David Gordon of Blog for Arizona summarized succinctly in a post last fall why Mitch McConnell is the real “Enemy of the People”.
Charles Pierce of Esquire similarly makes the case that There Is No More Loathsome Creature Walking Our Political Landscape Than Mitch McConnell (excerpt):
There is simply is no more loathsome creature walking the political landscape than the Majority Leader of the United States Senate. You have to go back to McCarthy or McCarran to find a Senate leader who did so much damage to democratic norms and principles than this yokel from Kentucky. Trump is bad enough, but he’s just a jumped-up real-estate crook who’s in over his head. McConnell is a career politician who knows full well what he’s doing to democratic government and is doing it anyway because it gives him power, and it gives the rest of us a wingnut federal judiciary for the next 30 years. There is nothing that this president* can do that threatens McConnell’s power as much as it threatens the survival of the republic, and that’s where we are.
McConnell declared himself in opposition to Barack Obama right from the first day in office. There’s even video. Most noxiously, in reference to our present moment, when Obama came to him and asked him to present a united front against the Russian ratfcking that was enabling El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, McConnell turned him down, flat. Moreover, he told Obama that, if Obama went public, McConnell would use it as a political hammer on Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Obama should have done it anyway, god knows.) McConnell issued a watery denial of these charges, but there’s no good goddamn reason to believe him.
He doesn’t have the essential patriotism god gave a snail. He pledges allegiance to his donors, and they get what they want. He’s selling out his country, and he’s doing it in real-time and out in the open. This is worse than McCarthy or McCarran ever were. Mitch McConnell is the the thief of the nation’s soul.
UPDATE: Historian Christopher Browning has written that “If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.” The Suffocation of Democracy.
I have said before that Mitch McConnell belongs in the pantheon of the worst senators in U.S. history. He is demonstrably a villain who believes in authoritarianism, as long as his party and he remains in control. No one has abused the rules of the Senate and American democracy more than has Mitch McConnell. History will not remember him kindly, nor should it. His name should be spoken with disdain as we do for those most despised villains in American history.
Compare and contrast McConnell with historic Senate leaders. Mike Mansfield, one of the great minds in the history of the Senate. Lyndon Johnson. Bob Dole. A minority leader, Everett Dirksen. McConnell should be ashamed to have his photos posted next the the others. Harry Reid at least tried to get things done. The actual people of the United States never enter into McConnell’s mind. What ever happened to his newer, and better and cheaper health care system.
I couldn’t agree more! He is a traitor to our country. We can only hope that when the Jenga tower falls, he is crushed by the rubble.