Sometimes you get a reminder that, for all their racism, misogyny and calls to violence, Trump and his team of brownshirts are really just amateurs. If you want to make the most disgusting accusation imaginable, want to twist the facts so much that up and down are reversed, want to say something utterly vile, pusillanimous, mendacious and two-faced all at once ... you need a pro. You need that chinless bastard and ever-grinning son of a bitch, Mitch McConnell.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used his Republican convention speech Tuesday night as a platform to blame the Democrats for the Senate’s failure to approve emergency funds to fight the Zika virus.
Never mind that the Republicans control the Senate, and that they failed — twice — to work out a funding bill with broad enough support to pass the chamber. In McConnell’s telling, it was the Democrats who prevented the $1.1 billion bill from passing before Congress left for a seven-week recess, so any public health consequences will be their responsibility.
McConnell didn’t just blame Democrats, he actually blamed Hillary Clinton, because as long as you’re lying, you might as well go all the way. And he didn’t just fail to “work out a bill with broad enough support,” what he did was poison the bill. Deliberately.
The Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, was incensed. “I don’t know what universe my friend is living in,” Mr. Reid said, referring to Mr. McConnell. “What does he think? Does he think we’re all stupid? The American people are dumb?”
The Republican bill took funding away from Planned Parenthood—and explicitly blocked that funding in areas like Puerto Rico where it’s most needed to fight Zika. It also took hundreds of millions from the Affordable Care Act. In other words, Republicans loaded the bill with everything they could in order to make it fail.
It’s not even a matter of holding the lives of children hostage to getting their way. Republicans never intended this bill to pass. Ever.
And now we’re facing what may be the first Zika case that originated in Florida and a disturbing case in Utah that may show Zika is more contagious than we thought.
Florida is already dealing with a number of Zika cases, but until this week those cases have involved people who traveled outside the country. On Tuesday, that changed.
Florida health officials are investigating a Zika infection in Miami-Dade County that may be the first acquired within the state, according to an announcement late Tuesday.
Health officials reported they are conducting an epidemiological investigation in collaboration with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And across the country, a Utah man who died after acquiring Zika on a trip out of the country apparently spread the disease to a relative.
Health officials are trying to unravel how a relative may have picked up a Zika infection from a Utah man who died.
The tropical virus rarely spreads from person to person, not like the flu or the measles. The virus can pass from a pregnant woman to her fetus and cause birth defects. And it can also be spread through sex. But it is mostly spread by mosquitoes.
The relative tended the man in his illness before his death, so there were many opportunities to be exposed to both direct contact and contact with fluids, but the idea that Zika may have another transmission vector is worrisome.
The elderly man had an extremely large amount of virus in his blood — the most ever seen. That helped make this case highly unusual, said officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Higher levels of virus in the blood can make someone more contagious.
Let’s hope that the Utah case doesn’t prove to be just unusual, but unique.
And let’s not forget that, even among the crew present this week in Cleveland, Mitch McConnell is uniquely disgusting.