Sen. Mitch McConnell (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
I swear, Mitch McConnell might spend more time on the Sunday talk shows than he does in the Senate. The latest wisdom being parceled out by Hell's favorite box turtle is that the Senate has given Barack Obama everything he asked for, so the administration has no reason to complain:
The White House has “been trying to pretend like the President just showed up yesterday, just got sworn in and started fresh,” McConnell declared Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “In fact, he’s been in office for three years. He got everything he wanted from a completely compliant Congress for two of those three years… We are living in the Obama economy.”
So McConnell is saying that Congress, in 2009-2010, was completely compliant? Wow. That's an impressive claim indeed. I remember filibusters galore, and near-blanket holds on presidential appointments, and a fight over health care that had whole segments of America convinced that "death panels" were coming to cart away grandma. I also seem to remember a stimulus that was gutted and replaced in large part with pointless tax cuts, and hostage-taking, always the damn hostage taking, and always centered around making sure the deficit-ballooning Bush tax cuts would never, ever expire.
It's not surprising that Mitch McConnell is a gigantic liar; that seems to be the job qualification, these days. I suppose it's also not surprising that he's just so darn good at it, for the same reason. But this is the same Mitch McConnell that, along with other key members of his party, went out of their way to explain how blocking Obama at every turn was the Republican strategy, from day one of his presidency. Gridlock was the plan, and the goal.
So what the hell, let's get PolitiFact on this one. Or better yet, maybe the press corps itself can give Mitch McConnell a ring on the telephone. Or perhaps maybe they can just stop having him on these shows if he's going to spend the entire time dreaming up magical fantasy histories that suggest he's spent the entirety of his recent career on LSD. If he thinks that his Senate, the one he sits his ass down in every day (well, every other day, or perhaps once a week, except during non-recess recesses when nobody comes in at all), has given Obama "everything he wanted," that's probably a sign of some sort of serious medical condition.