How cheaply our political affections can come.
"Mitch McConnell made history this week with a scant four words: 'I believe the women,'" fawns the Washington Post's Kathleen Parker. "[He] suddenly became irresistibly magnetic. Admit it: You wanted to hug him."
No, I'd still prefer to slug him.
Judge Roy Moore's 40-year-old offenses are either unforgivable in their own right, or, as Parker adds, "we tend to believe that people can change and be forgiven for past transgressions.... But forgiveness requires that one confess and repent — and Moore has done neither."
Neither has Mitch McConnell — and this rather reverses his "irresistible magnetism." His offense was much
more recent and far more damaging to the American soul than anything Mr. Moore had done. In 2016 McConnell upended constitutional norms and sabotaged political tradition by denying the president of the United States his choice of a Supreme Court nominee — even a hearing for his nominee.
McConnell's was an act of unprecedented partisan brutality; he would wait out President Obama's last year and, against all odds, simply hope for a Republican chief executive in 2017. And then the Court could be further contaminated by another ultraconservative mossback.
With breathtaking partisan ruthlessness and an utter indifference to constitutional mandates, McConnell, in terms of highest court appointments, effectively reduced every future president's term to three years rather than four. In brief, he essentially, single-handedly rewrote the Constitution.
Not that I'd believe or forgive him, but McConnell has yet to "confess and repent" his heretical secularism. Nonetheless, Ms. Parker and other memory-impaired fawners are swooning that "rare is the politician" — that would be McConnell — "who is also a statesman."
"Rather than try to ensure that Republicans keep the seat, he opted to do the right thing," gushes Parker, which is both a splendid truth and despicable lie. McConnell indeed did "the right thing," but for the wrong reason: He feared 2018's backlash should a groping, fumbling rapist like the Republican Moore be seated in the United States Senate. McConnell is pure pragmatism without principle — which translates into nothing but cheap opportunism.
What's moore, where was McConnell's belief in the women who exposed presidential candidate Donald Trump as a sexual assaulter? Where was his statesmanship then? The uncomplicated reality is simply that, to McConnell, Roy Moore is expendable, whereas Trump — whose accumulated transgressions, from the personal to business to politics, were far greater than Moore's — was anything but expendable. He was McConnell's only hope of devastating health care for millions, widening wealth inequality, and insuring that the high court would be populated by the lowest of ideological jurists.
If nothing else, for consistency's sake McConnell should be defending Moore. And Cory Gardner, he being the high muck-a-muck of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, should be flooding Alabama's zone with supportive cash and field operators rather than withdrawing both. Because if the Trumpian Moore "does not meet the ethical and moral requirements of [this Republican] United States Senate," who in hell does?