I’LL BE BACK, Mitch McConnell finally announced yesterday. Well, sort of.
“As much as it frustrates me, this process takes time,” the 84-year-old senator wrote.
The 600-word statement, expressing his intent to return to Congress at some undisclosed point, was his first since his (also undisclosed) hospitalization a month ago. It was accompanied by a photo of him on a hospital bed, clutching a copy of Sunday’s Washington Post — the kind of picture that kidnappers use to establish proof-of-life.
Which I guess makes McConnell the hostage-taker? It must feel that way to the over 4 million Kentuckians who have been without half their Senate representation for the past month.
McConnell’s statement is a masterclass in political manipulation. But it’s also proof that the public demands for transparency are starting to work.
Recall what actually prompted the public outrage. The emergency dispatch audio published last month by independent journalist Deseree Townsend made three specific factual assertions: “cardiac arrest,” an “unconscious” patient, and “CPR in progress.”
Now, despite the audio, McConnell says “I didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke.” But nowhere in the letter does he address the cardiac arrest.
Swapping out “cardiac arrest” for “heart attack” is a clever move because most people use the two terms interchangeably. They are not. A heart attack is a plumbing problem — a blocked artery starving the heart of blood, with the patient usually awake and in pain. Cardiac arrest is a much more dangerous electrical problem — the heart stops pumping, the patient collapses, and death follows in minutes without CPR.
So you can truthfully deny a heart attack while having had the more lethal thing.
The letter goes on to deny a litany of ailments that nobody really alleged: no broken bones, no concussion, no tumors, no hemorrhages. All of this gives the impression of disclosure while revealing nothing.
He admits that he was “briefly unconscious,” was hospitalized, and developed “a mild case of pneumonia.” The cause, per the attached note from the Office of the Attending Physician, was a fall attributed to his post-polio condition — one of several this year.
We’ve seen this movie before. When Susan Collins was finally forced to address her visible tremor in May, she reached for the term “benign essential tremor” — the “benign” being a bit of vestigial branding that neurologists have largely dropped, precisely because patients say it minimizes the often debilitating reality of the condition.
The gerontocracy’s play, when pressed on their obvious decrepitude, is minimal transparency. It is a Washington battle plan that the conventional news media always parrot. They did so in Collins’ case, with major outlets incorrectly using the word “benign” in their headlines.
It’s easy to feel cynical about McConnell’s response. But it’s important to note how genuinely extraordinary this is: the mothball mafia Don himself, who ran the Republican Senate with an iron fist for eighteen years, was forced to say something and release that humiliating photo due to public pressure. And I guarantee you that a famously arrogant prick like McConnell did not want to do that even.
“My impression of men of that age is that they’re a little private when it comes to their health,” former McConnell aide Scott Jennings told CNN last week.
McConnell says as much in his statement, swerving into self-pity about how his generation “hesitate[s] to share the vulnerability that comes with growing older.”
“Even in the public eye, I feel that same instinct — I can’t help it,” the Senator adds.
Yeah, well I can’t help clowning on you mummies. And from the looks of social media, countless other Americans feel the same way. For the first time that I can remember, the whole respect-your-elders routine Congress always falls back on isn’t working anymore.
Don’t let all the cynicism fool you: from McConnell to Collins, congressional leaders *hate *having to even briefly perform accountability to the public, which they regard as pesky vermin.
McConnell’s bow to public pressure here was a quick one. But it’s the first from him I’ve ever seen. Now let’s make him bend the knee.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
