 Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin of The New York Times co-wrote a book about the Biden administration and in this new book there are new albeit unsurprising details about Kirsten Sinema and I wanted to talk about this because it's pretty interesting. So Jonathan Martin tweeted out a couple of details about his book and here's what he says here. In private with GOP lobbyists, Sinema praised election denier Andy Biggs. I love Andy Biggs. I know some people think he's crazy but that's just because they don't know him. I'll visit this claim later. Sinema at same lobbyist fundraiser which took place during intense negotiations over Build Back Better mocked Biden, praised McCarthy, and sounded like a Republican while discussing taxes. The GOP heavy crowd loved her but her private persona is why the White House says she reminds them of Romney. Sinema's Senate colleagues also see this quite blunt version of her even if she's an enigma to the public. She said to GOP colleagues that five to six of her fellow moderate Democrats are quote hiding behind my skirt as she pushed back on the left. Okay, a couple of points of clarification there. We don't know what she said when she was reportedly mocking Joe Biden but I mean this kind of goes to show you that he shouldn't have shown her respect because that very clearly wasn't mutual. So he should have done what many of us on the left recommended and just publicly condemn her and Joe Manchin. But that last paragraph there is really interesting to me because it kind of confirms what a lot of us had speculated that there are five to six fellow Senate Democrats hiding behind her and also Joe Manchin. This was obvious. I think that when you have corporate Democrats like Chris Coons, Mark Warner, and John Tester they probably agree almost entirely with Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin but they just don't want to put themselves out there. They don't want to be the punching bag for the Democratic Party's base. They don't want to take all of the heat. But if they had to, if Push came to shove and Biden didn't have a cinema and a mansion I think that one of them, if not all of them, would have stepped up to fill that void. There's always going to be a mansion and a cinema, right, before it was Lieberman. There's always going to be someone in the Democratic Party who basically prevents them from fulfilling their own agenda and is basically a saboteur, a GOP-aligned saboteur. Kirsten Sinema is just confirming that there's more right-wing saboteurs in the party than the public probably knows about but this isn't shocking if you've been paying attention. Now it's funny that she mocks Biden but yet she doesn't mock someone like Andy Biggs. She claims that people dislike Andy Biggs because they think that he's crazy but really you can only think that he's crazy if you don't know him. Well Insider gives us some additional context here and contradicts what she says. Sinema and Biggs have been friends since their days serving together in the Arizona Legislature and have long found common ground across the aisle. Sinema backed him for Congress in 2016 telling a business group, I can't wait to sit here and do this with Andy next year, the Phoenix New Times reported at the time. Biggs has, among other things, spread false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump in Arizona, called for the election in Pennsylvania to be nullified, said as recently as October that it was not clear whether Biden fairly won Arizona in 2020 and denied the existence of climate change. Biggs, who objected to Congress ratifying the 2020 election on January 6th of 2021, has also pushed baseless conspiracy theories that the Black Lives Matter movement, Antifa and the FBI, may have been involved in causing the insurrection. Two of Biggs' own brothers have publicly condemned his attempts to discredit the 2020 election and called for his removal from Congress in the wake of the Capitol riot. Quote, by attempting to cause uncertainty in the election's outcome, Andy is at least partially to blame for the riot at the Capitol on January 6th, the Biggs brothers wrote in a letter obtained by the Arizona Republic. Political ambition, peer pressure, and fealty to former President Donald Trump proved to be too strong a drug to resist. So Andy Biggs is by far one of the dumbest, most extreme members of Congress. He's calling for the end of democracy in the United States. He's an authoritarian. And she's saying, well, you know, he's not crazy. You just don't know him if you think he's crazy. But yet his brothers are saying, no, actually, he's crazy. He should be removed from Congress. That's how crazy he is. But yet Kyrsten Sinema loves him. She's politically aligned with a member of the Freedom Caucus. And yet she won't even align with members of her own party. I mean, she's just a Republican. She's just a Republican. The difference between her and someone like Mitt Romney, for example, is that she's a registered Democrat. But that doesn't change her behavior. She's still a right winger. And there's some other portions of this article where they describe a moment where Kyrsten Sinema reportedly pulled a Marjorie or tried to pull a Marjorie and refused to wear a mask during a meeting with Joe Biden. Let's read that real quick. This is from the same article. The book also described more previously unreported details about the strained relationship between Sinema and the Biden White House, including that Sinema fought the White House's request for her to wear a mask in a meeting with Biden and told him not to come to Arizona to tout the passage of the American Rescue Plan last year. So that's just bizarre to me. You fought their request for you to wear a mask during a pandemic. People in Congress are incapable of behaving like adults. And it's just bizarre to me. That's some Marjorie level shit. But I mean, Kyrsten Sinema is an extremist. She's a corporate extremist, right? She might be more brazen and in your face about it than other Democrats and other Republicans, but she's an extremist. She believes that corporate rule in America is what should be de facto the governing position, right? It shouldn't be lawmakers who determine what laws are passed and aren't passed. It should be corporate America, the business class. And it's just, it's sickening. So very, very fascinating. But again, not surprising because this is Kyrsten Sinema, a Republican we're talking about here. So of course she's aligned with insurrectionists like Andy Biggs. And of course she mocked Joe Biden. But you know, in a sane world, Biden would hear articles about like this about her mocking him and he'd think, okay, you know what, the gloves are off now. I'm no longer going to pay them respect because they don't respect me. So mansion in Sinema, go fuck yourselves. I'm going to call them out publicly, but that's not going to happen. And that's really frustrating. But I mean, even if Biden stepped up and he actually pressured mansion in Sinema and they buckled. Well, then John Tester would step up and fill that void. It's kind of this never-ending cycle of the Democratic Party allowing saboteurs into their big tent party when if the party actually was serious about governing, they'd kick these saboteurs, these right-wing Republican saboteurs out of the party. But you know, at this point, I'm really sick of hearing about Kirsten Sinema and it almost makes me feel gross talking about this because I think she just loves the attention. People say that she's an enigma because her actions are a little bit irrational, right? I mean, she's doing things that are antithetical to her reelection campaign. But I think that to her, she just loves the attention. She loves the press, positive or negative. She enjoys it all. So I feel like I'm feeding into what she wants here by talking about this. But I just think it's important that we confirm what we've all speculated that if it wasn't for Manchin or Sinema, there'd be some other dickhead who would stand up and block progress. So that's where we are in the United States. The Democratic Party needs to purge the party of these ghouls. Otherwise, they will never be able to get things done and they're certainly going to continue to turn off large portions of the base rather than bragging about being a big tent party. They need to shrink the size of the tent and kick people like her, Republicans like her and Joe Manchin out of the party.