SHOT: Mitch McConnell votes against RFK Jr. to be HHS Secretary.
CHASER: Trump expresses doubt that McConnell ever had polio and then questions McConnell's mental faculties.
"He's not equipped mentally. He wasn't equipped. 10 years ago, mentally, in my opinion."— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1.bsky.social) February 13, 2025 at 3:40 PM
Ed Kilgore, at NYMag — “McConnell Finally Defies Trump, Now That He’s Irrelevant”:
… [D]espite McConnell’s disdainful attitude toward Donald Trump, he delivered the president’s beloved tax cuts and a steady flow of easy confirmation votes on executive-branch and judicial appointments. The Kentuckian gave Trump the priceless gift of a third Supreme Court appointment in his first term after his audacious and unprecedented refusal to give so much as a hearing to Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland. McConnell also defended Trump from conviction on two rounds of impeachment articles passed by the House. Though McConnell clearly disliked Trump (who more than reciprocated his contempt), the president was the party boss and McConnell was above all a party foot soldier.
I say “was,” because in the sad dénouement of his career after he gave up the Senate leadership, McConnell is finally showing a few signs of real independence from Trump. As the Senate’s Republican majority has rubber-stamped even the least qualified and most questionable of the 47th president’s nominees, McConnell has voted against three of them: Defense secretary Pete Hegseth, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Viewed without context, the first two votes reflect McConnell’s old-school Cold War views on defense and foreign policy, which made the empty MAGA suit Hegseth and the anti-interventionist former Democrat Gabbard repellent. And anyone who cannot find a reason for fears about Kennedy isn’t looking very hard. But plenty of other Republican senators undoubtedly suppressed similar misgivings and voted to give Trump what he wanted. Not the man who spent so many years whipping his troops into partisan uniformity.
These gestures are, however, far too little and way too late. Without question, Trump decisively won his long-standing feud with McConnell. Had ill health not forced him to step down as party leader, he would have almost certainly have been deposed as a satisfying punctuation mark on the MAGA movement’s total conquest of the Republican Party. Now he’s finally liberated from Trump’s yoke as he serves out his last two years in the Senate (it’s hard to imagine him trying to stick around beyond 2026). But McConnell has become totally irrelevant, which is the worst fate imaginable for a man who so clearly valued power over any set of real principles. His idol, the great 19th-century Kentuckian Henry Clay, was able to end his long and turbulent career in Washington on a very high note: the passage of his ultimate deal-making handiwork, the Compromise of 1850, which at the time appeared to be a historic measure saving the Union from dissolution over slavery. McConnell will spend his final years in office watching his colleagues surrender ancient prerogatives to whippersnappers like Elon Musk and to the president whose sobriquet for McConnell — the “Broken Old Crow” — seems quite apt right now.
McConnell isn’t getting much sympathy…
… The reality is that McConnell, like a lot of observers, thought Trump had written his political obituary with his conduct on January 6. Like so many other people, Mitch McConnell’s big mistake was underestimating Donald Trump, who now defines the party the Kentuckian lived to serve.
imagine your reaction if you were told a decade ago that in 2025 Mitch McConnell would be the only Senate Republican willing to stand up to a Putinist takeover of the US intelligence agencies
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 12, 2025 at 12:13 PM
Your reminder that Mitch McConnell kneecapped Barrack Obama, stole two Supreme Court seats & voted not to impeach Trump, twice – so no, he doesn’t get a cookie for voting against Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard & Bobby Kennedy Jr. pic.twitter.com/SDv9aZM9JM
— anyone_want_chips (@anyonewantchips) February 13, 2025
N(ice) P(olite) R(epublican radio), however, is sympathetic:
A survivor of childhood polio, Sen. Mitch McConnell was the only Republican in the Senate to vote No. Here's how he explained his vote.
— NPR (@npr.org) February 13, 2025 at 2:55 PM
Introducing “Opinion Contributor” Mitch McConnell:
#Tariffs 🇺🇸
www.courier-journal.com/story/opinio…— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) February 12, 2025 at 9:29 AM
On The Road – Mike S. (now with a Democratic Congressperson!) – Namaqualand, South Africa Part 4. More weird plants and wild scenery
Betty Cracker
Roast in hell, Mitch.
Geminid
McConnell looks like a gust of wind would blow him away. I think his goal now is to outlive Trump.
Some good news ftom Al Arabiya:
They are 7 hours ahead of Eastern time so we should know for sure this time tomorrow morning. Israel should release around 90 “security prisoners” into the West Bank later in the day.
Baud
As long as he’s unhappy.
JoyceH
The news folk are interpreting Trump as “questioning” whether McConnell really had polio but one of the pundits said what I’d been thinking – his first remark was “oh, did he have polio?” and then went into his vague waffle about “maybe he did, I don’t know”. And it sure sounded to me like Trump just forgot that McConnell had had polio, and being dementia addled couldn’t help blurting out “oh, did he have polio?”
Suzanne
@Geminid:
So may we all.
Fingers crossed.
Waldo
None will forget his heroic attempt to tap the brakes after the clown car plunged into the canyon. Bravo, Mitch.
Betty Cracker
Had lunch yesterday at a little mom-and-pop diner in rural FL. Fox News was on the TV screen but mercifully with no sound. Seeing the occasional chyron was a reminder of how we got here.
All kinds of shit was going down in the world yesterday, what with an unelected, foreign-born Nazi gazillionaire illegally gutting the federal government and a drunk, rapey former Fox & Friends weekend anchor selling out allies abroad. But from what I saw, Fox News had wall-to-wall coverage of ICE raids (real or fake, who knows?) with color commentary provided by “angel moms,” which is what Fox News calls women whose children died in accidents or crimes involving undocumented immigrants.
The visuals are just so weird on Fox News! Harris Faulkner still looks relatively normal, i.e., more like an actual human being than an overinflated latex sex doll from a vintage porn shop. But the other women anchoring the ubiquitous “angel mom” segments and in the studio all appeared to have undergone cosmetic enhancements and styling regimes so they could resemble Ivanka Trump as closely as their underlying bone structure allows.
Fascist aesthetics are uniformly terrible throughout history. But the American brand of it is apparently going to be…exceptional.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Fox has done a nice job forming a community of the morally damned.
TBone
Last night hubby remarked on the very subject of this post, and I said “he knows he is going to die soon.”
Baud
@TBone:
If there’s one silver lining to Trump over Harris, it’s that’s Trump is far less likely to be gracious over Mitch’s passing.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Boobs are the lure. I’m serious! I guess it was Ailes who figured that out? “Let’s hire Hooters girls to deliver right-wing propaganda 24/7, and we’ll build a zombie army of angry, titillated shut-ins!” Kind of genius really. EVIL genius, but genius.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Well, then, Dems know what they have to do. I hope new DNC chair Martin has already started organizing the beauty pageant. We need the get young men back in the fold!
p.a.
Mitch: The Leopard
I voted forbred and raised from a cub ate my face too!😂😂😂😂😂
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker:
Republican women have this exceedingly weird beauty standard. Must be blonde or have really heavy highlights, long hair in barrel curls — and never wear it up. Lip injections and waterline eyeliner (and a tip of the hat to the VPOTUS, who also does that). And the freakin’ buccal fat removal: WHY. It all simultaneously costs a lot to maintain, but looks cheap AF.
Did you see the TikTok that went viral about “Republican makeup”? It was bang on.
TBone
Morning mood music.
Dire Straits, of course…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzaaVXG8qI0
TBone
@Baud: hahahahaha!
satby
Josh Marshall has come out in favor of Hochul firing Adams. Pressure starting to build.
Shalimar
It’s funny that McConnell had total control of Senate Republicans for several decades, even when some of them obviously disagreed with the votes they were taking. Every single one of them voted how he told them to vote, even people like Collins who were given dispensation to vote against someone when that vote wasn’t decisive. Now that he’s actually right about how awful some of these nominees are, not a single one of them will vote with him and he is the one given dispensation to be alone.
Baud
@satby:
He’s doing Trump’s bidding because he has a prosecution hanging over him. He’s compromised. He’s essentially being extorted.
Betty Cracker
@Suzanne: I had to look up “buccal fat removal.” Jesus. That explains a lot.
@satby: The case he makes is sound, IMO. New York City didn’t elect Donald Trump as mayor.
satby
On topic, Moscow Mitch seeing his entire life’s work fall into complete irrelevance while deteriorating painfully from post-polio syndrome seems very fair. Karma.
satby
@Baud: made explicit in one SDNY resignation letter, I believe.
satby
@Betty Cracker: oh, I agree.
Suzanne
@satby:
Just wanted to see this again.
NotMax
@Suzanne
The Stepford squad.
kalakal
@TBone: Excellent choice.
Balconesfault
@satby: not complete irrelevance. He’s going to be responsible for between half a degree to a degree of climate change.
TBone
@kalakal: yours in service,
I remain.
Suzanne
@NotMax: I’ll just note that the societal preference for blonde hair in women is absolutely linked to white supremacy. But it even predates the idea of whiteness by hundreds of years. In the western canon, angels were usually depicted with light hair and eyes to represent purity and holiness, while demons and “loose women” were usually depicted with dark hair and eyes.
I muse on that from time to time, when women will spend thousands of dollars a year to maintain artificial blonde hair. It always amazes me how this stuff persists.
Ron
If he’s lucky, Mitch may also live long enough to see Trump hand Taiwan and his wife’s family and their wealth over to China.
no sympathy at all. He’s right up there at the top of the list for those responsible for destroying the US.
NotMax
@kalakal
Been meaning to ask if you’ve any opinion one way or another on the British TV series Boon. I see 5 of its 7 seasons have appeared as available on Prime.
Soprano2
@JoyceH: That sounds like something my husband would do. The press is going to deny FFOTUS’s decline for the next 4 years.
MomSense
@Betty Cracker:
Its like The Capitol from The Hunger Games.
TBone
@Suzanne: this is why I wear every gray hair, and every wrinkle, proudly like a badge of honor.
Sometimes, I don’t even mind the extra weight. It’ll fortify me in times of hardship, something to fall back on.
Plus: naturally bigger boobs hahahahahaha!
TBone
@Baud: nominated.
Jeffro
@Betty Cracker: I can’t decide if “Fox News with no sound on” would strike me more as a Onion-prank (due to the chyrons) or AI-generated soft porn (due to the procession of blonde FoxBots)
Either way have to agree with your take that it’s just. so. weird. And by that, I mean Fox even with the sound on
Suzanne
@TBone: I think we all live in society, and we all make concessions to its norms and preferences in some way. I certainly do. We’re all collaborators in some way or another, and it’s everyone’s personal decisions about what they’re comfortable with.
So I get why people bleach the hair and get fillers, etc etc etc. I just wish we could get rid of the beauty standard.
I think, though, that the beauty standard had a lot of impact on this election, and the male backlash to #MeToo. I think it’s impactful.
JoyceH
@Betty Cracker: a little discussed problem with buccal fat removal is that it tends to cause the face to age years ahead of schedule. And in the circles these women occupy, if you can’t look young, you might as well be dead.
hueyplong
@Betty Cracker: “Roast in hell, Mitch.”
Embracing the idea that a belief in hell is essential to life in Trump-Muskovy.
Spanky
I think it was Rupert Murdock that created the Page Three Girl. Couldn’t quite pull that off on American TV, so he opted for a standardized bimbo look for Fox.
Suzanne
@JoyceH: That’s what just blows me away about buccal fat removal. It looks good for such a short time, and then you look worse.
Those women will just have another procedure to reverse it, I know.
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
Taking to the next level Mencken’s term boohoisie.
//
lowtechcyclist
@Waldo:
Man, you fucking nailed it with this one. I’m in awe.
@Geminid:
May he be denied even that bit of satisfaction.
Bastard could’ve ended Trump’s political career four years ago. He can go fuck off and die now.
TBone
@Suzanne: Dove brand is fighting on our behalf, I hope sincerely.
Suzanne
@TBone: None of the brands are fighting on our behalf.
One thing that we never really discussed here was how the fat acceptance movement came to be associated with liberal-leaning women. That, IMO, has had a lot to do with younger men shifting rightward, embracing Rogan-y and RFK-y health bullshit, etc.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Betty Cracker: Thanks for the report of what’s showing on Fox “News.” Your valor allows the rest of us to save our blood pressure
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Betty Cracker: I had to look it up too. The loss of fat in your cheeks is going to make old age look 10X worse
lowtechcyclist
@TBone:
Appropriate! We’re all in dire straits now.
lowtechcyclist
@satby:
If only it wasn’t falling into irrelevance because even worse shit is happening to this country.
vigilhorn
@TBone: I’ve got my fireworks ready.
Betty Cracker
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I have a relative now in her 70s who had “work” done more than once in her 40s and 50s (probably on the cheap since that’s how she rolls). Hooboy. Oh well. As my late, un-retouched mother used to say, “You can be a good example or a horrible warning.”
TBone
@Suzanne: ok, point taken but this is a thing:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dove_Campaign_for_Real_Beauty
TBone
@vigilhorn: yay!!! AND the sound of many champagne corks popping shall ring out across the nation!
TBone
@lowtechcyclist:
Chris
They always do this. Eisenhower gave a speech raising alarms about the military-industrial complex. It was literally his farewell address, delivered after he’d spent eight years enthusiastically contributing to the problem and smearing anyone who raised the same kind of questions as a commie traitor. Goldwater gave speeches denouncing the religious right. It was in the eighties, twenty years after he ran for President during the original campaign that brought the people who would become the religious right (the segregationist Democrats) into the party. Colin Powell supported gays in the military… in 2008, long after he’d retired from government service and the entire world had stopped giving a shit what he had to say about anything, as opposed to in 1993 when he was CJCS and backstabbing his own commander-in-chief by leading the media battle against gays in the military. George W. Bush has mouthed a few platitudes about how Trump is a threat to democracy and that’s bad… after he spent an entire administration, including and especially his original election campaign, pioneering every technique Trump would use to threaten the electoral system.
You can always count on a Republican to pop up and make a few mouth noises about how his party should be nicer, as long as his entire career is safely in the past and he no longer has to actually do anything about it himself. John McCain probably deserves some credit here: he still waited until his career was over to do the right thing for the first time in his life, but he actually did it at a time and in a way that doing the right thing actually made a difference, which is damn near unheard of.
MomSense
@Suzanne:
They all look the same. I remember some of the things ballet dancers wore in the late 70s and early 80s. We would cut the crotches and feet out of our old tights and then put them over our heads with our arms in the legs to make sort of a breezy cover. Then we would wear giant parachute pants all cinched up with the waist band rolled down to our low hips.
Looking back at those pictures – we looked so stupid. But we were in a closed social circle which sort of altered our taste. These women with their procedures look so stupid to people outside of their circle. They don’t get it. I also think they are looking at themselves in close up and miss how insane they look from a distance greater than a magnified mirror. The hawk eyebrows, platypus mouths, coyote cheeks – it looks grotesque.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
Its really true. I went to a very lavish wedding in Indianapolis about 6 months ago thrown by the wealthy MAGA parents of the bride and the women all look the same – like an endless parade of Ivanka Trump clones of varying ages.
The sameness of the cosmetic surgery is wild – all the same noses, faces, lips and boobs and all have tattooed eyebrows.
I find the inflated lips distracting when I’m talking to them because the puffiness sort of migrates and blurs with repeated treatments – I find myself looking for the margin.
JML
Mitch McConnell makes me want to believe in hell just so that he can roast in it. He’s a traitor, one of the most evil senators in modern times (and there’s been some horrific ones) and he gets no points for a meaningless vote with no impact after he’s become utterly irrelevant. If he’d dragged Murkowski, Very Concerned Collins, etc with him and actually knocked off one of these scumbags, maybe he gets a cookie. Maybe.
Ohio Mom
Seems like a good time to remember Mitch has three adult daughters (from his first marriage) and they all hate him.
Suzanne
@Kay:
It’s called Instagram face.
The heavily laminated eyebrows are a big part of “Republican makeup”. Remember back when we were commenting on Casey DeSantis’ weird eyebrows? That’s them.
kalakal
@NotMax: Wow, that’s a blast from the past. I remember enjoying it, it’s a comedy/crime series. Boon himself isn’t a crook but he get’s into some dodgy situations. Michael Elphick was really good as Boon
Thanks for letting me know it’s on Britbox, I shall rewatch it
kalakal
@Suzanne:
One really weird thing is the free version of the ai image generator Dalle3 on Bing left to itself will generate faces that look just like Instagram Face ( aka Bing Barbies). What makes it weird is that Bing/Dalle3 was deliberately skewed to generate standard fake faces that don’t look like any real person. The GOP saw these grotesque, fake faces and went “looks good!”
Chris
@satby:
I fail to see how his life’s work is falling into irrelevance. His life’s work is more relevant than ever: this is exactly what he’s spent all of it trying to achieve. Sorry it’s not what he hoped it would be.
Chris Johnson
I would note that Mitch knows where all the bodies are buried, because he personally brought in the killers and ran cover for them for years. He also knows how difficult it will be to backstab Trump, because he’s the one who ran cover for Trump and for Russia for years and years and years, and he knows how to keep doing that even as it’s switched over to Russia doing that whilst not giving him anything (where once, they promised him the world). He is a betrayed traitor, who only wanted dictatorial power for him and his party forever, and is being given an implosion, a bust-out that will ruin him and his. At gunpoint (they cannot believe themselves safe to go ‘actually, no thanks, this is a trap’)
I’m very curious what his continuing slapping-in-the-face, his seemingly pointless enemy-making, represents.
Pretty sure he continues to want power for him and his, and pretty damn sure he knows this isn’t it. It’s an obvious trap. So why does he stand out as a renegade? More interestingly, if he still does have power, what’s he up to that he gets a lot of people to seemingly give the enemy everything he wants, and yet leave this one little flag saying ‘there’s a surprise but I’m not going to tell you what it is’? It would be SO easy for him to just go along. It would also be easy to screw things up for Trump and Putin: he did that with the Majority Leader, an anti-Trump guy and Mitch loyalist rather than Trump’s pick.
Whatever’s going on, going by face value ain’t gonna cut it.
Citizen Alan
@satby: “Fair” would have been the evil mofo dying a week before Scalia did.
Citizen Alan
@hueyplong: I swear, 90% of the reason I’m not an atheist is that I cling to the comforting vision of all the evil people who have been ruining this world my whole life going to hell and being subjected to infinite torture
WTFGhost
Man, if only he’d allowed one of the two, perfectly justified, impeachments to go forward, with a real trial held, to cover for the 17 Republicans who needed to vote in favor of his removal from office. Boy, such news stories about his strength and power to hold his caucus together in the cause of grave injustice!
Mai Naem mobil
I couldn’t care less about Mitch McConnell. One of the reasons I’m so cynical about his recent moves is precisely because of the crap he’s pulled. I actually don’t know if he’s trying to repair his legacy with these votes or if he’s genuine about these votes. Also one last thing, Mitch didn’t have a word to say when all the disinformation about the COVID vaccine was going on. Forget the stolen SCOTUS seats and the lost tfg impeachment opportunities, this POS garbage person couldn’t even open his big fat mouth when it came to the COVID vaccine. Enjoy your shit sandwiches bitch.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Suzanne: Nora Ephron, in I Feel Bad About My Neck, writes about the maintenance required by older women to maintain cultural beauty standards, and mentioned that she tried being a blonde and discovered being a blonde was almost a full time occupation. The maintenance time doubled or tripled. Instead of a couple of hours at the hairdressers, it was most of the day.
Kayla Rudbek
@Suzanne: I remember reading a medieval German author as a kid and getting really annoyed that the only brunette in the story was an evil sorceress (Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s Parzival). Also being very annoyed as a kid that NONE of the white Barbie dolls with black or brown hair had light eyes. So I was always in favor of Black Barbie dolls (I was old enough that they were called Chrissie instead of Barbie) and I always wanted Mattel to recognize that not all white people are blue-eyed blondes.