Contact across the Solar System

The Anti-Espionagers Strike Back

The Watchers were cautiously optimistic about Congresswoman Cristina, as they often called her. Congresspeople were gradually defecting from the anti-espionager cause, something that caused many of the Watchers to scratch their heads about what is going on behind the scenes.

But the anti-espionagers were livid. Cristina had seemed like such a great fellow anti-espionager, but she was faltering more and more and praising the SSC more and more. When she finally left the movement, it seemed almost anticlimactic. But it was a dividing line, and she had crossed it.

They were already dredging up the numerous scandals and pseudo-scandals about Cristina that her opponents had long made an issue out of, but after she left the movement, they did so with added intensity. Scandals and pseudo-scandals like the time that she held a mini-funeral for a broken smartphone. Like when she tried to find God in an onion. Like how she supposedly helped her husband find some jobs.

She and her followers had many well-practiced comebacks. Some people made a big issue out of her calling herself a mutt and using racial and ethnic insults as terms of endearment. She once responded "Yes, I'm a spic, I'm a wetback, I'm a beaner. My friends call me names like that and I do it to them. I used to get very upset at those names, but I don't anymore. It's so silly." About her sometimes going giddy with delight. "Is this a Congressmember or a teenage girl?" She responded "I feel really sorry for them. It must be horrible to have a life with no joy in it. I think we deserve more than that."

Her pushing vegetarian fake meats and similar sorts of foods in Federal cafeterias and military rations and school lunches and the like. Her critics saying "I don't want to eat veggie burgers all day" and "Americans want real food, not hippie granola nonsense from Congresswoman Veggie Burger!" Her critics also called Mike a soy boy, and she responded "He sure is. He loves my tofu recipes."

Some anti-espionagers made fun of her Spanish accent, with exaggerated trilled r's, like pronouncing her name "Crrristina". That, however, annoyed a lot of Latin American anti-espionagers. One of them said about it that "Ms. Martinez is a world-class loon, and her kookiness deserves to be exposed for all the world to see. I don't see how she can possibly get elected, let alone re-elected. But I cringe whenever I hear anyone make fun of her accent. We don't need that."

Then how terrible she was for skipping out on a wedding, then throwing a party for all the would-be guests where she wore a Mexican peasant dress and Mike wore overalls. As "tradition" and "heritage".

Her critics had long derided her having had beauty-salon jobs, and the anti-espionagers joined in. "So Tina became a quisling so she can do the mall rats' nails," a sentiment that many anti-espionagers found deliriously funny. They also slammed her for being a self-styled feminist who nevertheless made a career out of making women look beautiful. "Feminists say that women shouldn't be judged on their looks. But here is Congresswoman Chris making a career out of women's looks." But Cristina saw no contradiction, and she once posted some video of herself and a feminist activist doing each others' nails as they discussed careers and activism and policy issues. The anti-espionagers even made a big issue out of her comparing herself to the suffragette activists who struggled for the right to vote way back when. "What a privileged crybaby she is!" She responded with how she once did a high-school project on them, and that she became deeply impressed with their courage. "I thank them for making possible my career. I can vote, and I can be voted for," she said with a laugh.

They even claimed that "this Valley Girl" was recruited by the "mall rats" just as Sheila McKenna was -- and that this is a terrible conflict of interest that she should be investigated. But she shrugged it off as no worse than going on a fact-finding tour of the beaches of Acapulco. Or riding in some corporate executive's private jet.