“I am No Less American than Mitch McConnell”
Quote in title by Senate Candidate Charles Booker.
I pulled this partial of a commentary defining what Michael Kinsley was doing at Slate and what he created at Slate’s “The Fray.” I came to The Fray and the Best of the Fray at its peak. It was lively place with many intelligent writers across both aisles commenting. Tom Sullivan brought back memories of The Fray.
It was modernized several times and much of the content which was supposed to be kept was erased. The comments section is not the same.
Tom Sullivan as posted by Digsby on at Hullabaloo . . .
“Michael Kinsley, the one-time co-host of “Crossfire” and founding editor of Slate, began dropping off the radar (or at least, off mine) over the last decade. His Parkinson’s diagnosis had something to do with that, as it would. Kinsley’s Twitter account went cold about the time in 2016 when he published “Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide.”
But among the witticisms Kinsley will be remembered for is the Kinsley gaffe, a form of Freudian slip: ‘A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.’
Rather than use Kinsley gaffe, the common turn of phrase of late is the clunkier ‘saying the quiet part out loud.’ What a shame.
The occasion for this mini-retrospective is a Kinsley gaffe committed Wednesday by Senate Minority Leader and self-described ‘Grim Reaper,’ Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, after his 50-member caucus unanimously refused (with help from two Democrats) to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.”
I guess this is what Senators Krystal Sinema and Joe Manchin support also. Excellent content for my letter to Sinema.
Doing the google, Mitch McConnell has a lengthy history of ‘walking back’ foolish or offensive comments. So, maybe he will do so again. Maybe has just grown tired of apologizing. Maybe he is just trying to get back into Trump’s ‘good graces’. Does any ‘American’ in Kentucky care?
Every single of of his voters feel the exact same way.
Pretending that he was not just comparing the turnout of African American voters as a subset of American voters obscures the fact that the 2 to 4 percent difference is NOT negligible and that he is justifying suppressing the vote because he claims (incorrectly) that it is not currently being suppressed.
Arne:
That is true. If you only have a certain number of polling stations, boxes, etc. and they are distant; a voter may not be able to get to either, etc. The Gov. may not have purposely done it; but, they will not correct or improve it either. Not a direct form of suppression.
There’s ‘reality’ and there’s ‘alternative reality’.
Is one more valid than the other? Hmmm.
I suppose there is nothing wrong with using a mis-speak as an excuse for hysteria. Everybody does it. I have no doubt McConnel is in favor of suppressing the vote, but I am sure that “Black Americans turnout is the same as Americans” was nothing worse than a typo, albeit perhaps a Freudian slip.
What worries me is that jumping on a slip of the tongue convinces the other side that we are unreasonable. Just as, of course, they do the same thing.
Nothing gained. I think we might do better by thinking up ways to get around laws designed to suppress votes from voters they don’t like. Of course it might be bettre to keep quiet about this so as not to spoil the surprise.