Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is more responsible for the decay in basic American decency than any other person in that supposedly distinguished body. When our intelligence communities were warning that Russian spies and propaganda teams were seeking to undermine a United States election, it was Republican Mitch McConnell who warned the last president that if our leaders tried to more fully warn the public about those threats, Mitch McConnell would claim those efforts to be partisan efforts aimed at hurting the stupid, amoral, crooked Donald Trump. When a Supreme Court justice died in his sleep, it was Mitch McConnell who invented the new rule that the nation's first black president was not allowed to fill that seat, for over a year, simply because Mitch McConnell did not want him to.
It is Mitch McConnell who is guiding his party into slow-walking the investigation into whether the Trump campaign team committed an act of treason against their nation, despite ample public evidence that they did. It is Mitch McConnell who is stonewalling all efforts to hold the Trump administration to any ethical standards whatsoever, whether it be profiting from foreign governments funding Trump's own private hotel chain to the Trump refusal to abide by any other prior long-held national norm.
But more than that: Sen. Mitch McConnell, more than any other American senator, is a shameless, flagrant, and prolific liar. He, more than any other American senator, is a dishonest man. His speeches are Christmas trees ornamented with lies, half-truths, and fervent opinions he happens to have that he did not have yesterday and will argue bitterly against tomorrow. He is a living monument to the doctrine of party over country—that there is no law, no ethical boundary, no act of corruption or treason that cannot be overlooked if he, Mitch McConnell, can squeeze a little personal power out of the deal for himself. He is the Dignified Trump. He is the Genteel Racist. He is the reason the "intellectuals" of the Republican Party, at least the ones not running for office, have continued to denounce their own party for its shameless acts.
Here is Mitch McConnell being interviewed by Playbook on the "immigration debate":
Anna Palmer: This is something that's been thrown at you in the primaries, at your wife, at your family, felt directly ... Are you concerned that this debate is ... motivated by nativist feelings?
McConnell: There does seem to be a kind of high level of just ... anger. And some behavioral issues I would say. ... I am disturbed by the feeling that we can't just have a good old fashioned argument without losing our temper.
He is speaking here about the policies of forcibly separating children from their refugee parents at the border and throwing them in detention camps. He is "disturbed" that that is causing anger among the peasantry. And behavioral issues for those that so fervently object to this international human rights crime.
Here is a message to Mitch McConnell, who has broken his oath to defend and uphold the Constitution on more occasions than he has had lunch in the Capitol. A message to one of the prime current protectors of those that committed acts of treason against the country, and who considers every ethical boundary one that must not be crossed by his political opponents, and one that can be glibly crossed without consequences for his allies. A special note to the man whose party obsessed incessantly about imagined Democratic crimes—and is now bear-hugging the man who provably has been doing worse while bragging that he could. Fake charities. Profiting from lobbyists. Administration-wide grifting. Cover-ups. Lying to the public. And, in the golden hallways of Trump Tower, that treason thing.
Go to hell. Sod off, and take your disturbed with you. You built Trump, and you protect him. You built your party's new double-down into neo-Confederacy and open racism, and you protect it and nurture it. The president attacks companies and citizens for daring to defy him, and you say nothing. He spits at the ethical boundaries that have constrained every other leader, and you block the nation from responding. A sitting president came to you with an urgent warning that a foreign power was hip-deep in attempting to befoul the underpinnings of our democracy itself, and you did not only say nothing: you warned him that if he spoke up, you would act against him.
Go to hell. You are an enemy of the nation and to decency alike, a crooked, Nixonian man who has not yet found a boundary he would not cross in order to gain just a little more power. You are a cultist, a hack, a fool, and a coward forever hiding in your office and behind your staff, a cheap wax figure of a man who has not once mustered up a voice during any of the times in history, ever, when it might have mattered. May the history books mention you with the same disdain as Joe McCarthy; may your family have to build an iron fence around your grave to keep all the people you have harmed in your life from pissing on your headstone.
