All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[worstblogever]

On this date in both 2019, as well as 2020, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profiled the now former U.S. Senator from Arizona, Martha McSally, a position to which she was appointed by shady-as-hell Arizona Govenror Doug Ducey, after the predictable resignation of Senator Jon Kyl in early 2019, who himself was appointed to finish out the six-year term that John McCain was elected to in 2016. The fact that she became a Senator defies most respect for Democracy, considering Arizona voters rejected the thought of her as their Senator in the 2018 elections, choosing Democrat Kyrsten Sinema over her after she spent almost two years sucking up to Donald Trump and adopting his racist demagogue stances. It was one thing to see McSally fearmongering about MS-13 and calling for a border along the U.S./Mexico border, but Martha McSally actually was caught up in xenophobic euphoria that she called for a border wall to be built between Arizona and California, too. As McSally began to trail behind Sinema in polls, she started pushing a disgusting barrage of campaign ads where McSally claimed that Sinema’s anti-war protests against the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 featured her “denigrating the troops” (Sinema’s criticism was for the war pigs ordering the invasion, not the brave Americans asked to carry it out). That still failed to put Mcsally in the lead, and as final polls began to show that McSally would end up on the losing end of the race and allow Arizona to have a Democratic senator for the first time in decades, she responded with a Hail Mary, accusing Sinema of “advocating for treason” in their debate in October of 2018. Because accusing your opponent of a capital offense is totally reasonable.

Martha McSally was never a candidate the people of Arizona rallied behind, as even with a gerrymandered map helping her try and win Arizona’s 2nd Congressional District in the House of Representatives, she still lost in 2012, and even in the 2014 elections with Republican tail winds behind her, she only won over Democrat Ron Barber by 161 votes. She inspired the people of Arizona so much that she got caught during the campaign using sock-puppet accounts to post compliments to herself.

McSally’s voting record during her two terms in the House had her keeping pace with the conservative extremism that embodied the Republican caucus over the past decade, and once she hit the Senate, she was willing to sign off on William Barr becoming the most corrupt Attorney General in modern American history, as well as voting both against witnesses being allowed in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial as well as voting against convicting him by just ignoring the mountain of evidence in the name of partisanship.

But in 2020, Martha McSally had a far tougher challenge to face up against in the election than Kyrsten Sinema… she was facing down against Mark Kelly… even her attack strategy of using her military service as a fighter pilot to attack her opponent as “treasonous” isn’t just moot, it’s dwarfed by the guy who not only has that on his resume, and then went on to go into space. They were polling dead even a year prior to the election, with and McSally has firmly placed herself as an acolyte of Donald Trump… whose fortunes have decidedly taken a turn for the worse in polls throughout 2020... which left McSally scrambling to try and crawl back to the center in Arizona, and tethered to all the stupid decisions Trump makes that affect her state, like say, threatening Mexico with tariffs that would cripple Arizona’s economy.

And then there was Sen. McSally’s moment where she let her mask slip, and showed everyone how bitter and petty she truly is. Manu Raju, a reporter for CNN, was asking McSally her opinion on if the Senate should consider new evidence in the impeachment trial and she dismissed him with sheer contempt, saying:

”You’re a liberal hack. I’m not talking to you. You’re a liberal hack.”

So now she’s embraced Trump enough to start attacking the media. Outstanding. She had the nerve to try and spin the incident as if she was the victim, doubling down and saying she called him a hack because “it’s the truth”, and that the media reacting to her disgusting behavior was somehow just sexism directed at her because she’s a woman and not supposed to say things like that.

Revolting. Man or woman, it’s inappropriate. But it’s revolting to mock the media with that defense.

We were wholly expecting her to get desperate sometime before the 2020 elections and start fearmongering that if Mark Kelly is elected, he’ll “take all your guns away” with his support of gun control, even though his stance on the issue is pretty measured, and obviously motivated by personal experience, what with being the supportive husband of Gabby Giffords, a former Congresswoman and survivor of gun violence. But we’re almost betting McSally will do something that dumb, because that’s the sort of blunder she’s has become synonymous for. McSally was nothing if not predictable and did that in the final weeks before the election, doing precisely that. And honestly, those attack ads worked a lot better than the smears she posted about Mark Kelly supposedly doing “taking a flag of Communist China to space”, because seriously, what the ***?

When November came around, many vulnerable Senate Republicans inexplicably survived and got another term around the country… but alas, Martha McSally was not one of them, getting bounced from office by Mark Kelly by about 80,000 votes. As clear of a rejection as that is, she currently has the dips***s from “Cyber Ninjas” trying to avenge her in the embarrassing “Maricopa County Fraudit”, as the only races those idjits feel were impacted by the nonexistent fraud were the presidential and Senate races. McSally, for her part, has disappeared off the radar altogether since November 18th, 2020, not even posting anything further on social media after conceding defeat then.

We would like to wish her our finest “GOOD RIDDANCE AND KEEP F***ING OFF ON OVER THE HORIZON” salutes at this time.