I once called Mitch McConnell a “reptilian vote-counter”. Well, that insult still goes, because it’s true. Mitch can count votes, and here’s what he comes up with.
The last time the Republican candidate for president won an “honest” majority was George H. W. Bush in 1998. And if George H. W. ran today, he’d get his ass kicked harder than did his son Jeb in 2016, who got beaten so badly in the Republican presidential primaries that he quit before the primary of his home state of Florida, where he was once a popular, two-term governor.
Mitch knows that his senatorial majority is dependent on the massive over-representation of small, rural states in the Senate. He knows that Republicans have a functioning majority in the House of Representatives because of gerrymandering and the heavy concentration of Democratic voters in a relative handful of high-population urban areas. He knows that if the system wasn’t rigged, the Republicans couldn’t win.
So what is he to do? Give up? Hell, no! We just need to take care of a few things, that’s all, so that the American people can come to see reason again—for example, for all those Asians and Hispanics, who ought to be voting Republican, to realize that Democrats don’t give a damn about them, that all they want to do is give handouts to blacks and gays. To do that, well, we need to do a few things that aren’t strictly legal. We need someone like General Pinochet down in Chile and the colonels in Argentina, to kick a few asses without regard for “due process of law” and all that double talk. We don’t have time for due process of law! We need a man who can get things done! And once we get things done, well, then we can go back to normal, the way things used to be. We can get back to winning elections fair and square. Because it’s the honest folks like us who are supposed to be in charge, who are morally entitled to be in charge. Even if we have to cheat to get there.
Moral: Don’t expect Mitch McConnell to do the “right thing” any time soon. If you put a gun to his head, maybe, if it’s a really big gun and if it’s, you know, loaded.
