You Will Anyway: Mitch is still standing

Monday, November 21, 2022

Mitch is still standing

I’ve seen McConnell do serious harm to American democracy. In fact, the damage he has done is second only to Trump.

In my mind, McConnell will go down as one of the great villains of American history for stealing a Supreme Court nomination from then-President Obama by blocking Merrick Garland in 2016.

McConnell’s partisan obstinance undermined public trust in the Supreme Court as well as the Senate.

That corruption was followed by his brazen hypocrisy in ramming through Trump’s last-minute Supreme Court nomination of an anti-abortion zealot, Amy Coney Barrett, in 2020.

[...]

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), a Trump proxy, led the mutiny against McConnell, having already defied the Senate leader in the run-up to the midterms.

As head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Scott burned through millions backing Trump-supported candidates of questionable “quality,” as McConnell put it.

McConnell preferred mainstream conservatives with a better chance of winning because they could not be attacked as sycophants caught in Trump’s radical orbit.

[...]

If McConnell’s brand of hardball, pragmatic Republican Senate politics had lost out to Trump’s stew of rage and racial division, it would have sealed the destruction of a major party. The GOP majority in the House is already under the control of extremists mimicking Trump.

[...]

Scott lost the fight to oust McConnell by a vote of 37-10 inside the Senate GOP. But the war is not over. Those ten votes to depose McConnell have cemented a sizable pro-Trump faction in the Senate.

[...]

Well-known Republicans such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) embraced Scott’s effort to unseat McConnell. Scott also enlisted Sens. Ron Johnson (Wis.), Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Ted Cruz (Texas).

Such open rebellion revealed a lack of fear of McConnell’s power. And even though he remains at the helm, McConnell is now commander of a divided caucus.

The Hill

Good. I keep reading and hearing a Democratic line about how we need a strong Republican party - opposition party they call it. No we don't. Not if it's the Republican party. In today's corrupt system, if the Republican party is strong, the Democrats will be the opposition party and never return to power. What we need is a better system.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Precisely.

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"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.