These last fews weeks have really revealed what an overrated mediocrity McConnell is. All his riders got caught and publicly repudiated, some by the white house. His negotiations with the House broke down before they started. Even his vote counting has been off. He can only block
— Gorilla Warfare (@MenshevikM) March 25, 2020
Interesting that the Senate Repubs’ SuperPAC believes it will need to protect McConnell https://t.co/bzvnY3mmnN
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) March 23, 2020
Mitch McConnell pays lip service to President Trump but those in his circle say he has called the president “nuts” behind his back: How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief https://t.co/APJnV8lhuf via @NewYorker
— Jane Mayer (@JaneMayerNYer) April 13, 2020
Mayer’s characteristically well-written report is full of damning details, but what struck me most was that she doesn’t seem to have been able to find one person who’d defend the guy. Every Republican she mentions — including, predictably, all the best-Rolodexed Never-Trumpists — calls him a nasty little paper-pusher whose only loyalty is to the narrowest possible reading of his own self-interest, a milky-white grubber in the self-dealing amendments mine, a Grima Wormtongue who eventually turns on every one of his serial masters.
My read is that the Permanent GOP Party (in Exile) has concluded that calling Trump an unpredicted aberration will not be enough to turn aside the voters’ wrath this November; there needs to be a sacrificial Repub of long standing in the party. Mitch McConnell is widely feared but nowhere loved, which makes him an excellent candidate for that role…
… Many have regarded McConnell’s support for Trump as a stroke of cynical political genius. McConnell has seemed to be both protecting his caucus and covering his flank in Kentucky—a deep-red state where, perhaps not coincidentally, Trump is far more popular than he is. When the pandemic took hold, the President’s standing initially rose in national polls, and McConnell and Trump will surely both take credit for the aid package in the coming months. Yet, as COVID-19 decimates the economy and kills Americans across the nation, McConnell’s alliance with Trump is looking riskier. Indeed, some critics argue that McConnell bears a singular responsibility for the country’s predicament. They say that he knew from the start that Trump was unequipped to lead in a crisis, but, because the President was beloved by the Republican base, McConnell protected him. He even went so far as to prohibit witnesses at the impeachment trial, thus guaranteeing that the President would remain in office. David Hawpe, the former editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, said of McConnell, “There are a lot of people disappointed in him. He could have mobilized the Senate. But the Republican Party changed underneath him, and he wanted to remain in power.”
Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican political consultant, agrees that McConnell’s party deserves a considerable share of the blame for America’s COVID-19 disaster. In a forthcoming book, “It Was All a Lie,” Stevens writes that, in accommodating Trump and his base, McConnell and other Republicans went along as Party leaders dismantled the country’s safety net and ignored experts of all kinds, including scientists. “Mitch is kidding himself if he thinks he’ll be remembered for anything other than Trump,” he said. “He will be remembered as the Trump facilitator.”…
Bill Kristol, a formerly stalwart conservative who has become a leading Trump critic, describes McConnell as “a pretty conventional Republican who just decided to go along and get what he could out of Trump.” Under McConnell’s leadership, the Senate, far from providing a check on the executive branch, has acted as an accelerant. “Demagogues like Trump, if they can get elected, can’t really govern unless they have people like McConnell,” Kristol said. McConnell has stayed largely silent about the President’s lies and inflammatory public remarks, and has propped up the Administration with legislative and judicial victories. McConnell has also brought along the Party’s financial backers. “There’s been too much focus on the base, and not enough on business leaders, big donors, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page,” Kristol said, adding, “The Trump base would be there anyway, but the élites might have rebelled if not for McConnell. He could have fundamentally disrupted Trump’s control, but instead McConnell has kept the trains running.”
McConnell and the President are not a natural pair. A former Trump Administration official, who has also worked in the Senate, observed, “It would be hard to find two people less alike in temperament in the political arena. With Trump, there’s rarely an unspoken thought. McConnell is the opposite—he’s constantly thinking but says as little as possible.” The former Administration official went on, “Trump is about winning the day, or even the hour. McConnell plays the long game. He’s sensitive to the political realities. His North Star is continuing as Majority Leader—it’s really the only thing for him. He’s patient, sly, and will obfuscate to make less apparent the ways he’s moving toward a goal.” The two men also have different political orientations: “Trump is a populist—he’s not just anti-élitist, he’s anti-institutionalist.” As for McConnell, “no one with a straight face would ever call him a populist—Trump came to drain the swamp, and now he’s working with the biggest swamp creature of them all.”…
…McConnell… is the master of the Washington money machine. Nobody has done more than he has to engineer the current campaign-finance system, in which billionaires and corporations have virtually no spending limits, and self-dealing and influence-peddling are commonplace. Rick Wilson, a Never Trumper Republican and a former political consultant who once worked on races with McConnell’s team, said, “McConnell’s an astounding behind-the-scenes operator who’s got control of the most successful fund-raising operation in history.” Former McConnell staffers run an array of ostensibly independent spending groups, many of which take tens of millions of dollars from undisclosed donors. Wilson considers McConnell, who has been Majority Leader since 2015, a realist who does whatever is necessary to preserve both his own political survival and the Republicans’ edge in the Senate, which now stands at 53–47. “He feels no shame about it,” he said. “McConnell has been the most powerful force normalizing Trump in Washington.”…
[W]hen I asked John Yarmuth, the Democratic congressman from Louisville, who has known McConnell for fifty years, if McConnell had once been idealistic, he said, “Nah. I never saw any evidence of that. He was just driven to be powerful.”Yarmuth, who began as a Republican and worked in a statewide campaign alongside McConnell in 1968, said that McConnell had readily adapted to the Republican Party’s rightward march: “He never had any core principles. He just wants to be something. He doesn’t want to do anything.”…
For months, I searched for the larger principles or sense of purpose that animates McConnell. I travelled twice to Kentucky, observed him at a Trump rally in Lexington, and watched him preside over the impeachment trial in Washington. I interviewed dozens of people, some of whom love him and some of whom despise him. I read his autobiography, his speeches, and what others have written about him. Finally, someone who knows him very well told me, “Give up. You can look and look for something more in him, but it isn’t there. I wish I could tell you that there is some secret thing that he really believes in, but he doesn’t.”…
From the earliest days of McConnell’s political life, he has had questionable relationships with moneyed backers. His salary as county judge / executive was meagre, and, in an arrangement that troubled some in the community, a group of undisclosed Louisville business leaders quietly threw in extra pay, ostensibly for his giving speeches. David Ross Stevens, who briefly served as McConnell’s special assistant, told me, “It was like the big boys got together and gave him a pool of money.” Stevens said of McConnell, “He was the most shallow person in politics that I’d ever met. At our first staff meeting, McConnell said, ‘Does anyone have a project for me? I haven’t been on TV for eleven days.’ He was very clever, but it was all about ‘What’s this going to do for me?’ ” Stevens quit in disgust…
McConnell envied better-known colleagues who were chased down the corridors by news reporters. He wanted to be like them, he later told Carl Hulse, a Times correspondent, who interviewed McConnell for his book “Confirmation Bias,” about fights over Supreme Court nominees. The way McConnell ended up making his name was decidedly unglamorous: blocking campaign-finance reform. Even he derided the subject as rivalling “static cling as an issue most Americans care about.” Dull as campaign financing was, it was vitally important to his peers, and to democracy. Few members wanted to risk appearing corrupt, and so they were grateful to McConnell for fighting one reform after the next—while claiming that it was purely about defending the First Amendment. According to MacGillis, behind closed doors McConnell admitted to his Senate colleagues that undoing the reforms was “in the best interest of Republicans.” Armed with funding from such billionaire conservatives as the DeVos family, McConnell helped take the quest to kill restraints on spending all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2010, his side won: the Citizens United decision opened the way for corporations, big donors, and secretive nonprofits to pour unlimited and often untraceable cash into elections.
“McConnell loves money, and abhors any controls on it,” Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, a group that supports campaign-finance reform, said. “Money is the central theme of his career. And, if you want to control Congress, the best way is to control the money.”
Between 1984, when McConnell was first elected to the Senate, and today, the amount of money spent on federal campaigns has increased at least sixfold, excluding outside spending, more and more of which comes from very rich donors. Influence-peddling has grown from a grubby, shameful business into a multibillion-dollar, high-paying industry. McConnell has led the way in empowering those private interests, and in aligning the Republican Party with them. His staff embodied “the revolving door,” as they went from working for one of America’s poorest states to lobbying for America’s richest corporations, while growing rich themselves and helping fund McConnell’s campaigns. Money from the coal industry, tobacco companies, Big Pharma, Wall Street, the Chamber of Commerce, and many other interests flowed into Republican coffers while McConnell blocked federal actions that those interests opposed: climate-change legislation, affordable health care, gun control, and efforts to curb economic inequality…
Norman Ornstein, a political scientist specializing in congressional matters at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, told me that he has known every Senate Majority Leader in the past fifty years, and that McConnell “will go down in history as one of the most significant people in destroying the fundamentals of our constitutional democracy.” He continued, “There isn’t anyone remotely close. There’s nobody as corrupt, in terms of violating the norms of government.”…
In the closing weeks of the campaign, McConnell gave more assistance to Trump than many knew. In the summer of 2016, while the Senate was in recess, Obama’s C.I.A. director, John Brennan, tried to contact McConnell about an urgent threat to national security. The agency had strong evidence that President Vladimir Putin of Russia was trying to interfere in the U.S. election, possibly to hinder Hillary Clinton and help Trump. But, for “four or five weeks,” a former White House national-security official told me, McConnell deflected Brennan’s requests to brief him. Susan Rice, Obama’s former national-security adviser, said, “It’s just crazy.” McConnell had told Brennan that “he wouldn’t be available until Labor Day.”…
A previously unseen log of the private correspondence among the four leaders’ staffs shows that McConnell edited the draft, refusing to accept any of the others’ proposed changes. He was dead set against designating U.S. voting systems as “critical infrastructure” or urging election officials to seek assistance from the Department of Homeland Security. Instead, he insisted on leaving election security entirely to non-federal officials. The final statement was so muddled that a Reid aide argued, “FWIW, I’d rather do no letter at all.” Another Reid aide replied, “Me, too. But we apparently have no choice.” Finally, on September 28th, the others signed off on the McConnell draft. Instead of identifying Russia, or a foreign threat, it merely mentioned “malefactors” seeking to “disrupt the administration of our elections.” It was so indecipherable that neither the public nor election officials learned until well after the election that Russia had targeted voting systems in all fifty states. Reid told me, “The letter was nothing like what Obama wanted. It was very, very weak.”
“I don’t know for sure why he did it,” Rice said. “But my guess, particularly with the benefit of hindsight, is that he thought” calling out Russia “would be detrimental to Trump—so he delayed and deflected. It’s disgraceful.” Rice noted that after the election McConnell continued to resist numerous bipartisan calls to safeguard election security. Only after critics began mocking him as Moscow Mitch did he finally agree, last September, to support major expenditures on it. The nickname provoked the usually unflappable McConnell; he issued a response denouncing it as “McCarthyism.”…
Until recently, McConnell’s enabling of Trump has worked well for him, if not for the country. But it has now made him complicit in a crisis whose end is nowhere in sight. As the consequences of the Trump Presidency become lethally clear, his deal looks costlier every day. The trusted Cook Political Report recently downgraded the chances that Republicans would hold their Senate majority to a fifty-fifty tossup, after conservative strategists reported widespread alarm over Trump’s handling of the pandemic…
for all of Mitch's alleged political wizardry, it seems like he misread the room and got caught with his pants down when that terrible bill didn't go forward. His petulant statement defending the bill, when everyone on Twitter was calling it the "slush fund bill", just seemed off
— Almost Certainly not a Bot (@achilles_eyes) March 23, 2020
He skates by because of our electoral system and honestly the same reason Trump skates by: literally nobody assumes he has any agency. The MSM pretends like he doesn't even exist really.
— AdotSad (@AdotSad) March 23, 2020
If you live in Kentucky it is time for you to clean house! Mitch McConnell & the rest of the elected KY Republicans have been lying to you & have kept KY Families in Poverty for years, so McConnell & others could use State & Federal Welfare money to buy votes! HAPPENING NOW!! pic.twitter.com/dWbfxeFgWg
— WHSCI (@WHSCI) April 13, 2020
— Schooley (@Rschooley) April 12, 2020
Baud
I volunteer him as tribute.
Splitting Image
I think I see it.
MattF
I have an old friend who was a high-level Congressional staffer, now retired. I mentioned McConnell, she called him a snake and changed the subject.
japa21
This is why McGrath’s approach can be effective. She is talking about how the Turtle has actually kept Trump from better accomplishments (better by Kentucky standards) such as infrastructure spending. She was widely attacked for that, specially here, but I think it was smart politics.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
May the odds be never in his favor ?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
in other swampy Senate news….
trollhattan
@MattF:
But, I thought Warren was the snek.
Another Scott
@Splitting Image: Relatedly – NPR:
Kinda explains everything about Moscow Mitch.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geoduck
You want to know what the Shiatgibbon and Moscow Mitch really think of each other, just look at the picture with this article.
WereBear
What also interested me about the article was how Moscow Mitch has an ex-wife and three daughters who are flaming liberals and hate his guts.
Frankensteinbeck
I think the election of Obama gave McConnell a principle he stands by. He is utterly furious that a black man was made his boss, and wants to torture America for it. The only things he has actually worked for since Trump became president are shoveling money to the rich and cutting the social safety net, and there is honestly no connection between them because Republicans don’t care about deficits anyway. It’s a goal that fits just fine with his normal patterns and skillset anyway, because he can do it by doing nothing, and doing nothing is what McConnell is good at. He’s not stupid, but he’s no genius. He’s just so utterly evil that he sees opportunities to break norms that no one else would consider.
gene108
McConnell hopefully gets remembered as the most destructive Senator in US history. He should be given worse treatment than Sen. Joe McCarthy, and those guys during the pre-Civil War era, who beat another Senator near to death.
He destroyed the last vestiges of Republicans doing any governing, and just focus on grabbing money from rich people and rigging things to keep them in power.
Of course, the destruction of norms started in earnest with Gingrich, but McConnell took it to another level.
I hope his grandchildren and great-grandchildren will deny relation to him out of shame, because he is so badly remembered.
Sab
@Frankensteinbeck: Judges also.
Frankensteinbeck
@Sab:
Judges are easy. They’re a thing he can do on a party line vote with absolutely no resistance from his caucus. The trick is that he broke unwritten rules nobody thought of being such an asshole as to break, so that he had the judge openings to apoint.
debbie
I really, really hope Trump sees Jane Mayer’s tweet. “Nuts” indeed! //
A
Can someone find a chin for these traitors?! Can someone find a chin for Moscow Bitch? For DissedBarf?
scav
Is this the part of the mutiny movie where the captain (and enabling crew) start tossing overboard team-mates in order to lighten the load and conserve foodstuffs? JMW Turner’s Slave Ship would be a possible illustration, only the jetsam needs to be in uniform (I’m sure he wouldn’t mind adding some little red hats to the work).
Kent
Who has done more damage to American democracy? Trump or McConnell?
I think the answer is actually McConnell.
mrmoshpotato
Cole appears to be about to stuff himself with 8 pounds of beef. Should we be concerned?
Van Buren
History remembers the destructive populist demagogue but barely recalls the big money/ institutional wisemen who enabled him.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kent:
McConnell. It’s not even close. McConnell set up the systemic damage that let Trump in, and could have restrained Trump at any time. The only reason congress can’t do anything about Trump is that McConnell won’t allow it.
JPL
When I entered the room my TV was on and suddenly I heard the president slurring a few words. Click..
Serious question, did they give him an a double dose of valium and and is that something that should concern me?
trollhattan
@Kent:
If you think of Trump as the enabler (nominating all those damn Federalist judges) McConnell actually did the long-lasting deed. And it begins with blocking Obama’s nominations, not only judges, and right up through Judge Garland. He stole a SCOTUS appointment and is damn proud of it.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Frankensteinbeck: Yep. Trump probably doesn’t even get “elected” without McConnell, as the except from Mayer’s article above makes clear. It’s indicative of why I’m not merely calling for Trump’s destruction at the end of all my comments. The rot is party-wide.
Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpublicānam esse dēlendam.
Calouste
@Frankensteinbeck: The GOP Caucus could vote McConnell out of leadership if they wanted to. They don’t want to.
Baud
@A:
What did chins ever do to you?
trollhattan
@JPL:
I’m still good with the “snorts Adderall” theory.
Kent
@JPL: He is rambling on incoherently about the WHO. I don’t even get it. The WHO is the new fall-guy after his attacks on the governors yesterday completely fell flat?
danielx
Note: It is now blaming everything on the WHO.
mrmoshpotato
@danielx: Oh hooray. Back to baseball.
trollhattan
He will kill as many of us as he possibly can.
Kent
Yes, I suppose to some extent he is a puppet of the Kochs and the rest of their ilk. If not McConnell, they would have found another lackey to take his place. That doesn’t absolve him of his utter retchedness though.
trollhattan
Meanwhile, in the…sane?…half of the country.
Kent
Why would they want to? He gives them everything they want and is a convenient foil to keep the attention off of them.
Ksmiami
@trollhattan: Do we need a Supreme Court after this – it’s not legitimate anymore anyway
smintheus
Moscow Mitch, Putin’s Bitch.
West of the Rockies
David Attenborough narrates… “In his natural environment, the rather drab McConnell inflates his mottled throat sack and emits his mating call.”
Burble-Burble!
“Paying no attention to his rocky surroundings, the McConnell tumbles off the ledge and plummets to the muddy plain below where he lands on his back and begins to bake in the searing midday sun. Unless he can attract a mate, the McConnell will likely perish in the scorching heat.”
(((CassandraLeo)))
@West of the Rockies: McConnell makes me worry that I’m actually a replicant. “You look down and see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?”
Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpublicānam esse dēlendam.
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
I just saw a breaking news headline about this.
Unbelievable.
John Revolta
It works both ways. I’m always hearing about the positive legislation Nixon passed. Yeah, he signed shit that went through Congress with a veto-proof majority and now he gets credit for it.
My point is, good or bad, the guy at the top gets the credit. Truman was right. Even today, how many people know who McConnell is?
Baud
@John Revolta: The last liberal president. Hur, hur, hur.
Baud
@Brachiator:
Fixed.
Spanky
@danielx: Roger Daltrey is going to be seriously pissed off. In the American sense of the word.
Haroldo
@Kent:
Who has done more damage to American democracy? Trump or McConnell?
I think the answer is actually McConnell.
I’d like to turn this into a troika and add Rupert Murdoch to the mix.
Nora
Yes, I want Trump out of there with all my heart, but McConnell is a very close second. I want him to lose his senate majority, and I want him to lose his senate seat and I want his name to be anathema to generations to come. I hate him with the heat of a thousand supernovae.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Brachiator:
I don’t think the WHO under Tedros has exactly covered itself in glory myself. I feel they were too slow to act and were too complacent regarding the spread of SARS-CoV-2, along with many national governments. It was clear this was a pandemic when this had spread to Iran and later Italy and the WHO had still not declared this a pandemic.
That being said, this is an incredibly stupid decision and it comes at the worst possible time. The WHO does a lot of good work around the world and the US is a major funding member
piratedan
don’t forget that Mitch has a lovely symbiotic relationship with Trump, his wife is in the cabinet to keep tabs on what is going on and the grifting opportunities he’s now able to tap into must have expanded by tenfold… so Mitch is getting a two-fer – conservative legacy and cash… what more could a turtle need?
I hope when this is over, that they strip his ass nekkid and give him a curtain rod and a cardboard box and direct him to his new lodgings under an interstate overpass in Montana
BC in Illinois
In White House news:
Trump says that he will be authorizing each governor to reopen their state at the time of their choosing.
He’s not alone.
I also am authorizing every governor to reopen their state at the time of their choosing.
stinger
Just watched Obama’s endorsement. He knows so many words! In more than 12 minutes he never called anything “perfect” or “beautiful”!
MagdaInBlack
@BC in Illinois:
You made me spit my ice tea ?
Nice.
mrmoshpotato
@stinger: He also didn’t boast like a fucking moron about having “the best words.”
“I’m tremendous bigly at the words!” bellowed an orange Soviet shitpile mobster manchild.
West of the Rockies
@(((CassandraLeo))):
Well, then, I’m a replicant, too. You want to know about my mother? I’ll tell you about my mother….
mrmoshpotato
@Spanky: Pete needs to smash a few guitars over Dump’s stupid pumpkin head.
mrmoshpotato
@West of the Rockies: Did your lawyer have sex with your mama?
Ken
Sure, but I think they’re overworked. Look at some of the horrible decisions they’ve made. We need to increase it to, say, 25 members to take some of the strain off them.
mrmoshpotato
LMAO!
grammypat
I am not a doctor, but for at least the past few months I’ve noticed that the Toxic Toddler’s right eye is “wonky” … as though he’s got stroke damage. It seems to be getting worse. Has anyone else noticed this?
mrmoshpotato
@trollhattan: Holy orange shitstain, Batman!
Spanky
@grammypat: That would require looking at him, so no.
gwangung
@mrmoshpotato:
Yeah, but that’s gonna go over the head of most of the Orange One’s supporters…
Baud
scav
Behold his mighty might unleashed! Truly he commands both the opening of the states and their closing too! The virus itself trembles before him and spreads only wheresoever he dictates! Yea truly, the hydroxychloroquine heals, but only when accompanied by the touch of his cloak! Unbelievers will not be so blessed, and they rightly shall thus be proven unamerican. Blessed be the hats.
I am constantly and repeatedly stunned by how little a person one has to be to look up to this biped. Slow learner.
John Revolta
@Haroldo: Murdoch is in a category of his own. Historically I’d call him sort of a ten-cent Medici. Yeah, he personally is responsible for a large part of where the world is today and I wish I believed in Hell because that’s the only place where he’s ever likely to pay a price for it. Fuckem.
Kent
I’ve been watching the covid data at the John’s Hopkins site. Some of the states numbers were just dramatically reduced. Florida, for example was at 21,000+ yesterday and has now dropped to 13,000. Some of the other state numbers are also dropping.
Anyone know what is going on
EDIT: Well, now Florida is back up to 21,000 but Maryland has dropped from 9,000+ to 6,000+
Obviously there are some real-time data issues going on.
Mike in NC
@grammypat: Can’t stand the sight of his bloated ugly face, but only recently have I noticed that Fat Bastard has beady black dead-looking eyes, like a pig or a shark. Goes back to the total lack of empathy.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
Misogyny. No joke, in HS I actually had real functioning near-adults say with a straight face that women can’t be leaders because women are weak and “nobody would respect them”. I guess Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria were ingenues
Kent
FTFY. It’s a mystery we may never understand. Myso…something.
trollhattan
@Baud:
“Yes, I’d like to place an order for one Merkel and two Arderns, please.”
“What? Tuesday, Tuesday will be fine, can you do Tuesday? Wait, can you add a Sturgeon to that order? I fancy the accent.”
chris
@Ken: Add ten liberals, make it nineteen and the five conservatives would be… 27%!
West of the Rockies
Captain C
Me and probably you to the examiner/bladerunner: “Because that tortoise is actually Mitch Fucking McConnell, that’s why! You think I’d do that to a real tortoise? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@trollhattan:
“…We serve food here, sir.”
or
“Sir, this is a Wendy’s.”
; )
mrmoshpotato
@gwangung: Yeah, but it’s still hilarious. :)
Kent
@trollhattan: Tsai Ing-wen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsai_Ing-wen
West of the Rockies
What will our descendants know of 45 in 1,000 years? It might begin like this…
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and brainless Trumps of stone stand in the desert…
Brachiator
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Trump had other sources of intelligence regarding the pandemic. Whatever failings can be laid at the feet of the WHO does not have a great deal to do with Trump’s inability to make decisions regarding the virus.
It also says much that he needs to punish someone or some institution for having failed him. No analysis, no investigation, no opportunity for the WHO to improve what they do.
And so he may shut off a potential source of information for the next pandemic. What does that accomplish?
BTW: Right wing organizations and pundits are all for this. Recent episodes of The Federalist podcast had hosts and guests hot to see Trump slap down the WHO.
TS (the original)
@Brachiator:
Still looking for someone to blame – that buck has been flown around the country, through China, on to Italy and currently landing atop the UN. It needs to be flung back above the White House where it truly belongs.
Mike in NC
Local news showed a small group of protesters — maybe 20 to 30 people including kids — gathering illegally in the state capitol today to demand the governor “Reopen NC” per their signs. No indication of who they are or what their agenda is. Guessing they’re being paid by the state Republican party in service to Fat Bastard.
This deranged obsession to reopen everything on May 1st is very likely to result in another wave of coronavirus outbreaks, possibly with more cases than the first.
TS (the original)
@BC in Illinois:
And as Cuomo said in his presser this am – they don’t need his authorization, the constitution is their authorization.
germy
The funniest part of the Jane Mayer piece is when McConnell is quoted (after his divorce) as saying “I need to find me a rich wife.”
Elaine Chao certainly filled his expectations.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Brachiator:
I really don’t disagree with any of that. I was just commenting about how I thought the WHO had dropped the ball a bit. That of course doesn’t absolve Trump of responsibility and I didn’t mean to imply that it did.
It’s an incredibly dumb decision that will have consequences and is an attempt by Trump to deflect blame off himself
chris
I’d forgotten this.
Kent
@Brachiator: International organizations like WHO or the UN are largely a reflection of the major nations that sponsor them. If WHO is crappy that is more a reflection of the US, China, and EU than anything else as they basically determine WHO policy.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
I’ve been saying this forever. He’s been in the senate for 36 years and he’s never passed anything. All he’s ever done is use the filibuster to gum up the works and he gets away with it because IOKIYAR.
germy
piratedan
@Kent: you have to understand that reporting on this scale is kind of unprecedented in that people are looking for updates, not just daily but hourly and most of the DOH process (depending on the state itself) is used to track items like AIDS, Hepatitis and sexual diseases…
Also the mechanism for reporting varies from hospital to hospital and county to county. Some facilities have to print a report and send it by courier or mail. Others use fax and yet others with the enough volume have an electronic interface. so on the receiving end, the state has to have someone(s) dedicated to updating their spreadsheets from various sources. Even then you have to account that depending upon what’s been requested by each state, your numbers could fluctuate… I mean we could report patents that have presented themselves at our facilities, but say depending upon who sent them (or where and how they presented) our facility could farm that test out to Quest Labs or University of Washington or keep it in house depending upon… criteria. When we report that contact to the state, do they want everyone we touched? all testing numbers? negative, positive, inconclusive? If we used our media to report that data to the state but the test was done elsewhere, how does anyone make sure that they are only counted once? Now expand that to each state doing their own thing or establishing what criteria they publish based on what information that they are getting… well, lets just say that there’s likely some wiggle in the numbers….
Jim, Foolish Literalist
wasn’t this person once a fairly conventional Clinton-style Democrat, as in when she herself ran for office and during her media career?
In the end, Bernie was even betrayed by Bernie.
trollhattan
Uh.
IDK how reliable the South China Morning Post may be, so grain of salt and all.
germy
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: He’s done very well for Mitch McConnell, which was his goal all along. I’d say he’s been a success.
He needs to be voted out of office. I hope I live to see it.
trollhattan
@Kent:
Can you imagine staring down Xi every damn day of your life? Ugh, tougher stuff than I.
trollhattan
@germy:
Voted out/hauled out feet-first, Putato/Putahto.
eric
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: she has gone off the rails the last two weeks….during the primaries, her show was very DSA and bernie friendly, but it has taken a truly caustic tone about any deviation from the end of capitalism. Everyone is a sucker for the neo liberal paradigm and trump is going to crush biden. it has been interesting to watch.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
There’s a grift vacuum on the left now. Someone’s got to fill it.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@trollhattan:
No idea how reliable it is either, though I’ve assumed in the past it’s fairly accurate when using it. The more I hear about this virus the more fucking terrifying it can be. I wonder how pronounced this effect is in even mild/asymptomatic cases? First, it can cause liver, heart, and respiratory damage, now immune system compromise?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
@Baud:
Nobody named “Krystal Ball” should be taken seriously about anything imo. The first I heard of her was that she was a Berniebro
?BillinGlendaleCA
@mrmoshpotato: I don’t know, we have a local burger joint(Fatburger) that sells a 2lb* burger.
* I went recently, I couldn’t see eating a 2lb burger, I ordered the 1 1/2lb burger.
germy
Brachiator
@Kent:
Yep. Point noted.
It reminds me of conservatives who criticize the United Nations, even though the US clearly can determine UN policy.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I can’t believe her name is actually “Krystal Ball”. Like, that’s right up there with the parents who ate a lot at an Olive Garden while dating naming their daughter “Olive Garten”
Edit: That was weird. I thought my comment at 95 was eaten by WP
trollhattan
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
All good, and horrifying points. I cannot name another communicable disease that has received so much intensive research so rapidly and there are bound to be lots of unreproduceable results from this or that lab, but if just half of them bear out it’s going to be taking a health toll long after the pandemic dies out.
Measles erasing the body’s prior immunities comes to mind. Or chicken pox and shingles.
trollhattan
@Brachiator:
John Bolton did such a great job at the United Nations, telling the United Nations how worthless they are.
danielx
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
You know how it is, revolutions always end up eating their own.
mrmoshpotato
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Two-pounder was a half pound too far?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Is he still going on?
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
Trump’s base ate this stuff up.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@BC in Illinois:
He then went on to authorize the sun rising in the east tomorrow morning.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Remember when he claimed Obama laid on the couch and watched basketball all day, all those NBA games that are on during the day?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@mrmoshpotato: Yup, don’t want to over do it.
Mike in DC
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It’s like the SNL sketch at a Star Trek convention, with William Shatner telling the Trekkies to get a life.
Immanentize
@(((CassandraLeo))): I will go you one better. Considering the horror and tragedy and pain of my personal family life the last three years I believe that I died around November 9, 2016. And that you are all Al Avatars in my personal pergatory.
While in the real world, not the post-life torture sim I must endure; my wife is alive, my son the Immp never had cancer and Hillary is President
No one has yet offered any evidence to demonstrate I am wrong.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Emails, Baud, emails.
Elizabelle
@Immanentize: Hugs. Fate is a bitch. You and Immp have had more than your share of trials. And RIP Julie.
Ken
“Dating”? Hmm, I’ve heard a different version of that joke.
(Punchline: “And that’s why we aren’t allowed in the restaurant.”)
danielx
@BC in Illinois:
Me too! I never felt so important!
bluehill
@germy: As a “normal” politician, Mitch hasn’t done much, but that’s probably not the right way to evaluate his impact. As someone interested in amassing power, I’d say he’s been distressingly effective. After the travesty of the Garland nomination, I held no hope that Mitch would uphold any law, the Constitution, norms, standards, whatever – that got in the way of gaining more power.
He’s going out shooting as are his fellow repub true believers, and they don’t care about collateral damage to people or democracy. I also think he’s smart enough to realize there’s an increasing chance the repubs are out in November and is putting things in place now (e.g. packing the courts) to make sure repubs continue to exert power if Biden is elected and to take of himself personally.
trollhattan
@Immanentize:
If true I apologize for being boring as fuck.
For eternity, and beyond!
How do I tell if I’m…[note to self, tape “Westworld”]
patroclus
@trollhattan: The SCMP is Hong Kong’s largest newspaper and has had a good reputation for decades. I certainly read it when I lived there (along with the Hong Kong Standard). That said, I’m not an epidemiologist, so I have no way to assess what that article says other than having heard Zeke Emmanuel report something very similar on last night’s Last Word show.
Immanentize
@eric: Eric of Mass Eric? Waves (if so)
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I’m starting to wonder, was it worth it?
Immanentize
@trollhattan: Ebola got a shit ton of intensive effort. With ultimate good results.
I mean people bled from their eyes!
Immanentize
@mrmoshpotato: I know, that is just one wafer thin patty!
West of the Rockies
@trollhattan:
Remember back when dozens were waiting feverishly for the release of Bolton’s book? Talk about missing the boat.
Kent
It’s because they don’t actually want to CHANGE it. They want to rail against it for public effect. Trump is doing the same damn thing.
Another Scott
@trollhattan: The scientific article was published in Nature. Doesn’t mean that it’s right, but it means it got through a rigorous review process and isn’t nonsense.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41423-020-0424-9
NYMag has more – https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/more-bad-news-on-the-long-term-effects-of-the-coronavirus.html
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
Readership capture.
JPL
Frankensteinbeck
@trollhattan:
Interesting, but not scary to me. It’s an explanation of why it does what we already know it does rather than a newly discovered long term effect.
@eric:
One of the odder things about hardcore Berners is how they treat Bernie being the most electable candidate as a base assumption. I mean, I see how the idea forms. If everything is class struggle, Sanders is the only one leading that charge. They feel super enthusiastic about Sanders and talk to other people super enthusiastic about Sanders and they don’t like Biden, so surely Biden must be someone no one really wants and Sanders must have a giant electoral power. It’s just that it’s such a bedrock assumption to them, even though it’s now been flatly disproven, they can’t even address that possibility. It’s not an ‘I will withhold my vote’ threat for most of them. either. They just think it’s obvious.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@trollhattan:
Yeah, more research is definitely needed. The HIV comparison jumped out at me
Immanentize
@Elizabelle: @trollhattan:
I wish I could embrace that alt. real myself. It makes me happy to imagine it. Like Dwayne Hoover in Breakfast of Champions? ?
Frankensteinbeck
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Don’t worry about it. Attacking T cells is the mechanism responsible for people not recovering naturally from HIV. People do recover naturally from this coronavirus. This is already known and blatantly obvious. If this was more than the most superficial similarity to HIV, the death rate would be pushing 100%.
Kent
This is really a fundamental mis-reading of McConnell and the GOP Agenda over the past several decades. They do not have any legislative agenda at all short of tax cuts. Even the repeal Obamacare agenda really wasn’t all that serious, and more for public consumption than anything else. There are basically four interlocking components of the conservative agenda and none of them really require any legislation.
None of that requires any sort of legislative mastermind or deal-maker in the Senate Majority. It just requires someone like McConnell to be a relentless asshole. Which he is perfect for.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
They should be.
This sounds like very good new
What the fuck does that even mean?
I think all these explanations by the Republicans are just wishful thinking
Frankensteinbeck
@Kent:
Dude, did you see McConnell’s face when the Obamacare repeal failed? How he scrambled again and again to find ways that it might pass? He cared very much about it. He did his absolute level best to destroy medicare and medicaid.
Kent
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Were people turning out in the teeth of a pandemic to vote for Biden or Karofsky? I don’t know the answer. But it does affect how you read the results.
John Revolta
@Frankensteinbeck: Well look. It’s just logic! Only Bernie can beat Trump. Trump is gonna crush Biden, who crushed Bernie, just like he crushed Hillary, who………….crushed Bernie. See?
Kent
Yes, I watched it live. And saw the endless replays. But I’m not convinced. I think a lot of that was political theater. Like the dog who caught the car and didn’t know what to do with it.
The 2018 midterms would have been breathtakingly more one-sided and they might have actually actually lost the Senate in 2018 had they actually repealed Obamacare in the summer of 2018. The 2018 mid-terms were already mostly about health care, but that would have been 10x more intense had they repealed it and tossed 15 million Americans off their insurance. Beto, McCaskill, and Bill Nelson in Florida all lost with very narrow margins. And even Joe Donnally in IN only lost by 6 points. In an alternate history in which Obamacare got repealed, McConnell could have actually lost his Senate majority. He is smart enough to know that.
Nora
@Kent: Would people stand in line in the teeth of a pandemic to vote against Trump? I certainly would.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Frankensteinbeck: Yeah, beyond ideology, I think there is/was a deeply personal vindictiveness toward Obama in McConnell’s conduct over the last decade.
CliosFanBoy
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): sounds like a stripper name, or a porn star.
Kent
Yes, of course. But Trump was running unopposed and Sanders had not yet dropped out. So if it was mainly a Dem primary electorate then that could skew the results blue in the supreme court race. On the other hand, if people were primarily turning out to vote on the supreme court race and the Dem primary was ancillary then the results may be more translatable to the general election.
negative 1
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: Stopping legislation takes no talent at all. Any rep can do it, easily. It’s easy not to bring it out of committee. It’s easy to propose adding some ridiculous piece of pork. Saying Moscow Mitch’s only talent is killing legislation is saying hes not really any good at anything.
japa21
@Kent: Important to note that there is no party affiliation involved in the justice race. So people had to be aware of what each candidate represented. Additionally, Dems are notorious for voting top of the ticket in a primary and ignoring other races.
So yes, the fact that there was a primary was important, although just about everybody understood Biden was going to be the nominee. But they made sure they knew what was at stake in the SC race as well.
Amir Khalid
@mrmoshpotato:
It’s beef rib with the bone in, so it can’t be 8lb of meat. And besides, there’s three dogs and a cat with him. He’s probably going to share.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kent:
That works for his caucus. It does not work for McConnell. If he was just going through the motions to claim he did it, he could have stopped after the first or second attempt. He had no reason to look so down on camera. His voters were not going to notice the difference. Plus, how hard he pushed the repeal got gigantic push back from the public, and he kept trying until he got a ‘literally nothing will pass’ result. He did it past the point where it was hurting them for 2018. No. McConnell wanted Obamacare repealed, and it is consistent with all of his speech, actions, and expressions then, before, and since that he truly and deeply wants to gut the safety net.
Suzanne
@Baud:
I volunteer him as live organ donor.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Look who’s helping. Again.
Amir Khalid
@Baud:
That CNN headline is actually wrong. All but one of the women leaders the story names are prime ministers. Prime ministers, including Federal Chancellor Merkel, are heads of government, not of state. (New Zealand’s head of state doesn’t even live in New Zealand; she lives in Britain.) Only the President of Taiwan is head of both government and state.
MisterForkbeard
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Sigh. Who is silencing it?
Investigations by NYT and others show it to be pretty thin and not all of the accuser’s assertions are backed up. The Biden campaign says he didnt do it and they’ve encouraged people to investigate in order to prove it.
What IS happening is that we’re asking people not to assume he’s a rapist without any real evidence.
J R in WV
@(((CassandraLeo))):
So glad to see you here commenting. Welcome — take care — stay in touch, please !!!
TS (the original)
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I think this one has some validity. Seems the GOP forgot to tell people there were items on the ballot other than the Presidential Primary – or the republicans have more fear of COVID-19 than they are talking about.
TS (the original)
@Amir Khalid:
NZ Head of state does have representation in the country, via their Governor General – who is appointed by the Queen on advice of the NZ Governor. Their current GG is also a woman – so ladies all the way in NZ leadership.
BBA
I wonder if McConnell’s mysterious discharge from the Army hides a career-ending scandal or a massive red herring. The latter is more likely, but it’d be irresponsible not to speculate.
Flea, RN
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
He could have had even more information if he hadn’t fired the CDC epidemiologist stationed *in China* 6 months before the outbreak:
More at the link:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-cdc-exclusiv/exclusive-u-s-axed-cdc-expert-job-in-china-months-before-virus-outbreak-idUSKBN21910S
BBA
There is plenty of blame to go around. Let’s not let our hatred of Il Douche blind us to the perfidy of the Chinese government and their wholly owned subsidiary, the WHO. But let’s also not let Il Douche off the hook for his malignant incompetence in managing this.
Captain C
@BBA: The rumor (and only a rumor) I’ve heard has to do with the Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name In Those Times. Though I have a hard time imagining McConnell into anything but piles of money and/or his own image in the mirror.
Villago Delenda Est
Alain is gone, and this vile creature is still with us.
There is no fuckin’ justice.
Villago Delenda Est
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Well, gosh, Obama is an uppity ni*CLANG*. How does one expect a Bourbon asshole like Mitch to behave?
RAM
The fact is, the modern Republican Party has lost the ability to govern. It’s something they have no interest in and it shows. Their interest is in acquiring power for themselves and money for their donors and they’ve found that destroying representative government, one bit at a time, is the most effective way to do that. Coupled with that are their persistent efforts to destroy the nation’s elections system. So when a crisis comes along that requires governing, they have no idea how to do it and really no inclination to do it anyway. This applies to the entire party at the state and national levels, and in many states at the local level, too. The GOP has become the enemy of democracy.