![]() In July, McConnell delivered a tirade on the Senate floor denouncing criticism of him (by me and others) as a threat to America's survival. McConnell's campaign brushed off both, saying the tombstones were a light-hearted homage to a cartoon, and the young men were not campaign staff.īut Team Mitch takes a less tolerant view of speech directed at him. In another contemporaneous incident, young men (apparently volunteers) wearing "Team Mitch" campaign T-shirts posed in an Instagram photo groping and choking a cardboard cutout of Rep. Hours after the El Paso shooting in August, his campaign tweeted a photo of fake tombstones bearing the name of McConnell's Democratic Senate challenger Amy McGrath, among others. He and his aides have certainly asserted their own rights to make objectionable speech. That is hardly the recipe for a free and informed society." "It doesn't mean one has to agree with those opinions, but no one is served by trapping oneself and others in cocoons of ignorance. "Hearing criticisms of one's beliefs and learning the beliefs of others is simply training for life in a democratic society," he said in June 2017. He has, to his credit, defended flag burning, saying, "in this country we have a long tradition of respecting unpleasant speech." He also has championed free speech on the Senate floor. His money-is-speech argument has prevailed at the Supreme Court, causing the current flood of unlimited dark money in politics and the unparalleled vitriol it injected. ![]() McConnell's view that the speech he dislikes is defamatory clashes with his professed First Amendment devotion. He led the effort to help a Russian oligarch's business evade sanctions, and when that business then made a substantial investment in Kentucky, former McConnell aides lobbied for it. He has blocked virtually every meaningful bill to prevent a repeat of Russia's 2016 election interference. ![]() But the allegations underlying Moscow Mitch are specific and well-substantiated. Oh? McCarthyism, by definition, is a type of defamation using indiscriminate allegations based on unsubstantiated charges. "You know, I can laugh about things like the Grim Reaper, but calling me Moscow Mitch is over the top." On radio host (and Washington Post contributor) Hugh Hewitt's show this week, McConnell renewed his complaint that calling him Moscow Mitch is unacceptable - "modern-day McCarthyism," he said. ![]()
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