McConnell: Bad for Republicans, bad for the country

The Friday Letter / #509 / Sept. 9, 2022

This is the kind of U.S. Senator who doesn't threaten Mitch McConnell: John Cornyn of Texas, who said on the Senate floor,

“I don't want us to pass a bill for the purpose of checking a box. I want to make sure we do something useful, something that is capable of becoming a law, something that will have the potential to save lives. I am happy to report as a result of the hard work of a number of senators in this chamber, that we've made some serious progress. So soon, very soon, not soon enough for me, we will see the text of the bipartisan legislation that will help keep our children and our communities safe.”

Cornyn was talking about the gun confiscation bill that he, McConnell, and 13 other Republican senators voted for: Blunt, Burr, Capito, Cassidy, Collins, Ernst, Graham, Murkowski, Portman, Romney, Tillis, Toomey, and Young.

Thankfully Tillis, Blunt, Burr, and Toomey read the tea leaves and chose not to run for re-election.

Here is the kind of Republican senate candidate who keeps McConnell awake at night: Blake Masters, aiming to unseat Mark Kelly in Arizona.

“We can never amnesty any illegal alien, period. If your interaction with our country is to break its immigration laws, you will never get amnesty, you will never become a United States citizen. That is a line in the sand. We will never cross it.”

Masters, Herschel Walker, Kelly Tshibaka, J.D. Vance, Adam Laxalt. These are not your father's Republicans. They are the America Firsters and it is absolutely without doubt mandatory that they be elected in November.

Some of the candidates are not perfect. Trump purists may cringe that Mehmet Oz, running in Pennsylvania against a known Marxist, recently said he would not overturn the state's 2020 electoral votes. Look at his opponent, who wants to shut down police departments, empty the prisons, and legalize marijuana. He has never held a job outside of politics and lived off his parents well into his 40s.

A potential challenger to McConnell?

Interviewed Tuesday night on Charlie Kirk's radio program, U.S. Senator Rick Scott (Fla.), sternly warned Republican senators, challengers and their campaigns that buying into Mitch McConnell's pessimism about GOP prospects for November is nothing short of treason.

That's a strong term, treason, much overused and more typical of how the left describes anyone who disagrees with them on anything. But Scott is rightly alarmed because – he didn't say this but knows it just as you and I do – McConnell is the wrong leader for Republicans: corrupt, weak, servile to the left, and too comfortable in his cushy job of minority leader where the perks are limitless and the mandate to deliver is nil.

His wife's business dealings with China are no more defensible than Hunter and Joe Biden's.

If it's an unfair rap on McConnell that he would rather keep minority status than see Donald Trump re-elected, let him explain why.

“Unfortunately, many of the very people responsible for losing the Senate last cycle are now trying to stop us from winning the majority this time by trash-talking our Republican candidates,” Scott wrote in the Washington Examiner. “It's an amazing act of cowardice, and ultimately, it's treasonous to the conservative cause.”

McConnell, fearing the rise of constitutional street fighters and Trump supporters, is trying to quell enthusiasm for Republican chances. But even if Alaskans wisely retire Democrat sympathizer and anti-Trumpster Lisa Murkowski while the rest of the country replaces retiring establishment Republicans with conservatives, the Senate will still be stuck with a liberal legislative majority with Republicans like Romney, Collins, Sasse, Cassidy, and Cornyn who think MAGA stands for Making America Gutless Again.

If Republicans retake the Senate, conservatives must try to remove McConnell, even as their chances are slim given the money McConnell gets to dole out to the campaigns. Too many of them are beholden.

The need to set priorities

Joe Kent is running for Congress in Washington's Third District. He ousted 5-term Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler, whose conservative rating by Heritage Action for America is a respectable 82 but only 65 by the American Conservative Union.

A combat veteran and former Green Beret officer and a single parent whose wife was killed in combat, he is deeply concerned that Republicans are fighting the wrong battles that will cost control of both houses if they don't get their act together. He says beating the Ukraine drum while ignoring the nation's destruction wrought by our open southern border will end in disaster.

“If any of these representatives feel so passionately about how we have to go and save Ukrainians and provide them with lethal aid and continue to push this escalation,” he said on Tucker Carlson Tonight this week, “they need to go back to their districts and tell the American people, tell their constituents, what they are asking them to do and what the ramifications could potentially be. Why do foreign nations always come first? Why do we secure their borders and not our own?”

Carlson responded that if Republican candidates talk about the issues that matter, they will win. His example was the 25 of 30 DeSantis-backed school board candidates who won in Florida because they listened to parents fed up with what the left is doing to public education. Five of the state's largest school boards flipped from leftist to conservative control in the non-partisan August election.

We asked Mr. Kent to elaborate on his comments but did not get a response.

Neither did we get a response from Michael Anderson, a recent Republican convert who is running for House Seat 99 in the North Carolina General Assembly. It's a solid Democrat district in Mecklenburg, but Anderson is unfazed. Anderson is a black attorney of humble roots – he grew up in a biracial single-parent home – who got pushed just a bit too far by his Big Tech employer in requiring employees to get a Wuhan virus vaccination or be fired.

“I thought we ought to do something to fight against these policies and funnel people toward politicians who were freedom-minded,” he said. His opponent is the Democrat incumbent, a leftist who voted for police defunding in Charlotte.

Polls claim Democrat fortunes are rising, but it's important to remember that outside of Trafalgar and Rasmussen, most polls are push polls, that is, designed to ramp up enthusiasm for Democrat candidates. People like Kent and Anderson are the new face of the America First wing – the controlling wing – of the Republican Party. Polls, the corporate media, and establishment Republicans are lagging behind in understanding this.

These types understand what Republicans must do to take control of Congress and shut down the nonsense. They have their finger on the nation's pulse. They know that voters want something done about the open southern border, inflation, government-corporate censorship, capitulation to China, surrender of our energy independence and its resultant national security risk, boots on the neck of small business, and the woke's destruction of our culture.

Democrats, of course, want to make this election about abortion, climate change – and Trump.

Trump couldn't be happier. He loves the attention, and that is part of the problem. Trump can't save the country unless he gets re-elected, and as usual, he seems to be doing everything he can to prevent that.

Short takes on the news

The government sent $1.3 billion in stimulus payments to more than 1.1 million prison inmates, the Washington Free Beacon reports. In a letter to Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb), the IRS acknowledged that 163,000 of the recipients are serving life without the possibility of parole. . .

Thank goodness for gun control. Two brothers wanted for stabbing 10 victims to death and injuring at least another 18 were both found dead this week, but RCMP now believes only one of them performed the stabbings. The CBC said the stabbings took place in at least 13 locations, including a Cree Indian reservation. The manhunt extended to Alberta and Manitoba. . .

Touché for the ages. After a newsreader for KABC-TV in Los Angeles reported that the station's power had gone out under Gov. Newsom's rolling blackout policy, the Oil & Gas Workers Association sent a sympathy note, sort of, The Blaze reports: “Get somebody to bring you 5 gallons of wind turbine.” Ouch! . . .

Bringing us together. Charlie Kirk listened closely to Biden's Make America Pathetic Already (MAPA) speech last week and offers the following summary of references:

China 0.
Crime 0.
Inflation 0.
Fentanyl 0.
The border 0.
Charlottesville 1.
January 6, 2.
Insurrection 3.
Donald Trump 3.
Extremism 7.
Violence 10.
MAGA 13.
Republicans 16.

Ivermectin: still on FDA's no-no list

A peer-reviewed study of 88,000 subjects in Brazil found that regular use of Ivermectin as a preventive reduced Wuhan virus deaths by 92 percent, The Blaze reports. A board-certified clinical endocrinologist and researcher conducted the study. Hospital admissions dropped by 100 percent.

In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration is supported by social media censors in opposing Ivermectin for humans, seeing it as a threat to state-sponsored and taxpayer funded vaccinations. A lawsuit by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana seeks to discover the identity of administration officials it says have been holding weekly censorship meetings with social media giants Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. They have taken down postings that support ivermectin.

The FDA says ivermectin is unsafe because a different form of the drug is used to treat parasites in animals. Its warning implies that the veterinary and human versions are the same, which they are not.

A Newsweek piece last Saturday tried to ridicule ivermectin by noting it is supported by a professional mixed martial arts artist and Trump supporter who is not involved in medical care or pharmaceutical research. The article did not mention the peer-reviewed Brazilian study.

Revisiting bad boy Brett Kavanaugh

Mollie Hemingway has a very funny piece at The Federalist meant to remind us of just how horrible a person is Brett Kavanaugh. Titled “Don’t Let The Washington Post Get Away With Memory-Holing Its Anti-Kavanaugh Campaign,” it reports some of his worst abuses posted by Twitter cynics:

“He neglected to add the plus 4 zip codes on all his Christmas cards,” “Didn’t rewind a VHS before taking it back to Blockbuster,” and “Sources say that Kavanaugh once failed to turn off his brights for an oncoming vehicle.”

It gets worse. The Onion ran a piece with this headline: “Kavanaugh Nomination Falters after Washington Post Publishes Shocking Editorial Claiming He Forgot His Daughter's Piano Recital.” These stories are at least as believable as the Post's support of Christine Blasey Ford's rape claims that turned out to be wholly fabricated. It reminds us of very serious charges made against Vice President Dan Quayle that he once tore off a mattress tag in violation of federal law.

Recommended reading

“How America's Elites Decided Vicious Anti-White Racism Is a Good Thing”
John Murowski at The Federalist

This racism isn't coming from dropouts and losers, Murowski argues. It comes from successful professionals who have reached the highest levels of respectability. Excerpt:

A scholarly article in a peer-reviewed academic journal described “whiteness” as “a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility.” The author, Donald Moss, had also presented his paper as a continuing education course or licensed therapists who would presumably treat patients with this condition. The paper advises: “There is not yet a permanent cure."

“The World Wants No Part of Woke, But it's Glad We Do”
Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness

China can likely sink any $12 billion American aircraft carrier and its 5,000 diverse “they/them” crew that dares to venture into the Taiwan Strait. Excerpt:

The Pentagon and CIA put our recruitment videos that sound like kindergarten diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. Yet the military is less eager to explain why the United States met utter humiliation in Afghanistan or why the army only has met about 50 percent of its scheduled recruitment targets.

Few date to attribute declining morale, inept strategic thinking, and anemic recruitment to the stereotyping and targeting of middle-class white males, Soviet-style workshops, and diversity, equity, and inclusion mind conditioning.

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