Rachel Maddow just nailed it

| 7:00 pm EST January 21, 2020
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Over the past week I’ve been pointing out that, regardless of what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell might want us to believe, he’s not in control of the Senate impeachment trial. I’ve been growing a bit lonely while waiting for other pundits out there to come around to the same conclusion. But now Rachel Maddow, one of the very best in the business, appears to see it the same way I do.

Mitch McConnell uses a consistent strategy. He announces or leaks some fantasy of his. He claims he has the votes for it. He sits back and enjoys watching the media repeat his words as if they were fact for a few days. Then he quietly admits that particular fantasy isn’t going to happen, because he never did have the votes for it. Then he floats some new fantasy about how he’s going to conduct the trial, and the cycle starts over. He forces everyone to focus on fighting back against the imaginary scenarios he floats, instead of fighting over things that are actually real and possible.

This is a clever strategy on McConnell’s part, but it only works when the media is complicit in parroting his fantasies, and when the public is complicit in believing it. After McConnell predictably had to abandon his twelve-hour-a-day impeachment hearing fantasy today, Rachel Maddow tweeted this: “Senator McConnell said he had the votes to pass the resolution distributed last night. Clearly, he didn’t — or he wouldn’t have had to make last-minute changes to it today. Just worth keeping in mind in terms of his future assertions about what votes he says he has.”

She’s right, of course. But then again, she’s the smartest person on television. Now that she’s pointing out Mitch McConnell is wearing no clothes when it comes to these head-fakes, hopefully other television pundits will start to do the same. We all know that McConnell is a consistent liar. We need to stop making the mistake of suddenly believing him whenever he confidently announces that he’s going to pull off something scary. He always says he has the votes – especially when he doesn’t have the votes.