What do senior Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and Iran’s new Supreme Leader have in common?
Not a lot, except that both men are currently being hidden from public view – and nobody seems to know for sure if either Mitch or Mojtaba Khamenei is alive or dead.
Iran is a brutal theocratic regime where the truth tends to be suppressed. America is meant to be a free and democratic society. Yet the 84-year-old Senator for Kentucky has been in hospital since June 14 and rumors are spreading that he is brain-dead, on life-support, or possibly worse, and the party leadership appears to be covering up the facts about his health.
We can expect this to continue at least until August 3 – because, under Kentucky law, if McConnell can make it to that date without being declared unfit for office, his senatorial seat will not be contested in a special election. Grand Old Party bigwigs would rather McConnell is not replaced by a more MAGA Republican candidate. And so the party leadership keeps insisting that all is well.
Leader Thune spoke with Senator McConnell yesterday by phone. They had a lengthy and substantive conversation that covered a variety of topics, including national security,’ said a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Monday.
“Senator Barrasso and Senator McConnell had a lengthy conversation early this afternoon,” added a spokesman for Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso. “Their phone call lasted roughly 20 minutes. They caught up about the latest news impacting Senate races, the Graham Platner scandal, and the recent Supreme Court ruling on coordinated spending limits.”
And Scott Jennings, the former McConnell staffer turned CNN talking head, insisted he’d spoken “to my old friend Mitch McConnell this morning … for just shy of 20 minutes … about Iran, Ukraine, the unfolding situation in Maine, my visit to the TR Presidential Library, and even a little bit of Senate history. I told him we want to see him back at work as soon as possible.”
A spokesman for McConnell, meanwhile, declared that Mitch “continues to improve and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters while the Senate is out of session.”
The trouble is, nobody seems to believe these testimonies. Outgoing Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie summed up the mood with a parody tweet on X this week: “I spoke to McConnell for about 20 minutes this morning. He said we should end the war with Iran, quit giving aid to Israel, stop spying on Americans without a warrant, and he’s really sorry about how my primary turned out.”
McConnell, who has held his Kentucky seat for 41 years, is now a not-quite-living symbol of America’s decrepit gerontocracy. In 2023, as Republican Senate leader, he had two “freezing”
episodes, when he just stopped talking for about 30 seconds before being escorted away by aides. Now it appears he has suffered some sort of grave cardiac episode – news outlets have reported that he was found unconscious and required resuscitation – and is being kept out of the public eye. Democratic Governor Andy Beshear has written to McConnell’s office demanding a health update, but says he has not received any reassurances. And yet McConnell carries on, still officially representing nearly five million Kentuckians on Capitol Hill, even though he may never return to Washington.
Since the 1990s, various American politicians have put forward legislation to impose congressional term limits to avoid such absurd scenarios. But such a reform would require a constitutional amendment and a two-thirds majority vote, which has not yet been reached. The gerontocrats may be corrupt, dysfunctional, even dying – yet somehow they survive.
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