Kellyanne Conway just did it again
It’s tough to listen to Kellyanne Conway. She is a master of finding ways to be unpleasant. One of her favorite techniques is the filibuster. She starts talking and doesn’t stop. Sentences that would ordinarily have ended in periods tend not to, and when they finally get around to culminating to an actual point, the end of one sentence more often than not becomes the beginning of a new sentence.
Take her recent appearance before Fox and Friends where she was asked about her violations of the Hatch Act. She said, “It isn’t even clear that the Hatch Act applies to assistants to the president, it’s not even clear what the Hatch Act allows, I would be the first, we think I would be the first member of the West Wing to be hauled in front of Congress to talk about the Hatch Act.” Then, without (literally) so much as pausing for breath, after explaining that she doesn’t know what the Hatch Act is, she goes on to define the Hatch Act. “The Hatch Act means you can’t advocate for or against the election of an individual.”
Then, in a tour de force of Orwellian doublethink, Kellyanne proceeds to violate the Hatch Act right before our very eyes. “If I’m talking about the failure of Obama-BidenCare, if I’m talking about the fact that twenty eight million Americans have no health insurance, that’s a fact.”
First, since when did ObamaCare suddenly become Obama-BidenCare? Since Kellyanne and company decided that Joe Biden was the likely Democratic candidate in 2020, I suppose. It has been, in effect, rechristened so that all the alleged sins of ObamaCare can be laid at the feet of Joe Biden. In other words, Kellyanne is electioneering. In other words, she’s violating the Hatch Act right before our eyes.
Naturally we don’t know who the “twenty eight million Americans (who) have no health insurance” she is referring to are. We do know that the Republicans tried a vote in the Senate to repeal Obamacare in 2017, and had they been successful, about twenty million people would have lost their healthcare, with absolutely no alternative to replace it. Could that be what she meant? And if twenty eight million Americans have no healthcare for some reason, who’s fault is that? Who has been president of the United States for the past two and a half years?
Kellyanne continued, “You know what they’re mad about? They want to put a big roll of masking tape over my mouth.” Now you’re talking, Kellyanne. Before going on a final, desperate, non sequitur rant about how unfairly conservatives have been treated by “Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington” (CREW), Kellyanne had this utterly baffling bit of doublethink to add: “Even if the Hatch Act applies, our position is we haven’t violated it.”
It now turns out that Kellyanne is going to disobey a subpoena to appear before Congress to answer for her Hatch Act violations. I dislike Kellyanne Conway in particular because she is the worst kind of person, a person who knows the difference between right and wrong and sells out to evil for money, power and fame. We know she knows better because she used to do commentary for the major networks before Trump hired her, and she told us what we all knew, that Trump is a liar and a conman and a thief. I personally do not believe that Hell exists, but every now and again someone like Kellyanne Conway comes along and makes me wish it did.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.