According to Arizona Republic journalist EJ Montini, the thing that former Republican gubernatorial candidate for Arizona Kari Lake feared the most is now a reality: She has become “irrelevant.”
“I haven’t noticed lately any photos of Lake hanging out at Mar-a-Lago with former President Donald Trump, America’s election denier in chief,” Montini noted in an op-ed on Thursday.
“And it has been a while since I’ve received a ranting email from one or more of the poor saps who fell for Lake’s ongoing plea to donate money to her election challenges. Even today, news of her appeal to the Arizona Supreme Court has been greeted with a big, fat, statewide — even nationwide — yawn.”
“For a self-serving, egocentric political evangelist like Lake it must be torture,” Montini opined. “The very worst thing that could have happened to her is happening. She’s become … boring.”
The journalist also compared Lake to Fonzie, the iconic character from the 1970s sitcom “Happy Days.”
“It’s safe to say she has ‘jumped the shark,’ again,” he wrote, adding: “You either know what I’m talking about, or you can Google it.”
It happened during the fifth season of “Happy Days,” and became shorthand for describing the moment a TV show, or a business, or a person loses their mojo, their appeal, and goes into a sharp decline.
In the “Happy Days” episode, Henry Winkler’s character, “The Fonz,” while waterskiing in his signature leather jacket, literally jumps over a shark.
Hence the term.
With Lake I’m not sure if the shark jumping occurred during her initial whining complaints about the stolen election, or when she took those complains to court and lost, or when she took those same complaints to the Arizona Court of Appeals and lost, again, with that court calling her claims “sheer speculation.”
But it has happened again, this week, when her lawyers brought the case to the state Supreme Court.
If shark jumping were a sport, Lake would be an Olympic gold medalist.