Good and Brain-dead: Republican institutionalist and Mad King creator

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor

We’ve had our obit of Senator Mitch McConnell ready to go for a long time. It seems appropriate to publish it now, as the actions of his famously loyal, devoted, and loving wife Elaine Chao, who remained in China to meet with her bosses while her husband lay in intensive care in Washington city, made it clear that Mitch, like Elvis, has left the stadium.

As a man who never did a kind or worthy thing during his entire life on Earth, you might think he’s not worthy of a lengthy threnody, but he is. Not because of any virtue he possessed or because he left behind friends and family who will mourn his passing (9,000 miles away in their Beijing hotel suite), but because he was the living embodiment of a basic truth about the last 60 years of Republican parties.

Despite the endless efforts by Republican hacks and shills to paint the Mad King as an unprecedented and inexplicable departure from decades of worthy Republicans like Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Deadeye Dick Cheney, the opposite is true. And the sorry life of Mitch McConnell literally provides the actual and spiritual link between the Republican Party of Tricky Dick Nixon and the Fascist clown show now being performed by the Mad King.

Mitch McConnell, about to get on a 20-minute phone call

There would be no Mad King regime without Mitch McConnell. In February 2021, after the deranged sex offender had come within 20 feet of storming the Capitol and overthrowing the verdict of the American electorate, it was ol’ Mitch who threw out the life preserver.

When Democrats and even a few theretofore spineless Republicans demanded that the Constitutional order threatened by the Tangerine-Faced Fascist be restored through the remedy that the Constitution specifically provides for such abuse of power, it was Mitch who persuaded the Senate not to find Jeffrey Epstein’s BFF guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors or to bar him from future office. Mitch, his wattles quavering with pretend integrity, said that the Mad King, out of office after January 20, could no longer be tried. This happens to be, what’s the word for it, a lie, but it was enough to give Republicans cover to let former President U Bum fight another day.

Nor was that the only occasion on which Mitch provided crucial assistance to the Republican campaign against our former democracy. Many of the Mad King’s most ludicrously illegal abuses of power have been rubber-stamped by a bent Republican Supreme Court. These unelected Republican Lords have for example invented absolute Presidential immunity for criminal acts related to his office. This has provided all the cover the Mad King has needed to corrupt and debase formerly honorable institutions like the Department of Justice, while lining his own pockets with billions in ill-gotten crypto and other gains.

That same bent Court also decided that the Mad King could impose his insane crooked whims on all formerly independent agencies (overruling over a century of accepted statutory law blessed by that same Court ninety years earlier), except the one that protects the bank accounts of those crooked Justices and their plutocratic overlords. Hey, do you think you can buy or wipe your greasy mitts on Schickelgruber’s table linen for free?

That Supreme Court would not exist without the unceasing efforts of Mitch McConnell. We won’t dwell on his decades of shepherding horrible Republican nominees like John Roberts ‘76, Long Dong Thomas, and Surly Sam Alito onto the Court, because he was only acting in lockstep with his racist reactionary Republican colleagues. And those three are but half of the unelected Council of Doges that has destroyed the Court as a judicial body.

Let’s turn back to 2016 when Nino Scalia, a previous horrible law-free Republican reactionary who provided the deciding vote that elected George W. Bush President, lost a wrestling match with his pillow. 

Too soon? 

Scalia rigged the 2000 election and rewrote the Second Amendment during his years in office, leading to the plague of gun violence that has mowed down thousands of innocent lives. Mourn them first.

As was customary, the then President, a smart lawyer named Barack Obama, did what any President would do: he nominated a replacement he thought would be palatable to the majority Republicans of the Senate, an accomplished seasoned moderate milquetoast and former prosecutor named Merrick Garland.

But Mitch’s brain, still supplied with oxygen in those bygone days, came up with the argument that because Obama was in the last year of his second term, anything he did could be ignored. Garland wouldn’t even get the courtesy of hearing (because such a hearing would demonstrate both his unthreatening nature and his obvious competence). All Republicans joined him in this blockade.

Kentuckians throng to mourn Mitch's passing

When Hillary Clinton lost the Electoral College vote to the Mad King, Mitch was beside himself with joy. After celebrating with undoubtedly many rounds of exciting and fulfilling coitus with his adoring and adorable wife Elaine, he voted to confirm for the seat Garland was blocked from a mediocre reactionary Re;publican named Neil Gorsuch. That was bent Republican #4.

The following year, Mitch had no problem installing a lying drunken sex offender onto the court, Brett “It won’t come off” Kavanaugh. Bent Republican #5.

And then the postman rang a second time.  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in declining health for years, died in September 2020, two months before Election Day 2020 and while America was reeling from the COVID pandemic that the Mad King did his best to propagate.

Mitch had previously assured Republicans that if Ginsburg died before Election Day, he would make damn sure that Republicans filled the seat, notwithstanding his prior principled opposition to voting on Supreme Court nominees in the last year of a Presidential term.

Sure enough, he rammed through the confirmation of a spooky mediocre Handmaid, Amy Coney Barret, while the earth was still piled on Ginsburg's grave.  And he gloated about it too. 

So the next time you have a 20-minute phone call with Mitch, be sure to congratulate him on his role in constructing an entirely illegitimate and lawless Supreme Court devoted to enshrining extreme Republican ideology into law. 

But we, unlike our subject today, have a functioning cerebrum, so we can remember all of Mitch's legislative accomplishments during his career as a living Republican Senator. For his entire career, he fought consistently to enrich the rich and powerful and torment the poor and powerless. 

Especially loathsome was his habit of gloating over doing terrible things.  After 20 kids and 6 teachers were slaughtered at Sandy Hook by some loser who borrowed his mother's high-powered assault rifle, President Obama tried to do something to prevent such slaughters from happening again.

Mitch stopped him cold and posted this:

Like the entitled white Southern racist he was, he also boasted that his goal was to do everything in his power to frustrate President Obama and ensure his defeat.  And he was a man of his word, when he was able to express words. Tax cuts for the rich. Benefit cuts for the poor. All mainstream Republican positions.

As noted above, he supported the Mad King's assault on democracy and the rule of law.  Even when he disagreed with the Mad King, like Ukraine, he did jack s***, his spine having predeceased his brain.

His odious life makes clear that the Mad King is not some anomaly arising from radioactive waste infecting cheap bronzer, like Godzilla.  The Mad King and Mitch McConnell swim in the same fetid Republican stream of white supremacy, plutocracy, and just plain evil.

If you think we are generalizing from perhaps an isolated example, as we were going to press we learned of the death of Lindsay Graham, another spineless white Southern mediocrity who went from impeachment hellhound in 1998 to Republican hack to enthusiastic supporter and taint polisher of the Mad King and all that he has done to our nation. 

Thanks to men like this, children are waking up hungry in America, millions who lost their health insurance dread any illness, and hundreds of thousands around the world from Uvalde to Sudan to Iran aren't waking up at all, having been killed by the policies of the Mad King and his miserable henchmen.

We do have one bit of advice: try to live your life so that when you are on your deathbed, your spouse doesn't decide to leave you to your fate and remain in China to take care of family business.  

Or, for future reference, Slovenia.