Anything Mitch McConnell ever writes is going to be cynical, the same way anything you flush down the toilet is going to be wet. The only question is what he’s being cynical about. Yesterday, the Senate majority leader published, and tweeted about, an opinion piece for the Fox News website: “Will Dems work with us, or simply put partisan politics ahead of the country?”
It would be too boring and infuriating to run through every occasion on which Mitch McConnell openly and directly announced that he was putting partisan politics ahead of the country. It is what he does, and it is the only thing he does, and he has been a monstrous success at it. Mitch McConnell suggesting he thinks obstructive partisanship is bad is like a shark complaining the water smells too much like blood.
Even his talking points about bipartisan accomplishment were partisan talking points: The piece celebrated the passage of “the largest year-on-year increase in defense funding in 15 years, which put an end to the Obama-era atrophy of our armed forces.”
Given that, though, why did this Fox News article exist? For what audience was the majority leader praising the just-completed work of “a Congress that has conducted as much serious, cooperative work as any in recent history”? Why did McConnell—or whatever henchman typed up this thing under the corporate identity of “Mitch McConnell”—bother?
It’s possible McConnell was just taunting the libs, the one identifiable source of pleasure in his withered, skulking life. It’s also possible he was using Fox News to issue the script for his majority members to recite as they confirm the Red Skull as Ambassador to the United Nations and a carton of Georgia-Pacific paper products to the Ninth Circuit. What’s truly chilling is the thought that somewhere, in the dusty void where the respectable center was formerly thought to be, there might be someone still dumb enough to believe any crumb of what he has to say.
