How does it feel, Mitch McConnell, to know your opinions no longer carry any weight with your fellow Trumped senators?
When you were majority and minority leader you could cajole or more frequently coerce your subordinates to vote your way. But now you are their equal, maybe even their inferior given your lame duck status, and they no longer look to you for direction. Even on a deeply personal issue such as the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services, which you opposed given your childhood bout with polio and his ambivalence toward the vaccine, your colleagues ignored you, as they did when you voted against Pete Hegseth’s investiture as defense secretary.
How does it feel, Mitch, to be an afterthought? A shell of your former self?
How does it feel to see America slide into complicity with Russia? Your life’s work devoted to strengthening America’s deterrence to tyranny reduced by the shameful exhibition of a president and vice president (the latter from your state of Kentucky, no less) berating a president of Ukraine for standing up to Putin’s immoral aggression. Did you not teach JD Vance anything? Maybe you did. Maybe he learned from you that in politics it is okay to do any and all things to advance your position.
Do I sound cruel? Perhaps if you had not practiced aggressive, partisan power in thwarting the nomination process of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, or waffled on your vote to hold Donald Trump responsible for the January 6 Capitol insurrection after voicing that belief in the days after the assault on democracy, or manufactured the ultra conservative Supreme Court that has emboldened Trump to act without fear of accountability, perhaps I would feel sympathy for you. But you deserve all the grief I hope you are experiencing and feeling now that you witness Trump’s progressive dismantling of American leadership at home and abroad.
A few days ago Turner Classic Movies aired “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” As he is dying from wounds near the bridge he has built for the Japanese that is being blown up by British, American and Burmese commandos, Colonel Nicholson, played by Alex Guinness, utters words that you should relate to: “What have I done?”
We who love our country are praying for a Trumpian train wreck that will save our democracy. Are you patriotic enough to stand up to tyranny from within what was once a principled party but is now a gathering of toads and unprincipled lackeys?
