The Mitch McConnell mystery is solved. But it doesn't look good for America
The senator is alive, a key requirement to maintain one’s job in the US Senate
lol
Like any good proof-of-life photo, it featured that day’s newspaper. After a nearly month-long disappearance, when it was clear that he had been rushed to the hospital but not clear why or in what condition, Mitch McConnell broke his silence, as they say in the tabloids, by releasing a photograph of himself sitting upright in a hospital bed.
...
One almost has to feel gratitude to Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, who had the decency to die out in the open, without inflicting a mystery on the public. In McConnell’s case, the circumstances bordered on absurd. Think of it as Schroedinger’s Republican senator: for a while, sealed in his box of secrecy, the former Senate majority leader was both alive and dead.
Excellent, excellent, excellent. Oh, such good writing.
Now that mystery has been resolved. But the episode reflects a grim reality of US politics:...American leaders are so old that it is plausible that they could drop dead at any moment, and so unaccountable that it’s not clear anyone would bother to tell us if they did.
Oh my goodness. lol.
Think, for a moment, of the peculiarities of Mitch McConnell’s job, which he has now occupied for 41 years. He is among the most powerful men in the country...If you’re anything like me, your own job probably involves much less privilege and much less power, and you spend your days doing things that might be more honorable but are undoubtedly of less consequence. Now ask yourself [I love that]: could you, with your lesser powers and lesser responsibilities, simply disappear from your job for four weeks without notice or explanation? And when you re-emerged from this abandonment, do you think you could claim that you are entitled to remain in that job, even if you can’t perform it, by the simple virtue of being technically alive?
My jelly belly is shaking, this is so good.
The entitlement is staggering, and so is the reality that McConnell is not even the worst example of what is a thoroughly bipartisan phenomenon. A weak and senescent Dianne Feinstein...Joe Biden was so addled and confused...Chuck Grassley, a sitting Republican senator from Iowa, is 92... And of course, there’s Donald Trump: never the sharpest tool in the shed, the president... has devoted himself less to policy...than to the kind of idle vanity projects that might serve to distract a retiree, like pool beautification and home remodeling.
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...What is offensive about the gerontocracy is how transparently it reveals the rot at the core of the American political system, how plainly it demonstrates that our elected leaders do not serve the people, but serve only their own gratification, only their own power. It is not difficult to imagine a different country, one where elected leaders considered themselves public servants, and one where it does not seem unreasonable that the voters – nominally, those politicians’ boss – might want to know where they’ve been. This is not some great fantasy of a utopian model of self-governance. But for those of us here in the sclerotic and collapsing United States, it is apparently out of reach.
Moira Donegan, The Guardian
Oh, young Ms. Donegan, you write too well and insightfully for one of your years, and...for one who is American. (?) Are you really? You're a Guardian U.S. columnist, but were you birthed and swam your entire life among us turds in the toilet bowl of the The Toilet Nation? You read as too normal to be "wretched refuse".
