Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Today In Moscow Mitch




On the same day the House Oversight and Reform Committee is set to open an investigation of his wife's possible ethics violations, cosmically foul Sen. "Moscow Mitch" McConnell is the subject of a devastating profile in Rolling Stone: "Mitch McConnell:  The Man Who Sold Out America."  The profile traces his too- long political career as one of the most destructive persons ever to occupy a position of power in American government (and touches on the aforementioned shady lady's use of Moscow Mitch to advance her family's interests).  This is just a small taste;  please take the time to read the whole profile -- if you have the stomach:
For so many years, McConnell has seemed maddeningly invincible. But now, just a few years after achieving his lifelong goal of becoming Senate majority leader, it appears that every political sin the man has committed on his relentless march to power is coming back to haunt him at once. He has welcomed infamy, and now it has arrived on its own terms, bringing with it a previously unthinkable possibility: Could 40 years’ worth of devil’s bargains finally be catching up with Mitch McConnell?

For all the damage he’s inflicted on American democracy, for all the political corpses he’s left in his wake, Mitch McConnell has never betrayed an ounce of shame. To the contrary, like the president he now so faithfully serves, McConnell has always exuded a sense of pride in the lengths to which he’s gone to achieve his ambitions and infuriate his enemies.  [snip]

It was already becoming clear that, in the political world of Mitch McConnell, convictions and campaign pledges were fungible things, easily tossed aside. Throughout his career, as the Republican Party veered right, and then further right, McConnell moved with it. “It’s always been about power, the political game, and it’s never been about the core values that drive political life,” John Yarmuth, Kentucky’s lone Democratic congressman, told Alec MacGillis, author of the 2014 McConnell biography The Cynic. “There has never been anything that interested him other than winning elections.”
Moscow Mitch is the perfect paladin for the Republican Party -- ruthless, amoral, destructive, cynical, and interested in power for power's sake, not for promoting the general welfare of the American people.  Even though his approval is around 18 percent in Kentucky, we'll need a big blue wave to carry him out of office, and Amy McGrath is best- positioned to build that wave in 2020.  The fight is just beginning;  let's carry it through to the end.

BONUS:  It's winnable.  Don't believe otherwise --