McConnell is the political arsonist who has set the U.S. ablaze; now let’s watch him burn in his own inferno
Matt Gunterman September 29th, 2008
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) looks sad these days. Did you see the photos of him, seated next to Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) during the bailout negotiations? McConnell was subdued, his spirit visibly broken. He knows what the next five weeks will hold for him, his party, his family, and his staff: humiliation, defeat, unemployment, and pariah-status. McConnell knows that this election season hasn’t reached bottom for him yet. His party is splintering, his president is impotent and irrelevant, and McConnell himself is without power and is not in control of his destiny.
McConnell is a man who knows that history is about to catch up with him.
If the timing had worked perfectly for him, he’d have gone down as one of the greats: Majority Leader, five-term senator, one of the founders of a conservative movement that established the Republican party as the majority party for a generation. That’s how things could have gone after the 2004 elections.
But that’s not how things did go, and that’s not how things will go.
In the coming five weeks, the Republican party is going to implode and voters will cast the GOP into generation-long minority status. Senator McConnell will lose reelection and suffer national shame in the process. And — after all this — historians and political scientists will begin the long effort to analyze where it all went wrong in the United States at the turn of the 21st century.
And they will point to the career of Sen. McConnell as a big contributing factor to all this big mess we find ourselves in. It was McConnell who inserted dirty money into federal politics like never before. It was McConnell who pushed partisanship to such extreme levels that party politics began to trump patriotism. It was McConnell, in other words, who pushed the mantra that this nation isn’t worth anything unless Republicans are profiting from it. It was McConnell who flamed the fires of bigotry and fundamentalist Christian fanaticism to build the Republican base.
McConnell has always practiced slash-and-burn politics, and it was his hope that his career would stay ahead of the massive inferno he was setting off in American political culture. But that fire is about to consume him.
And we can — as we begin the work of the clean-up from this tragedy — look forward to some entertainment: watching Mitch McConnell being burnt to a political crisp.
- Mitch McConnell
- Comments(5)
Did you see in that photo that he wouldn’t even pass the cream and sugar to Obama?
With his record for Kentucky, he should retire. He is old and ugly and has enough money to never work again. Or, one of his rich friends can hire him, and Kentucky can get a real leader that will help all the “people” for a change.
Gunterman is BACK, baby.
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