Don't let looks deceive you, Sen. Mazie Hirono is one tough 'badass'

SCREEN CAPTURE / YOUTUBE

Hawaii's Sen. Mazie Hirono  urges her Republican colleagues to support the Affordable Care Act.

SENATOR MAZIE HIRONO, 70 may look like one of those Asian American elders you see at social gatherings with neatly coiffed hair and lively eyes looking over their spectacles, but don't let looks fool you. She's one tough woman.

An excellent article by NPR, titled "The Quiet Rage of Mazie Hirono" destroys the quiet, subservient Asian woman stereotype.

One newspaper columnist calls Hawaii's senator a "badass."

"I always was," Hirono said in an interview with NPR. "I just wasn't very noisy about it. I've been a fighter all my life. I just don't look like that."

That's probably why no one has dared step up to challenge Hirono in her re-election bid this November despite the fact she is fighting stage 4 cancer of the liver. Nothing slows her down.

Those dated stereotypes are still powerful and we all need to guard against the way they can warp an individual's view of other people. If one were to apply that stereotype to Hirono, they would be shocked at Hirono's behavior. They would also be grossly misinformed.

Since she was diagnosed with cancer a year ago she has been more visible and outspoken. The election of Donald Trump seems to have given her more energy as she battles Republicans on immigration, health care and trade.  She has she the "good girl" don't-rock-the-boat image she was saddled with, thrust upon her by the predominantly white, male Senate and Washington media.

She is the Senate's only immigrant and its first female Asian American. Until Kamala Harris and Tammy Duckworth were elected in 2016, she was the ONLY Asian American in the Senate.

She had kept a pretty low profile. But she is not afraid to put herself out front of an issue if she thinks it would help the issues she cares about.

"As I tell my staff," she told NPR, "people are getting screwed in this country every single second, minute, hour of the day. And, by our efforts, if we can decrease that number, we will be making a difference. We will be doing our jobs."

When it came to defending the American Care Act, her emotional appeal on the Senate floor put the senators in their place, though it didn't change the vote of most rigidly partisan Republicans.

Late in the night, she took the floor and said. “Here I am a United States senator, I am fighting kidney cancer and I’m just so grateful that I had health insurance so I could concentrate on the care that I needed rather than how the heck I was going to afford the care that was probably going to save my life.”

She spoke about how when she was first diagnosed, she heard from many of her colleagues across the aisle. “You showed me your care,” she said, fighting back tears. “You showed me your compassion. Where is that tonight?”

As the only first-generation immigrant in the Senate, she's not afraid to challenge Trump's immigration proposals. On more than one occasion, she has called Trump, "xenophobic" and a "liar." "To call the president a liar, that is not good, but it happens to be the truth," the soft-spoken Hawaii senator told Time recently.

She has also been criticized for doggedly asking federal judiciary nominees if they have ever been accused of sexual misconduct. She wants the nominees' answers on the record in case, in the future, they do act inappropriately, they can be charged for perjury.

READ the entire NPR article here.

To her those who criticize her for her pointed questions, Hirono responds, "F--- them!"

"If that's considered liberal, as opposed to what I call justice and fairness, as I am won't to say, f--- them!" Hirono said.

Actually, based on the Asian American grandmothers I've encountered, that's not an uncommon response. 

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