A True Photo of Mitch McConnell

[Kid Berwyn]

[leftstreet]

1. Indeed

[Kid Berwyn]

4. The Misadventures of Moscow Mitch

Intel Committee Report Raises Questions About McConnell’s Role to End Sanctions on Company Identified as “Proxy for the Kremlin”

by Berry Craig
Kentucky Democratic Party, August 19, 2020

Frankfort, KY — The latest report from the bipartisan Senate Special Committee on Intelligence, which details Russian interference in the 2016 election, includes information that raises new questions about McConnell’s role in a troubled economic development project in Eastern Kentucky.

The company in question, Rusal, was founded by Oleg Deripaska and is the major investor in an aluminum company, Braidy Industries, which has struggled to start operations in northeast Kentucky for more than three years. Deripaska is identified in the report as a close adviser to Russian president Vladimir Putin and involved in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

But it’s the committee’s declaration for the first time that Rusal is still believed to be directly involved in Russian government actions that directly contradicts McConnell’s explanation about his support for lifting sanctions on Rusal in 2019. This new context brings into question McConnell’s role in sanctions being dropped for Rusal and Rusal’s subsequent investment in Braidy shortly thereafter. Yesterday morning, McConnell “applauded” the committee’s work.

A section of the report titled “Deripaska’s involvement in Other Russian Active Measures” 
identifies Rusal as one of Deripaska’s companies considered to be “proxies for the Kremlin, including for Russian government influence efforts, economic measures and diplomatic relations” (page 153).

Sanctions were first placed on Deripaska in April 2018, but were lifted in January 2019. The Treasury Department lifted the sanctions after a bill to keep sanctions on Deripaska and Rusal fell just three votes short in the Senate. At the time, McConnell called the bill a “political stunt” despite bipartisan support.

SNIP...

In August 2019 Time reported that one of Rusal’s major investors, Len Blavatnik, had donated millions of dollars to McConnell’s Senate Majority Fund PAC and the NRSC.

And in January 2020, after a shake-up in leadership, another McConnell donor, Charles Price, became chairman of Braidy.

Source: https://ky.aflcio.org/news/misadventures-moscow-mitch-intel-committee-report-raises-questions

[Blues Heron]

2. What a pig

[Kid Berwyn]

5. The Gravedigger of American Democracy: McConnell as Hindenburg

You know who as Hitler.



A leading Holocaust historian just seriously compared the US to Nazi Germany

“If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.”

By Zack Beauchamp@[e-mail] Oct 5, 2018, 11:21am EDT

Excerpt...

Browning’s essay covers many topics, ranging from Trump’s “America First” foreign policy — a phrase most closely associated with a group of prewar American Nazi sympathizers — to the role of Fox News as a kind of privatized state propaganda office. But the most interesting part of his argument is the comparison between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Paul von Hindenburg, the German leader who ultimately handed power over to Hitler. Here’s how Browning summarizes the history:

Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

Because an ever-shrinking base of support for traditional conservatism made it impossible to carry out their authoritarian revision of the constitution, Hindenburg and the old right ultimately made their deal with Hitler and installed him as chancellor. Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.

Snip...

McConnell, in Browning’s eyes, is doing something similar — taking whatever actions he can to attain power, including breaking the system for judicial nominations (cough cough, Merrick Garland) and empowering a dangerous demagogue under the delusion that he can be fully controlled:

Continues...

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/5/17940610/trump-hitler-history-historian

[Kid Berwyn]

3. Biden: McConnell stopped Obama from calling out Russians

by Eric-Isaac Dovere
Politico, 23 January 2018

Joe Biden said Tuesday that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stopped the Obama administration from speaking out about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign by refusing to sign on to a bipartisan statement of condemnation.

That moment, the former Democratic vice president said, made him think “the die had been cast ... this was all about the political play.”

He expressed regret, in hindsight, given the intelligence he says came in after Election Day. “Had we known what we knew three weeks later, we may have done something more,” Biden, a potential 2020 presidential candidate, said.

Biden was speaking at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, a block from his old office at the Old Executive Office Building, to discuss his new article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, “How to Stand Up to the Kremlin.”

Biden said he and former President Barack Obama worried that without a united front of bipartisanship, speaking out before the election would undermine the legitimacy of the election and American institutions in a way that would play into the Russians’ larger ambitions.

Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/23/mitch-mcconnell-russia-obama-joe-biden-359531

So Catch-22, they can cheat and win, but we must play by the rules and lose.