Hardball

On that day when Obama informed the leadership of both parties of Russian interference in the election and Mitch McConnell’s response was to threaten to consider it a partisan issue should Obama go public, on that day Obama should have assured McConnell that if he did make it a partisan issue, he’d be awakened the very next morning by the D.C. police with a dead hooker in his bed, with every news outlet in America, both print and broadcast, already on the sidewalk outside ready to film him being lead to the police cruiser.

Because it is that level of partisanship that got us here. I’ve been saying for more than a decade now that the Democrats seem to think they are playing a gentlemanly game of badminton and the GOP knows they are actually in a no-holds-barred street fight. The rules the Dems love so much are just as effective a weapon as a broken bottle and equally disposable.

And like a street fight, there are no referees, no cosmic scoreboard where “moral” victories (3 million more votes!) are chalked up; you either win or you die. Al Gore may have won, but the GOP took office. And multi-millionaire John Kerry gave up without a fight, plus $200 of my money in his war chest.

Win or die. Take office and enact policy or become a historical footnote.

McConnell understands this is an actual, visceral fight to the death and has been since Saint Ronnie decoupled truthfulness from public service. I don’t think Obama ever fully understood that his enemies are not men of good conscience with whom he happens to disagree over policy but rather they are hate-filled monsters who actually want to actually destroy him and will tell any lie and will not hesitate to fully weaponize even the most innocuous sentiment in service of eradicating him simply for being black.