Yesterday I was on the beach and stumbled on a dead thing which had had its head and tail chewed off, possibly by dogs, but I think was a baby dolphin. It looked more energetic than Mitch McConnell.

I definitely don't loathe dead baby dolphins as much as I do him.

Same. And yet, I can't help but think that what comes next will be worse.

Sounds like Cornyn wants to be next. He's possibly less effective than McConnell?

More energetic, more charismatic, more fuckable.

The amount of shit you have to eat to be a Republican leader is still astounding to me. It seems incompatible with no just democratic norms, but basic self-respect.

This is great news for the blue team, as Mitch is clearly the smartest and most effective Republican who has been outsmarting Dems for decades. But its crazy that even a super effective political operator like Mitch couldn't keep the party from going off the rails. Or maybe it was ultimately his choice to make it so.

For all his faults McConnell genuinely is against Russian expansion, so to the extent he's failed to wrangle congress on Ukraine aid that really is due to failure and not want of trying.

Not in thrall to Trump*

*except in the moments it mattered the most

Ukraine aid passed the Senate so he's done about as much as he can do there. He just doesn't have that kind of influence in the House. Maybe he could lean more on House Speaker Churchy McGoo to allow it to come to a vote, but if that happens, probably the Trump caucus would just create another Speakership crisis.

"Churchy McGoo" made me laugh.

I'm not sure McConnell has ever outsmarted anyone, or at least not much. He's used power when he's had it. He's often been successful in keeping his caucus together, and in finding ways to get particular Democratic senators to break with theirs on particular issues. They're doing so based on their own calculations, so his successor won't be in a different spot with them.

It may be that whoever comes next is less adept at getting the assholes who write for the mainstream press to sing his praises, but they're pretty focused on normalizing authoritarianism, so that probably won't work.

He was shameless about abusing power and breaking rules that had been held together with etiquette and scotch tape, in a different way than Trump did. So maybe not "outsmarted" but still destructive in novel ways.

Both he and Trump are willfully destroying a generation of goodwill, institutional strength, and cultural wisdom. They are doing it with the active assistance of the people who spent the 90s talking about the superiority of western culture and institutions.

I don't disagree with anything in 13 or 14. I'll continue to pushback on Blame Democrats First, which is basically epidemic.

[An interesting example of this was in a Discord I'm in, with a lot of younger folks. Someone linked a recent story about Senate Dems whipping up a bill to save IVF, and commenting that if they could do that, why couldn't they have passed a law preserving abortion. If you click on the story, you see that it's clear that the IVF bill isn't going to pass -- it needed unanimous consent in the Senate, and House leadership was against. So, what really in the contrast? Nothing. OK, people want to act like Dems have let them down, but better examples than 'Republicans have been elected to a bunch of positions' are going to be necessary.]

McConnell has been pretty unprincipled in his exercise of power, and I expect whoever come next (or next after) will be more so.

Democrats didn't make him that way.

Both he and Trump are willfully destroying a generation of goodwill, institutional strength, and cultural wisdom. They are doing it with the active assistance of the people who spent the 90s talking about the superiority of western culture and institutions.

That halcyon era of Newt Gingrich?

I think things are quite a bit worse than they were then.

I see the Senate is finally filling 5 red state district judgeships. More of that shit ought to be happening.

Mitch couldn't keep the party from going off the rails

Mitch, more than any other single figure in American politics, is the one who fucked up the rails in the first place.

17: Yes, but not through any special virtue of that era's Republicans.

His SIL just died in weird circumstances last month.

"Angela Chao died on February 11, 2024, at the age of 50. According to the Blanco County sheriff, she died after her Tesla went into a pond on her private ranch (named JWCB Ranch, or JW Ranch for short), which is located at 101 Schneider Lane in Johnson City, about 40 miles west of Austin."

19 I think I'd put him behind Trump and Gingrich. Each of them, in their time, made it impossible for the Republican mainstream to hold off the nuts (or, because they normalized the nuts, even to take power). And the only way for the nuts to gain and then wield power is to break a lot of stuff. McConnell would have been happy with a McCain or a Romney presidency.

I think GWB won despite Gingrich, and was floundering around for some sense of why he was there until 9/11.

How many people in Blanco County don't die by drowning in a pond?

His main innovation was that anything that's not a written rule isn't a rule at all.
"her Tesla went into a pond on her private ranch"
Sure autopilot sucks but for a well timed assassination it can be pretty effective, especially given the demographic skew of Tesla owners.

Lyndon Johnson had a car that would work as a boat. Maybe she got confused?

I believe I saw where there is now a criminal investigation.

re:McConnell, for some reason it brought to mind an incident from 2019 which to me exemplified both his own malevolent approach to "governing" but even more so the cynical complicity of the press. It was just after the 2018 midterms when the House had passed a fairly extensive set of election reforms. At a press gaggle in a hallway he was asked about would become if it in the Senate He said something like "nothing" and then some crack about how he knew that was the case because he controlled it and proceeded to laugh ghoulishly and all the reporters joined in. Ha!Ha! Ha! Just like the Founders intended. No followup questions.