The Mendacity of Mitch McConnell (Molly Jong-Fast)

[Nevilledog]

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Tweet text: Molly Jong-Fast🏡
@MollyJongFast
I wrote about the worst person in the senate in ⁦@voguemagazine⁩

https://www.vogue.com/article/the-mendacity-of-mitch-mcconnell-senate-majority-leader

Democrat Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot, has raised $46,921,518 for her Kentucky Senate race. In August alone she raised $8.7 million, with the average donation said to be $48. Conventional wisdom states this seat is a long shot for Dems and there are many more winnable Senate races around the country, like Arizona and Colorado. But winning is only part of why Democrats are pouring money into this race. They are passionately donating to McGrath not just because of who she is—but because of who she isn’t. You see, McGrath is running against the most hated Republican in the Senate and perhaps even the entire party: 78-year-old Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr.

There are lots of reasons to hate Mitch McConnell. Let’s start with his actions since 2018, when the Democrats took back control of the House. In the past two years, McConnell has defiantly blocked any legislation that has come from the Lower House, refusing to take up 395 House bills that have been sent to the Senate, a fact that he’s embraced by joyously tweeting a picture of a graveyard and calling himself the “grim reaper of socialism,” and telling Fox News, “They’ve been on full left-wing parade over there.” But, of course, Grim Reaper Mitch doesn’t mean socialism; he means a functioning government, which McConnell effectively brought a halt to as soon as Republicans lost the House. And stopping legislation makes sense because fundamentally, as Jeet Heer writes in The Nation, “Both Trump and McConnell are nihilists, eager above all to hold onto power and to serve the wealthy donors of the Republican Party.”

There are other reasons to hate McConnell, among them the fact that he’s packed the courts with hundreds of conservative judges on the federal bench, making it, as Howard Fineman wrote this week in the Washington Post, “younger, whiter, and more male—and far more partisan—in the process.”

And then there’s the hypocrisy. In February 2016, McConnell said, “Of course it’s within the president’s authority to nominate a successor even in this very rare circumstance—remember that the Senate has not filled a vacancy arising in an election year when there was divided government since 1888, almost 130 years ago—but we also know that Article II, Section II of the Constitution grants the Senate the right to withhold its consent, as it deems necessary.” Shortly after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, McConnell stood on the floor of Congress and told the Senate that “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.” Completely the opposite of what he said when there was a Democrat in the White House and 10 months to go in his term.

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[smirkymonkey]

1. K&R

As much as I despise Trump, it is McConnell who is the real demon in the destruction of our democracy, and he has been at it a lot longer and with much more targeted malice than any other politician in the history of this nation.

I have often wondered what it is that makes someone like Mitch so truly evil and hateful toward the majority of citizens in this country. Why he wants to cause such suffering and struggle only to enrich and empower a very small group of rich, white men at the top? As Molly mentioned, he is a 78-year-old very wealthy man. What is he getting out of this and what drives him? Surely he can't get much more personally as he is not bound to get much richer and will not live much longer.

I really hate this motherfucker more than almost anyone except for Donald Trump, and the only reason for that is because Trump is more ubiquitous, louder, nastier and influential on a global scale. But McConnell and Barr are very close seconds. They are evil men who deserve to get their comeuppance very soon.

[CrispyQ]

2. It's about preserving the white Christian patriarchy.

These (mostly) men were only ever in favor of representative government as long as they were at the top of the hierarchy. And they had a good run at it, too, since they put themselves at the top & rigged the game, but now that demographics are changing, they have to rig the game even more in order to keep their place at the top. They genuinely believe they are superior to the rest of us, in spite of the fact that it is centuries of their policies that have brought us to an ecological brink.