Winston Churchill, clearly in a bitchy mood, once said of Labor Party Leader Ramsey MacDonald “I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as ‘The Boneless Wonder’. My parents judged that the spectacle would be too demoralising and revolting for my youthful eye and I have waited fifty years, to see the The Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.”
Dunno what Winnie would say about Mitch McConnell, but one should remember that octopuses are awfully smart, can solve mazes and slither through just about anything, not to mention the fact that Mitch can play four-handed piano and shave at the same time. There’s no doubt that Mitch came up painfully short last week, but rumor has it that he still hasn’t given up, and, as Eric Levitz points out in New York magazine, Mitch still got 49 senators to vote for an utterly fake bill, a bill intended not to go into effect, a bill literally “written” over lunch, to serve as a placeholder to allow the convening of a House-Senate conference to “reconcile” the Senate fake bill with the “honest monstrosity” that had passed the House, “reconciliation” simply being “replacement” by a gentler name.1
Levitz is more than a little stunned that 49 senators would vote for a bill that “would increase premiums, medical bankruptcies, and the number of Americans who die each year for want of health insurance — without offering any justification for doing so, beyond a (disingenuous) prediction that their plans would never take effect.” Well, except that a majority of the House of Representatives did vote for a bill that was far worse, one that would, for starters, cut Medicaid expenditures by hundreds of billions of dollars in order to spend that money on something useful, like tax cuts for the rich!
When House Speaker Ryan’s original “Repeal n’ Replace” package failed in the House, Ryan announced that “Obamacare is the law of the land for the foreseeable future,” almost as if Paulie knew his bill was an unworkable piece of crap. Almost as if he knew! But the howls, both from the “base” and the basest (i.e., Donald Trump), scared the shit out of poor Paulie. “You mean,” cried the base, “you can’t make life wonderful for us like magic? You can’t? Then why the fuck have we been voting for you for the past four fucking elections? Huh?” “You mean,” cried the Donald, “I’m not as cool as Kenya boy?”
Well, Donald is pissed all over again, and so is the base, and, what’s more, if Mitch doesn’t get it right this time, he’ll have Tony Scaramucci’s fist so far up his ass his farts will be winding Tony’s Rolex.2 All of which can really make an octopus think. So prepared for a lot more ink, and a lot more slippery slither, from ole’ Mitch.
Afterwords
So which is ole’ Mitch, boneless or soulless? I’d go with both, and throw in heartless too.
- Levitz points out that it’s not at all clear that the House was ready to play the Senate’s little game. House Speaker Paul Ryan gave a stunningly evasive answer to senators’ request for a guarantee that the House wouldn’t just pass the Senate bill and be done with it. You’re tired to thinking? Well, so are we! ↩︎
- Well, he would have had the Mooch not been most untimely booted from the White House. Mooch, we hardly knew ya! And hardly had time to make fun of your divorce! ↩︎
