Mitch McConnell strikes again
Mitch McConnell has done it again. Over the weekend he seemingly endorsed the idea of deadly violence against his 2020 Democratic opponent Amy McGrath by tweeting an image of her tombstone, listing election day in 2020 as the day of her “death.” It wasn’t lost on anyone that McConnell did this while the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings were going on. Now McConnell is endorsing the idea of violence against a political opponent yet again.
Mitch McConnell posted the offensive “RIP” imagery from his @Team_Mitch account. Shortly thereafter, photos surfaced of several young men wearing “Team Mitch” t-shirts while physically and sexually assaulting a cardboard cut-out of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She then used Twitter to publicly ask McConnell if these young men worked for him, and if McConnell was funding their mock violence against her.
This prompted McConnell’s 2020 campaign to release a statement which said this in part: “these young men are not campaign staff, they are high schoolers.” In other words, boys will be boys. It’s the same rhetoric that the Republican Senate used to justify the sexual assault that then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused of having committed in his youth. Interestingly, some photos of these young men showed them holding cut-outs of Kavanaugh’s face over their own faces.
The bottom line: by writing off the actions of these men as merely a product of their youth, Mitch McConnell is endorsing the mock violence that they were staging against a Congresswoman. If anyone were willing to give McConnell the benefit of the doubt over his image depicting Amy McGrath’s death, McConnell is leaving no doubt where he really stands on these things. It’s time for him to resign.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report