A new profile reinforces the notion that the Senate majority leader has no political conviction beyond the will to power.
In a truly enlightened society, someone would throw Jane Mayer a parade. The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent is as good as it gets at combining deep reporting and solid, readable prose. Her recent profile of Mitch McConnell demonstrates all of this once again and, in addition, it contains one of the most amazing quotes about a political figure—hell, about a human being not currently incarcerated in a SuperMax facility—I’ve ever read. Mayer speaks to someone who’s known McConnell for years, and apparently tells this person that, in all her research, Mayer hadn’t been able to find any animating principle behind McConnell’s political career. And this person tells her:
Give up. You can look and look for something more in him, but it isn’t there. I wish I could tell you that there is some secret thing that he really believes in, but he doesn’t.
That’s one of those quotes for which you make sure you save your notebook. Mitch McConnell, it tells us, has managed to enable a criminally negligent, criminally incompetent, and (likely) criminally criminal president* because Mitch McConnell is a vacant, soulless, unprincipled goon whose only allegiance is to his own power and to those forces in politics that allow him to maintain it.
