Mitch McConnell Bites The Hand That Feeds Him
The Senate minority leader wants to cancel corporations because he doesn't like what they are saying.
image via AP
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC -- It’s difficult to pinpoint a specific date when the Republican Party completely lost its shpadoinkle. Sure, they’ve always operated on wacky-shack logic, but it was around 2009 when they became permanently untethered from fractal reality, history, math, and science. The last of the free-range Republicans retreated, at that time, to the safe-space of Fox News, AM talk radio, and the creepiest crawlspaces on the internet in order for their nonsense to stick.
The ideological segregation of political news and commentary has been a gigantic gift to the now Trumpism-controlled GOP. Now, they can say just about anything no matter how inconsistent or divorced from our dimension of time-space, and people will believe them. Worse, if it’s not reported in their fascist idiocrat press, it never really happened. If it’s spoken by someone with an “R” after their name, and if it’s broadcast on Fox News, then it must be real. If it’s spoken by, for example, the Ben Shapirobot and linked on Facebook, then it’s good enough to repeat uncritically to everyone they know.
This is why your Red Hat uncle didn’t realize how truly violent and un-American the January 6 insurrection was. The latest polling from Reuters-Ipsos indicated that 55 percent of Republicans believe the insurrection was staged by leftists, while 51 percent of Republicans believe the attack was composed of “mostly peaceful, law-abiding Americans.” Why are they so badly deluded? Once again, it’s the usual suspects: Fox News, radio, and social media propaganda. By the way, it can’t be both. It can’t be leftists in disguise and “peaceful, law-abiding Americans.” Pick a lane, morons.
This is why Mitch McConnell’s latest crap-on-a-stick will never be questioned for consistency by Red Hat audiences.
Earlier this week, McConnell chimed in on the various corporate boycotts of states like Georgia, where Republicans passed completely ludicrous and completely unjustified election laws based on the completely ludicrous and completely unjustified lies of Donald Trump -- more specifically Trump’s insurrectionist lies, all of which were tossed out of courtroom after courtroom for being outrageously bogus.
Trump made it all up, but lies and fabrications are enough of an excuse for Republicans to disenfranchise voters, especially voters of color. We’ve seen this series of events before. I’m sure you recall how the congressional Republicans de-funded both ACORN and Planned Parenthood based on obvious prank videos by James O’Keefe and his copycats -- videos that were almost immediately exposed as frauds. Facts are irrelevant to the modern GOP. Fraud is good enough to codified into law. And they know it.
Likewise, Mitch McConnell knows that he’s full of shit, but it doesn’t matter to him. It’s open season on the sucker demographics, with the Red Hat Republican Party exploiting its gullible, impressionable, paranoid base. Here’s what he said about the corporate boycotts of states like Georgia:
"From election law to environmentalism to radical social agendas to the Second Amendment, parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government," the Kentucky Republican said in a statement Monday. "Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order."
He added: “Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex. Americans do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic left-wing signaling."
And here’s the big finish: “My warning to corporate America is to stay out of politics… I’m not talking about political contributions.”
Yes, Mitch McConnell just threatened to cancel any corporation that chooses to not do business with bigots and evildoers.
The albino sleestak McConnell believes corporations need to stay out of politics, but only when corporate opinions disagree with Republican gibberish. He’s all in favor of megachurches and other religious groups immolating the establishment clause and injecting themselves into politics. That’s fine and dandy. Moscow Mitch was thrilled when Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, one of the alleged plotters behind the Russian attack on our elections, barnstormed into Kentucky with bags of Russian cash to help out his bestie, the Republican leader of the Senate.
The political participation of both the megachurches and the Russians isn’t restricted to cash payments, either. In each case, the political speech is clear and incontrovertible -- beyond donations or other investments. Take a look at your Facebook timeline from 2016 as just one of many examples.
Worse, the Supreme Court’s ruling on the 2010 Citizens United case was fully embraced by McConnell who said:
“For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process,” he said in a statement at the time. He hailed the decision, Citizens United, as “an important step” in “restoring the First Amendment rights of these groups.”
Right, so McConnell supports First Amendment speech rights for corporations. That’s what Citizens United was all about. Dinesh D’Souza’s profanely awful Hillary Clinton video was considered by the FEC to be an illegal corporate contribution to the Republicans during the 2008 election cycle. The Court, however, disagreed -- ruling that the video was constitutionally protected speech. Therefore, corporate personhood included the same rights afforded to actual human beings.
On top of all that, we just ousted a president who, himself, was the head of numerous corporations and refused to divest. For four years, McConnell said nothing while Trump routinely promoted and enriched his corporate wealth by stealing taxpayer money and funneling it directly into his businesses.
Oh, and one more thing: is the leader of the Senate Republicans trying to control corporations from his perch in Washington? Yes. Do Republicans normally oppose government interfering in the private sector? Yes, of course. But, again, a contradiction like this is completely lost on the mouth-breathing simpletons who devour Fox News every day.
The scorching audacity of telling corporations they should stay out of politics -- or else -- while having previously wallowed in corporate speech in politics is not only blindingly, undeniably hypocritical, but it’s a flagrant exploitation of the media bubbles in which Republicans continuously manipulate their target demos. Plus, there’s the added Trump-style attempt at retribution for opposing the Lord of the Turtle Club. In other words, corporate speech is so wrong that it demands punishment, but only when it doesn’t land on the far-right end of the political spectrum, demanding bullshit laws on top of bullshit laws.
At the end of the day, though, if Mitch McConnell wants to help us overturn Citizens United, fine. Pick up a sign and join the march, Mr. Leader. But we probably shouldn’t hold our breath.
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Is It Time To Reconcile With The MAGAs In Your Life?
It depends on whether they subscribe to the GOP's new intellectual justification for rabid fascism.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
by Justin Rosario
It has been three months since the terrorist attack on the Capitol and you have likely come across people wondering whether we should move on as a country. Should they reach out to MAGAs and try to heal the divide?
Granted, I may not be the best person to weigh in on this. I am not easy to offend but when you cross that threshold, good luck getting back across it. I am not very forgiving and I generally don’t allow toxic people back into my circle.
Can you think of anyone, short of a serial killer, more toxic than a MAGA?
Forgiveness Is Divine. But…No
I’d love to be able to forgive and forget easily, but I don’t have that luxury — and frankly, neither do you even if you think otherwise.
I do not have this luxury because I’m Jewish. Although if I’m being honest, I’m not a very good Jew. I eat ham. I don’t observe the Sabbath. The only reason I know which Jewish holiday it is is because my non-Jewish friends post about it on Facebook. But despite being The World’s Worst Jew, I am keenly aware of the dangers of right wing extremism because it always always puts Jews in harm’s way.
You can imagine how I’ve viewed the right’s descent into open white nationalism over the last several years. There were a lot of people taken completely by surprise at the tidal wave of antisemitism, particularly the explicit antisemitism, surging from the right and the GOP. I was not one of those people.
Once a movement has become fully enthralled with the idea of genocide, which the right has whether you want to admit it or not, the only thing left is the intellectual justification. That’s the part we’re up to now. As Vox reports, conservative intellectuals are openly engaging in “strikingly dehumanizing” language that has historically been a precursor to mass murder:…
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Moscow Mitch needs to come out and come clean. Admit that you're a disturbingly cynical excuse of a human being who wears his blatantly gross hypocrisy like it was some kind of badge of honor for you, McConnell. That you actually hate democracy and want to do away with it and turn the country into a back water Third World nation for your extremely wealthy donors. And that you get away with it because the voters in your home state of Kentucky generally have shit for brains who'd vote for Hitler if he had an (R) next to their name.
Just admit it already, Moscow Mitch. Because any other excuse you make makes you so full of shit, boy!
<-- See meme.