Sunday, September 30, 2018

Sure Vote For Sinema, But Do So With Eyes Wide Open

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An old friend just reached out to me and asked me if it was ok to contribute through the DSCC because he wanted to help Beto and Kyrsten O'Rourke. My advice was to contribute directly to Beto here because giving anything to the DSCC means helping them line the pockets of corrupt, inept consultants and because they don't like Beto anyway. As for Sinema... you can imagine-- or if you can't, take a gander at some of these. If you live in Arizona, hold your nose and vote for her if you must, but as I told my friend, if you have Senate money to contribute, it would be wiser to spend it helping Tammy Baldwin defend her seat from relentless attack from the GOP, who are aiming to defeat her in a state Trump won.




As for Sinema... you know what? I'm not going to repeat myself about her record and her insanity. Instead, let's look at her penchant for lying that has been exposed as journalists looked more closely at her fabricated heroic biography. When she first told it to me, long before she was first elected to Congress, I realized she was a liar and an insane person. Josh Voorhees covered the bio-lies for Slate last week, The Details of Kyrsten Sinema’s Homeless Story That Matter—and the Ones That Don’t.

I guess Schumer didn't vet her when he handed her the party nomination. Meanwhile Arizona voters are trying to decide how seriously to take serial embellishment in light of an exposé by the NY Times that included her parents' divorce case court records that contradict her decades of bullshit. First of all, was she really homeless living in an abandoned gas station with no electricity or water? Here's her latest iteration of the carefully woven deception she's been telling voters for over a decade and "continues to offer it up on the stump and in interviews. It’s all the more compelling because of how well it lines up with her political argument. A former progressive flamethrower who has recast herself as a Blue Dog Democrat, Sinema offers voters a modern retelling of the myth of the self-made American man or woman, designed to thread the needle in a red state: Pull on those bootstraps, by all means, but they can pull you up only so far. 'See, my parents taught me if you work really hard you can make it,' Sinema said in that ad, which mentioned her family’s reliance on food stamps and the Pell Grant she used to go to college. 'I worked really hard-- but I still needed a little help.'"


The problem now, though, is that her recollection of time spent without electricity doesn’t line up with what the New York Times found when it dug a little deeper. The paper discovered that during her mother’s divorce proceedings, she and Sinema’s stepfather told a judge that they were paying monthly bills for electricity, phone, and gas. Sinema was unable to explain to the paper why her parents would have an electricity bill at a time she says they didn’t have electricity. “Oh gosh, I don’t have an answer for that,” Sinema said. “That’s not something a little kid would hear about from her parents.”

As the paper notes, Sinema’s taken a tough line on truthfulness in the past, writing in her 2009 book, for example, that it’s “wrong to tell half-truths and be sneaky about the truth-- no doubt about it.” And this also isn’t the first time questions have come up about Sinema’s childhood living conditions. Speaking to the Washington Post for a profile published last month, her step-aunt took issue with Sinema’s description of the structure in which her family lived, which was owned by her stepfather’s parents, who lived nearby. “I realize this tugs at people’s heartstrings and that was what she was going for, but, you know, it’s not the truth,” said Susie Fleming, who said she believed the structure-- which she called a remodeled country store-- had at least some utilities when Sinema lived there as a child.

Republicans, naturally, were quick to tout the Times report:




In many ways, this is familiar territory. Sinema is far from the first politician to run on her biography, and when you do that, the details of your biography become fair game. But as a candidate’s lived experience-- as someone of a certain gender, race, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, etc., or any combination thereof-- grows in importance, particularly on the left, it’s a good bet that we’ll see more of this type of litigation of those lived experiences. In 2008, one popular question was how black is “black enough?” In 2018 in Arizona, it’s how homeless is homeless enough?

It’s telling, though, that so far the GOP attacks against Sinema have been either overly specific (“in direct contradiction to court documents,”) or overly broad (“exaggerating her story of growing up ‘homeless’ ”). Despite what those scare-quotes suggest, Sinema has been clear from the beginning that she wasn’t living on the streets.

Given how frequently she has mentioned a specific lack of utilities like water and electricity, it’s fair to question whether that was the case. And if she did intentionally embellish the details, that matters. But it’s also worth remembering what’s not up for debate: Sinema and her family spent years living in conditions far more dire than your typical future senator did, and through hard work and some government aid, she was able to find remarkable success. She was the valedictorian of her high school at 16, and earned a prestigious scholarship to Brigham Young University, where she graduated in just two years. Whether her parents had electricity is relevant to that story, yes, but voters can decide for themselves whether it changes the moral of it.
And this is quite the Trump adhesion score for a so-called Democrat-- even for a damned Blue Dog!


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6 Comments:

At 2:04 PM, Blogger Gadfly said...

Beto the ConservaDem, who Howie, along with BuzzFeed and many others, is still beguiled by and still won't admit is a ConservaDem. Most conservative 1/3 of Congressional Dems, more conservative 1/2 of Texas Congressional Dems.

Facts is facts, Howie.

 
At 2:20 PM, Blogger edmondo said...

Ummmm, I guess you've never been poor --- lucky you.

It's very simple to keep paying an overdue electric bill even after the electricity has been turned off. In fact you better keep paying the money owed if you ever expect to have electricity in your name again.

I'm no great fan of Sinema but the story is completely plausible.

 
At 4:38 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Since "democrats" are no better than Republicans, voting records matter a great deal to me. If I lived in AZ, I couldn't vote for either Party's candidates. I would find someone else.

And don't give me that "any blue will do" crap. That slogan gave us a "moderate 1985 Reagan Republican who did very little for eight years except try to do the Republican agenda for them. He got $65 million out of it. What did YOU get?

 
At 8:15 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

This is where DWT loses many of his readers. DWT would have never said "vote but keep your eyes open" for a Sinema equivalent in GOP. He would have said "don't vote" for that Sinema equivalent in GOP. Simply incorrigible.

 
At 6:26 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yeah, 8:15. electing the sinemas is why we now have a trump and kkkavanaugh and pence and sessions...

every time you choose a lesser evil, you are choosing a greater evil than the last time you chose a lesser evil. It's not a staircase up. It's not a level grade. It's a greased chute down.

But americans, dumbest motherfuckers in humankind's history, cannot understand this simple concept... in spite of 40 years of history showing that lesser evilism gives us trump et al.

Next time, it'll be worse. How much worse can it get before it's just too late?

 
At 11:10 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

6:26, if our 'eyes were wide open', we'd have changed course back in the '80s, when this greased chute was built and lubed.

Americans with 'eyes wide open' is not quite as good as a whole nursery full of house plants (none with eyes at all). So... you're not asking anything that will matter.

when sinema gets elected, we'll be worser than when McCain was re-elected last time... and 2016 was destined to be worser than 2012 no matter which shitty candidate we elected.

2020 will be worse.

Is the 'hold your nose and... with eyes wide open' delusion or rationalization? It certainly isn't wisdom, as is reproved every time we invoke it.

 

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