Mitch McConnell: Putting Party Ahead of Country Every Time

[babylonsister]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-06-01/mitch-mcconnell-putting-party-ahead-of-country-every-time/#

Mitch McConnell: Putting Party Ahead of Country Every Time

by Michael Tomasky

People insist on presuming that Mitch McConnell speaks and acts in good faith. But as Michael Tomasky argues, this is a delusion born of the Senate’s distinguished history.



The leathery visage of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell never fails to sadden and enrage me. McConnell has made it abundantly clear that his goal is not to help the economy or anything else; his overriding concern is making Barack Obama a one-term president. When he said Sunday that there will be no deal on raising the debt ceiling without substantial Medicare cuts, he made his motives clear again. Others have beaten me to the punch in calling this a hostage situation, and that’s precisely what it is.

My sadness and rage intensify when I stop to think that McConnell once worked for and now holds the seat of the great John Sherman Cooper. Who? A senator from Kentucky from the 1940s through the 1970s, Cooper was a liberal Republican: not just someone who was kind of liberal for a Republican, but a genuine liberal, and also a genuine Republican, at a time and from a place when and where it was possible to be both. Cooper hailed from southeastern Kentucky, an oasis of Republicanism in what was then an otherwise solidly Democratic state. Remember, in those days and in such places, Democratic meant segregationist, another thing the towering Cooper never was: As a Kentucky circuit judge after the war (he was among the soldiers who happened across Buchenwald) but before his Senate service, he empanelled black citizens as jurors—in 1946.

Are Democrats—and is the president—ready to do what it takes to defeat McConnell and his fellow Republicans in their effort to enact ruinous and unpopular changes to Medicare?

snip//

But whacking Medicare is extremely unpopular, too. So what the Obama people need to be asking themselves is the following. Are Democrats—and is the president—ready to do what it takes to defeat McConnell and his fellow Republicans in their effort to enact ruinous and unpopular changes to Medicare while also risking default on the country’s debt? I think the Democrats can win the fight politically, but only if they’re ready to go to the wall.

No, it’s not like it was in Cooper’s time, and that’s sad. But it’s a fact—of which McConnell is a walking embodiment. Can we please quit pretending otherwise?

[CBHagman]

1. Very cynical strategy by the Republicans.

I sincerely believe they are hoping that their scorched-earth and extortion policies result in a weaker economy, which they will then blame on Obama, all while claiming the Democrats are the demagogues (Note that it didn't take the 'cans long to whinge that Obama and the Dems were misrepresenting and demagoguing the Paul Ryan voucher program).

As for McConnell, we mustn't forget his office was the one that went after Graeme Frost and his family. In case you don't remember Graeme Frost, who, with his sister, received medical care through the SCHIP program, allow Paul Krugman to remind you:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/opinion/12krugman.html?pagewanted=print