Chasing Kyrsten Sinema into a Bathroom Is Not Normal

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, October 04, 2021

 

Yesterday afternoon, on the campus of Arizona State University, a cluster of left-wing political activists followed Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema into a bathroom. They filmed her as she entered one of the stalls, filmed her while she occupied one of the stalls, and filmed her as she left the bathroom in shock. “We need to hold you accountable!” the activists maintained, to the sound of awkward flushing. “We can get you out of office if you don’t support what you promised us!”

 

The condemnation was . . . well, non-existent. Reporting on the incident, Newsweek led with the fact that, as of last night, the video had “been viewed 4 million times on social media.” At the Washington Post, the key takeaway was that “frustration over Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s refusal to fall in line with other Senate Democrats and pass legislation central to President Biden’s agenda” had “boiled over.” On Twitter, meanwhile, the Daily Beast contended merely that Sinema had “locked herself in [the] bathroom to avoid young activists.”

 

Which isn’t really the story here, is it? The unusual feature of Sinema’s visit to the toilet was not that she “locked” the door while she used the facilities, but that she was pursued by a rabble of agitators wielding camera-phones and speaking in declarative slogans. Where I come from, “avoiding” others while using the lavatory is standard procedure. Being followed into the lavatory by angry crowds is not.

One imagines that this might be more obvious if the politics were slightly different. If, instead of a left-winger berating a moderate Democrat in the loo, a right-winger had berated a moderate Republican, it would have been the biggest news of the year. Within minutes, the incident would have had a name — the “Arizona Attack,” perhaps. Within a day, it would have been deemed to be representative of everything that was wrong with the American Right — and with the United States itself. Within a week, we would have been drowning in breathless TV segments, tendentious op-eds, and mawkish lectures about the sanctity of democracy in the United States.

 

I can hear the rhetoric now. Change a handful of inconvenient details, and this incident would be cast as an attack on “women,” on “the LGBT community,” and on “our democracy itself.” Put the motivating criticisms in the mouth of Tucker Carlson, instead of Chris Hayes, and the episode would be widely held to represent “the logical endpoint of the climate of hatred that has been whipped up.” Attribute the passion to a MAGA type instead of a progressive, and it would be said to “evoke the painful memories of January 6.” Noting the event, the Washington Post concluded that it was “representative of the dissatisfaction that many Arizona Democrats — and Democrats across the country — have voiced over Sinema’s resistance toward the reconciliation bill.” Is there anyone alive who believes that the Post would have been this sanguine if the roles had been reversed?

 

The affair brings to mind the politicized “irregular verbs” from the BBC’s satire, Yes, Minister: “I have an independent mind, you are eccentric, he is round the twist.” In the stylebook utilized by the establishment press, left-wing protesters are “passionate,” “frustrated,” “tired,” “dissatisfied,” “engaged,” and “peaceful,” while right-wing protesters are “bitter,” “hateful,” “dangerous,” “disturbed,” “misled,” and “violent.” Why, five years later, is the attack on the Pulse nightclub still being cast as an anti-gay hate crime somehow caused by the Republican Party, while the 2017 congressional-baseball-practice shooting — which was carried out by a fan of Bernie Sanders who hoped to murder a considerable portion of the Republican caucus — is treated as an anomaly that deserves to be consigned to the dustbin? I’ll tell you why: Because, almost to a man, the establishment press’s starting assumption is that conservatives are wrong and progressives are right, and because everything else flows from there.

 

Today’s New York Times provides an illustrative example. The last three pieces that the Times’s news team ran on Kyrsten Sinema were about her holding fundraising events with “business groups that oppose” the reconciliation bill; her having “angered some Democrats back home” (note the wording: she angered them); and her having gone back to Arizona for “a doctor’s visit and a fund-raiser.” In the opinion section, meanwhile, there is an item musing on how Monica Lewinsky would have used Twitter in 1998, an editorial about the Capitol riot, a piece attacking the Supreme Court, and an essay on what would happen “if men needed the abortions” (I thought they did? — it’s hard to keep up), but nothing whatsoever on the disgraceful invasion of Sinema’s privacy. Odd, right?

 

Throughout the Trump years, journalists who claimed that they were concerned with the maintenance of political decorum took to intoning “This. Is. Not Normal” whenever news of a fresh departure crossed the transom. Today, with Trump out office and the Democratic Party fully in charge of D.C., we are watching as progressive activists corner senators in their commodes, surround legislators’ boats with kayaks, and organize the harassment of sitting Supreme Court justices. Did they mean it? Or did they just want the space cleared for themselves?