Mazie Hirono Did Not Come Here To Make Friends

You will love this Mazie Hirono interview very much.

Mazie Hirono has been one of our favorite senators for a while now, mostly because we like the way she just doesn't have time for all the "congeniality" of the Senate. Oh, she abides by the rules, but she also is ready to dickpunch somebody who needs it.

Like when she said this to former Attorney General Bill Barr during a hearing:

HIRONO: Please, mister attorney general, give us some credit for knowing what the hell is going around here with you.

And when she also said this to him:

HIRONO: The American people know that you are no different from Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway, or any of the other people who have sacrificed their once-decent reputation for the grifter and liar in the White House.

Or when, during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, she said this at a press conference:

HIRONO: I just want to say to the men of this country: Just shut up and step up. Do the right thing for a change.

It's kind of her thing. Before Christine Blasey Ford testified, when Chuck Grassley was saying oh yes, they were really working on getting in touch with Ford so she could testify, they were working very hard at that, Hirono told ABC Grassley's claim was "such bullshit I can hardly stand it."

In that spirit, in case you missed it, you should really take some time with Hirono's interview this week with the New York Times . The headline says she "wonders how some Republicans live with themselves" and oh boy, she is bringing it.

We really like this quote, where she talks about about her religion, and how people react when she starts cussing at them:

I find a lot of religion to have all of the proscriptions and not openness and acceptance of other people's legitimately held faiths. That is why I describe myself as a Buddhist. Buddhism, we don't even have a book. It is a way of living and being, which is to be compassionate and kind. I think those are two good things to try to follow. I'm not perfect in that. I can be very terse with people. Part of it is that I don't think many of my colleagues have dealt with short Japanese women.So here I come, and I'm saying, "[expletive] you" to them, and they don't quite know how to react.

She's not perfect at always being kind. Sometimes they don't know what to do with her when she tells them fuck you. Oh well!

She continued, with this anecdote about how much Ted Cruz is garbage:

I was his ranking on his Constitution subcommittee and we had a number of these hearings; not very many of my Democratic colleagues would come. A reporter asked me why and I said they have better things to do than to come to these half-assed hearings. There was one in which all these Republicans who showed up went over their five minutes, and it got me kind of irritated. I said to Cruz, "Are you going to let everybody go eight minutes, nine minutes?" And he said, "When you get the gavel, you can do whatever you want."I put my hand on his shoulder — this was pre-Covid — and I said, "It can't happen soon enough."At that same hearing — we had a break so the mics were not on; it's not like I'm saying this in an open hearing — he said, "Look, it's not my fault that your people are not here."I said, "I don't give a flying [expletive] what your reasoning is." He stopped and said, "I will always treat you with decorum, even if it's not reciprocated." I said, "I wasn't swearing at you ."

"Decorum," PFFFFFFFFT fuck that. 

And then she said this great thing about how she's not a warm and fuzzy person, and about wondering how Republicans sleep at night. It was in the context of how she's handling Republicans after so many of them continued to support the dude who literally incited a domestic terrorist attack on the US Capitol:

It is hard to talk with them in any other way than purely transactional. What am I going to say? "How could you not condemn the incitement to insurrection?" I often wonder how they wake up in the morning and face themselves, but they are obviously able to bifurcate. They act as if nothing happened. That's the amazing thing. You have Cruz, Hawley and all these guys who continued to protest the counting of the electoral votes even after what we experienced.I don't know how they live with themselves. Then you have people like Lindsey Graham: When you enter the moral dead zone that is the Trump ambit, you've lost your soul. So I am pretty much just transactional with them. Some of them can be nice. But then when they vote en masse to screw people over, it's hard to be all warm and fuzzy — and I'm not a warm and fuzzy person to begin with.

She didn't come here to be all warm and fuzzy.

Read the whole interview, you will love it, Mazie Hirono is a badass, the end.

[ New York Times ]

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