Cheap shots: Collins

Oh, she takes just like a woman,/ and she makes love just like a woman, yes she does,/ and she aches just like a woman,/ but she breaks promises to her constituents just like Senator Corker. Screengrab from CNBC.

Vixen's rundown on which Senators took which bribes to vote yes on the #TaxScam includes this:

And let's talk about Sen Collins, who was hailed as a hero for stopping the repeal of the ACA. She was going to wait and see if she got certain provisions regarding health care coverage, and didn't. And criticizing her for voting yes on this turd is sexist! (Why was the coverage so focused on Collins? Because she made it seem like she had a reason to vote no and was reachable. Our bad, obviously--but criticism of a US Senator isn't sexist--it's about whether she's good on her word. Was she being seen as reachable because she's a woman--or because she said she was? Hm. Seems like it's on her.)

That's why she thought it was sexist! People thought she might keep her word just because she's a woman, as if a woman can't be just as cynical and dishonest as any man going if she puts her mind to it. It's the hard bigotry of high expectations!

With a capital T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for Politics

1924 sheet music. From Wikipedia.

Collins said she was “very troubled by the fact that we seem not to have learned from the 1998 bombings of two of our embassies in Africa at the time when Ambassador Rice was the assistant secretary for African affairs. Those bombings in 1998 resulted in the loss of life of 12 Americans as well as many other foreign nationals.” 

She said, “What troubles me so much is the Benghazi attack in many ways echoes the attacks on those embassies in 1998, when Susan Rice was head of the African region for our State Department. In both cases the ambassadors begged for additional security” but she said, as with the Sept. 11 attack on the consulate in Benghazi, those requests were turned down by the State Department. (NBC News, 11/28/12)

In what sense, exactly, "troubled"? Is she blue?* Would she be in distress, affliction, difficulty, or need? Would she be exhibiting emotional or behavioral problems? Cold sweats, night fright, apparently unmotivated panic? Somehow I doubt it. Maybe troubled like a teenager, infected by all the bad faith around her and acting out.

I mean, I'm not saying she's a liar or anything like that, just that it's really interesting, if you will, how all the words that spill out of her mouth, one or two syllables at a time, in that des-olate croak, seem to be sug-gesting this re-mark-able story about how every time you give Susan Rice a job, someone seems to blow up the em-bassy or murder the am-bass-ador. Doesn't it look, on the face of it, a little careless? I mean, nothing like that ever happens in the Collins family.

She's that girl, in seventh grade, who likes to see a fight. She's poison.

*But she won't be blue always, 'cause that sun gonna shine in her back door one day, eh, Suse?