John McCain, throughout his career, has had a habit of talking big and acting small, as he did last Tuesday, correctly denouncing the absurd process by which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell manufactured a grotesque piece of non-legislation, a gesture rather than a bill, that would pretend to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act but in fact would simply damage it significantly but leave it in place, but then voting to allow consideration of said grotesquerie.1 Classy, John!
But Johnny topped that later in the week by joining with several other senators, after said grotesquerie failed, to vote in favor of its replacement—a new, improved grotesquerie, so grotesque that no one even knew what it looked like—but only with the proviso that it would not go into law!2 For what are we, legislators!
Well, congrats to John for not being quite that stupid.
Afterwords
Paul Krugman has more on the hypocrisy of Big Johnny and his “moderate” friends here, excepting those two chilly (as in “cool”) chicks, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. As Eugene McCarthy once observed, “if you’re drowning fifteen feet from shore, a Republican moderate will throw you a ten-foot rope.”
- Word accepts “grotesquerie”! Magnifique! (But, uh, not “magnifique”.) ↩︎
- Even more amusingly, House Speaker Paul Lyin’ Paulie Ryan wouldn’t even give “The Three Cowards” a straight answer. His unwillingness to assure McCain that the House wouldn’t pass the Senate bill may have been the straw that broke McCain’s back. So thank you Paulie! For once your usual shittiness turned out to be a good thing! ↩︎
