a RINO traitor.

    Joe Manchin is able to get away with heterodoxy because he’s the only Democrat who can still get elected in West Virginia, and since he still votes with Democrats a lot of the time, they have to work with him or end up in a much worse situation.

    Lisa Murkowski is able to get away with heterodoxy because she lives in a weirdly idiosyncratic state in which she (and her family) have built up a personal brand that’s actually stronger than the party, the movement, or Trump.

    And so forth.

    There was nothing preventing Sinema from building that sort of personal brand, and Arizona, a purple state in the middle of a transition, is probably the right place for it.  She just didn’t care to do the work for it, or worse, was too dumb to realize she had to.

  121. 121.

    lowtechcyclist

    If I ever see Sinema on fire, I will not take a piss on her.
    If I ever see Sinema on fire, I will not take a piss on her.
    If I ever see Sinema on fire, I will not take a piss on her.
    If I ever see Sinema on fire, I will not take a piss on her.
    If I ever see Sinema on fire, I will not take a piss on her.
    If I ever see Sinema on fire, I will not take a piss on her.
    If I ever see Sinema on fire, I will not take a piss on her.
    If I ever see Sinema on fire, I will not take a piss on her.
    ;-)

  125. 125.

    catclub

    @cain: This has surprised me because, if I heard correctly, they do not have athletic scholarships at the Ivy League schools.

     

    So the salary the school has paid them is even smaller than at Div 1 schools with athletic scholarships.

     

    I agree  with their choice, though.

  129. 129.

    sdhays

    @Chris: Exactly. Being “a maverick” could definitely have worked, but it requires actual work and being sensitive to how far you can push your base and where. And, as you say, McCain wasn’t “Maverick McCain” right away; he dabbled with that when it was expedient and he already had a strong relationship with powerful parts of the Republican base.

    Sinema tried to skip all of those parts because she’s lazy.

  130. 130.

    Fair Economist

    @Chris:

    As near as I can tell, she was that disaffected “both sides suck” Gen Xer who actually believed the whole “we need bold bipartisan solutions from maverick senators who will cross the aisle and stand up to partisanship!” shit the media’s been peddling for decades, and thought throwing herself into it headfirst would make her some kind of star.

    I dunno. The thing is, until the very end when she negotiated a border bill compromise, she did nothing of the sort. She pushed for things that are actually wildly unpopular with voters, period – like opposing a minimum wage increase and protecting hedge fund tax breaks. Maybe she thought voters liked was people opposing their own party, regardless of reason? That’s closest to what she did, but that’s just an incredible misreading of the reality.

    And even if she just wanted to grift, surely she would have seen that these corp and foundations have no interest in somebody no longer useful to them. It’s just so odd that somebody who got a
    Senatorial position – which requires hard work and reading the room – could be so clueless once she got there.

  132. 132.

    Chris

    @Fair Economist:

    I dunno. The thing is, until the very end when she negotiated a border bill compromise, she did nothing of the sort. She pushed for things that are actually wildly unpopular with voters, period – like opposing a minimum wage increase and protecting hedge fund tax breaks. Maybe she thought voters liked was people opposing their own party, regardless of reason? That’s closest to what she did, but that’s just an incredible misreading of the reality.

    Or maybe she bought the bullshit that you’d believe if you followed standard political reporting infotainment for long enough to ingest all the tropes.  One of the biggest ones being that “Socially Liberal, Fiscally Conservative” is some sort of untapped gold mine.

    Or maybe it’s none of that and it’s literally just that she enjoyed the thrill she got from being a troll who got in people’s ways.  Who knows.

  133. 133.

    Brachiator

    @Fair Economist:

    @Chris:

    As near as I can tell, she was that disaffected “both sides suck” Gen Xer who actually believed the whole “we need bold bipartisan solutions from maverick senators who will cross the aisle and stand up to partisanship!” shit the media’s been peddling for decades, and thought throwing herself into it headfirst would make her some kind of star.

    She and Manchin would both make claims about “extremism on both sides” that were weak and unconvincing.

    I’m still not clear what either of these two really want.

  136. 136.

    Chris

    @Brachiator:

    Manchin is a blue senator in a blood-red state.  Has has to shit on the unpopular party in order to stay popular, and he has to shit on the popular party in order to differentiate himself from it.  He’s almost certainly pretty conservative by nature, he’s almost certainly got donors to please, and he didn’t have to do all the things he did to monkey-wrench Biden’s agenda, but within the context he operates in, yes, “both sides do it” is a message that makes sense for him, even if it’s bullshit in factual terms.

    Sinema?  Well, as we’ve all been saying here, she’s either too stupid to know what she’s doing or too indifferent to care, so…

  137. 137.

    Fake Irishman

    @NotMax:

    Members of Congress are under FERS like any other federal employee. It will be pretty small: one percentage point for year of service starting at the age of 62. So about $11,000 a year in current money. Nice to have, but hardly wealthy.  Mitch McConnell will be eligible for about $85,000 or so, assuming he makes it to the end of his term.

  138. 138.

    Geminid

    Kyrsten Sinema reminds me of Virginia Senator Jim Webb. He was elected in 2006, another Democratic “wave year” 12 years before Sinema won in 2018. They were both one-term Senators for states transitioning from red to purple.

    Their most important votes were for Majority Leader. After that, Sinema and Webb were  “glass half full or glass half empty, but irritating as shit either way” politicians.

  139. 139.

    Miss Bianca

    @Cacti: what’s so baffling to me is that, as others have noted, with just a few attitude (and vote) adjustments, she probably could have held that seat for life.

    Kinda like her seeming-mavericky-hero role model John McCain, but McCain, odious as he may have been, actually had a few principles he referred to every now and again.

    What Sinema’s principles may be, other than endless quirkiness being her “brand”, along with endless self-aggrandizement, God alone knows – I sure haven’t figured it out.

  140. 140.

    Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony

    Where is suzanne? She usually has the best insight on Sinema.

  141. 141.

    Chris

    @Miss Bianca:

    This isn’t strictly about Sinema, but I’ve noticed that the third-party “both sides suck” ethos that people like her gravitate to has increasingly become completely vapid and incoherent, with no actual ideas or demands of its own other than how other factions (namely, the two parties) should behave.  They’re just personality cults for the followers, and ways to self-actualize through attention for the leaders.

    Historically, third parties and people who are disillusioned with both parties are usually about something.  They’ve got actual policy demands on issues that they don’t think either of the two parties are addressing.  The Dixiecrats were about preserving segregation.  The Populists were about bimetallism and a more active government.  The Know-Nothings were about anti-immigration.  The Bull Mooses were probably the most personality-cult like in that they were to quite an extent about TR’s ego, but they were still pushing an actual platform of progressive reforms in opposition to the return to Gilded Age conservatism that GOP elites were trying to enforce.

    There’s just nothing like that these days.  When you see somebody trying to make a third way stand, it’s never actually to propose ideas of their own that the two parties aren’t suggesting; it’s always some sort of meta demand that “my party is running on the platform that the other two parties should get along more and compromise on things.”  Compromise how?  Nobody knows.  About what things?  Nobody knows.  It’s just a vapid, content-less demand for how everybody else should behave.

  145. 145.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Princess: Says the woman who refused to meet with dodged her constituents.

    Slight improvement on what is, otherwise, a masterpiece.

  151. 151.

    Glidwrith

    See my extended pinky finger? That’s because Sinema is not worthy of the middle one.

  152. 152.

    Geminid

    @WaterGirl: Kyrsten Sinema and  Joe Manchin will likely fade out after Ruben Gallego and Jim Justice are sworn in. Gallego is much more authentic than Sinema.

    As for Jim Justice, journalists from all over the world will want to cover him and Baby Dog. That hound might host next year’s Puppy Bowl!

  153. 153.

    EmanG

    I do love the “hold for applause” moment just after she says she’s not running. Bit of a slow clap for that one.

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