+ The Daily Beast via MSN: Mitch McConnell’s team fuels health mystery with cryptic update [posted Aug. 27]

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Mitch McConnell’s Hometown [Louisville, KY.] Newspaper Publishes Scathing ‘Pre-Obituary’ of the ‘Not Yet Departed’

A Kentucky reporter who covered McConnell for decades argued that the 84-year-old senator is “every bit the detestable figure that” President Richard Nixon was

Excerpt from People, published July 23rd:

The scathing reflection on McConnell’s career was written by columnist Joseph Gerth, who has covered Kentucky politics at Louisville’s The Courier Journal since 1988 — three years into the Louisville native’s first of seven Senate terms.

“Unlike Nixon, McConnell never paid for his sins that have damaged our nation’s trust in government, destroyed the country’s ability to have meaningful dialogue and cemented our nation’s politics as an arena in which winning is the only thing that matters,” wrote Gerth, who spent a decade as the paper’s chief political reporter, in an op-ed on Wednesday, July 22.

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Gerth wrote in his Wednesday [July 22] column that he was sparked to write his evaluation of McConnell’s life’s work after seeing pushback to criticisms of the late South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham following the 71-year-old Republican’s sudden death on July 11.

“That got me thinking about Sen. Mitch McConnell, who was rumored to be dead or on life support or in a coma or whatever and was the odds-on favorite to beat Graham to the gates of hell in the days before Graham’s death,” Gerth wrote. “And, so with McConnell allegedly on the mend, I figured I’d go ahead and tell you what I think about McConnell now — when no one can complain, ‘How dare you write that about a dead guy?’ ”

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Gerth also noted that McConnell once boasted he voted for Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964 over the opposition to civil rights by Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee.

Yet as a senator decades later, the columnist wrote, McConnell was the architect of the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court that has now undone much of the legal achievements of the civil rights movement that McConnell once claimed to belong to — including attending the 1963 March on Washington where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

“He had more guts as a young man than he had as an old man,” Gerth wrote. “It seems somehow fitting for the ultimate shape-shifter, who wrote about accompanying Sen. John Sherman Cooper to see Johnson sign the Voting Rights Act into law, that the court he created was the court that struck down the last remaining significant provision.”

The Kentucky Republican’s “biggest failing may be his embrace of a president who he believes is stupid and who he believes led an attempt to overthrow the United States’ government on Jan. 6, 2021,” Gerth continued.

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Beyond McConnell deciding to once again support a president he accused of triggering “a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election,” Gerth noted the senator has also tolerated President Donald Trump’s racist remarks towards his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.

“And that is the legacy of Mitch McConnell,” Gerth wrote. “He ends his career adopting the anti-civil rights positions Barry Goldwater supported, handed to him by a despised and distrusted Supreme Court that he created.”

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