LOOKISM IS ONLY THOUGHTCRIME WHEN IT'S CONVENIENT.

It's two days after Hallowe'en, try not to think of Pramila Jayapal.

I'm being outrageous to make a point, which is that the representative is characteristic of the sort of ward-heeler politician who exploits the penury of her constituents to get into office only to do nothing meaningful to change that penury because then they might vote differently and she'd be out of a job.  Such politicians have kept up this schtick for at least fifty years, probably much longer.  Thus, the machinations of the so-called progressive caucus are in the service of dumb ideas, and it doesn't matter who is taking point for the latest effort to enact those ideas.

What does it say, though, when the self-styled progressives don't have anything beyond motive-questioning?

It wasn’t that long ago that embattled Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema was hailed as a triumph of bisexual representation. After she was sworn in in January 2019, Out celebrated the first openly bisexual senator as a “rebuke to Trumpism,” positioning the “sassy lawmaker” in opposition to homophobic then-Vice President Mike Pence.

But just a few years into her tenure, public opinion has soured on Sinema. Instead of a brash, bisexual icon willing and able to stand up to the far right, she’s now seen as an unreliable centrist, a self-absorbed Democratic turncoat more fixated on getting attention and lining her own pockets than uplifting her community. No longer a bi icon, she’s now held up as a cautionary tale about the limits of representation.

As a bisexual woman — and one who, like Sinema, is white and cisgender — I now cringe every time the senator makes the headlines. Whether it’s fashion columnists dissecting her showy personal style, cartoonists mocking her as a “manic pixie dream senator” or the seemingly endless analyses of her inscrutability, Sinema seems to embody many of the nasty assumptions about bi women I’ve worked my whole life to avoid.

Her "community" is all the voters in Arizona, whether they compete in triathlons or not, whether they might be good to go in a threesome or not, whether her transgressivity is OK or not.  The closest Lux Alpatraum comes to making any statement about whether a policy position might work or not is this.

In theory, electing more bisexuals will lead to better legislation that more thoughtfully addresses bisexual-specific concerns, making sure bisexuals don’t fall through the cracks of public health, anti-violence and anti-poverty initiatives. But in practice, it’s clear that politicians from marginalized backgrounds don’t always act in the best interests of their community. Sinema herself is proof of that. Despite her own history with poverty, she’s worked to gut the social safety net provisions included in the Build Back Better Act.

Might that be because those social safety net provisions will simply enable dysfunction? Should be easy enough to argue a contrary position.

It's not enough, though, to put forth alphabet people as a "rebuke to Trumpism."  If they don't do the woke mob's bidding, they might as well be Trumps.  Seriously.  "Kyrsten Sinema in All Her Bad Outfits Is the New Ivanka Trump."  Seriously.  "Much like Ivanka, Sinema keeps quiet on the issues most people want to talk about, preferring to let her outfits and the smirks she gives photographers do the talking. So whether she likes it or not, the rest of us are left projecting our opinions about Sinema onto her clothing."  No serious policy analysis there.