Joe Sonka July 30th, 2008

(crossposted at Barefoot and Progressive)

Wow. David Hawpe responds to Mitch McConnell’s incredibly whiny op-ed yesterday in the Courier-Journal, and it’s absolutely devastating.

First, he shows how McConnell quite deliberately distorted what the Courier-Journal said in the op-ed that McConnell responded to.

Then, Hawpe responds to Mitch’s whining that he was called a fraud. Well, yes, if you deliberately deceive people, that’s what you are, a fraud. If it walks like a duck….

Then Hawpe gets into Mitch pathetically whining about the Courier-Journal daring to write about the most powerful politician in Kentucky and one of the most powerful in the country.

McConnell also has complained about the frequency with which his name shows up on our editorial page, but there’s a simple explanation for that. He’s the minority leader of the U.S. Senate, in the middle of one of the most important American elections of the modern era, during which Congress is locked in a relentless partisan fight over what to do about the disastrous situation into which George W. Bush and his Capitol Hill enablers have thrust the nation.

He’s exercising power, in important ways, day after day. Of course we’re going to write about him.

In addition, McConnell is unarguably the most powerful public figure in Kentucky. He is the leader of the state’s Republican Party, which, with Senate President David Williams following McConnell’s no-new-tax dictum, has effective control of the agenda in Frankfort — not to mention primary responsibility for the General Assembly’s devastating failure to raise new revenue, so as to avoid disastrous service and program cuts. Our senior senator built the state GOP that has given us Ernie Fletcher (a scandalous figure as governor, with more bad news about his administration apparently to come) and Jim Bunning (named in Time magazine as one of the worst members of the U.S. Senate, but saved at re-election time by gay-baiting and McConnell’s personal intervention).

Why wouldn’t we be writing regularly about someone so consequential?

Still, McConnell insists on portraying himself as a casualty of liberal media bias.

Talk about the politics of victimization!

McConnell’s friend and former colleague, Phil Gramm, recently groused that we’ve “sort of become a nation of whiners.”

That’s sort of true about certain politicians, too.

Oh, snap! Hawpe just took McConnell to the woodshed. If McConnell keeps on deliberately fudging the facts in order to smear his enemies, one might get the impression that Mitch enjoys getting his whooping over and over again, because his targets aren’t going to take it lying down this year… no matter how much Mitch whines and complains about his poor pathetic victimhood.

• Mitch McConnell
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