Mitch McConnell Drooling Over Possible Return To Power

It's your very 'Mitch' Sunday show rundown.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (pictured above while watching the ending of "Marley And Me"? ) appeared on "Fox News Sunday" this weekend with temporary host and former George W. Bush press secretary Dana Perino.

Here are some highlights!

McConnell argued that the Biden administration is doing better with Ukraine now, thanks to how Republicans were around to push Biden to do more:

MCCONNELL: I think the administration has gotten better, but they've had to be pushed every step of the way to get more aggressive sooner. They are stepping up their game, but principally because of bipartisan pressure from Congress on the administration to do more, quicker.

Sooner? That's rich coming from the party that acquitted Trump in his first impeachment for literally extorting Ukraine for its desperately needed military aid.

Then the topic moved to energy:

MCCONNELL: It's really ridiculous. I mean the administration wants everybody else to produce more except us. They want us to be green, and so they're going after our allies in the -- in the Middle East, asking them to up production. Look, we were energy independent as late as 2019. We can be energy independent again.

So let's stop development on clean and green energy, which other countries are developing, to make fossil fuels companies richer? Nothing will say "energy independence" like being a distant second to China once the time comes.

McConnell also mentioned NATO:

MCCONNELL: Putin's invasion has done a lot to unify NATO and get the attention of NATO. And it's also noteworthy that the secretary general of NATO has pointed out, we're going to beef up the troops along the eastern border of NATO, the frontline countries. This has been a good lesson of the importance of NATO once again. I think some people have kind of lost sight of that over the years.

Who "lost sight of it," Mitch? Who were/are these misguided people? Reminder:  we were all there. We all remember.

Then came the pièce de résistance of this softball interview: McConnell's vision board for a GOP-controlled Congress come November 2022. Let's just say it's the same bullshit, but wrapped in vagueness to hide that they have no new ideas.

MCCONNELL: Well, our agenda next year, if we're fortunate enough to be in the majority, will be focused on exactly what you and I have been talking about, crime, education, beefing up the defense of our country. The president's request for the Defense Department, in this year's request, doesn't even keep up with inflation. We've got a war going on in Ukraine. [...] So all of those will be on our agenda. We will not have the presidency for two more years. Obviously, we will have to work with the administration to see what we can agree on. But we want to turn the president -- let me put it this way, Biden ran as a moderate. If I'm the majority leader in the Senate, and Kevin McCarthy's the speaker of the House, we'll make sure Joe Biden is a moderate.

Let's break that bullshit down:

• By focusing on "crime," he may mean no accountability for police misconduct, immunity for terrorizing marginalized communities, and maybe more funding for the further militarization of police.

• "Education" might mean more bills/laws to ban any talk of race or acknowledgement that LGBTQ people exist, while dismantling teachers' unions. You didn't think they were going to raise school budgets or pay teachers better, right? That and probably more push for homeschooling/privatizing of schools.

• "Beefing up defense" is self-explanatory. They are going to keep increasing defense spending while ignoring the middle class and poor. It's been the same rhetoric as always.

"We only have empty pockets when it comes to the morally right things to do, but when it comes to tax cuts for billionaires and when it comes to unlimited war we seem to be able to invent that money very easily," Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says. https: //cnn.it/2vpyVNl pic.twitter.com/dgVgv8EMRb

— CNN Politics (@CNN Politics) 1533778196 

McConnell thinks "moderate" is code for Republican or conservative, which some spineless or craven or a mix of both Democratic senators seem to agree with. That has been essentially the problem of the last two years of a Democratic Senate. They've inflicted damage on themselves and done little to counter the narrative that losing the midterms is inevitable. 

The interview ended with McConnell commenting on President Biden's likeability, and side-stepping a question about Trump endorsing Dr. Oz in the Pennsylvania GOP primary, which was well summarized by the best headline Rolling Stone ever published.

As we've pointed out before, most Democratic politicians and news media can't or won't face the existential threat that the modern GOP has become. This is exemplified by McConnell basically admitting he's a villain to Axios, and the shocked disbelief on Jonathan Swan's face as he looks for moral red lines from a man who has none.

.@jonathanvswan asks Mitch McConnell where he draws his moral redlinespic.twitter.com/is7WZqSuhx

— Axios (@Axios) 1649349900 

How many times do we have to quote Maya Angelou's "when people show you who they are" quote before some people will get it?

Have a week.

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