Mitch McConnell wants to clear the air based on my earlier RedState post. In the post, quoting Yahoo! News, I noted McConnell said, “When it came to Obamacare, we gave it everything we have, everything we have, and we just lost.”In response to this morning’s post, Mitch McConnell’s press team sent out an email blast with the transcript of the speech. They reached out to my office insisting I fix a quote from a news story that itself has not changed the quote. Nonetheless, the McConnell team insists the actual quote is, “We gave it everything we had, and we just barely lost the legislative fight.”Okay, but what else did Mitch McConnell say. From his own transcript:

Obamacare should be repealed root and branch. And we’re not backing down from this fight. We’ve taken the same approach to Obamacare. We gave it everything we had, and we just barely lost the legislative fight. The Supreme Court ruling last summer was another blow. But I can’t just stand by and look at that assault on liberty behind me and do nothing.

He immediately then declared, pointing to the rules and regulations of Obamacare, “Ladies and Gentlemen: if there were ever a symbol of what we’re fighting against, that tower is it. And grounded in the principles that unite us, we’ll fight this and every other assault on liberty that the Left throws at us — until we restore the American ideal.”Pay close attention to that. McConnell had next to him, as a prop, the rules and regulations enacted under Obamacare. His prop was not the law itself, but rather the rules and regulations stemming from the law.Mitch McConnell is playing three card monty with the Republican base and thinks we are foolish enough to believe his distractions. He thinks we can pick fights now on regulations. But the regulations will keep coming and the Senate Democrats will keep blocking any and all repeals unless Mitch McConnell actually picks a fight on Obamacare itself — not the underlying rules and regulations.I wonder how many people actually think he had the 2,000 page law next to him, instead of the regulations.The only existing way to defund Obamacare is to fight on the continuing resolution. Unless Mitch McConnell has the testicular fortitude to shut down the government until the Democrats agree to defund Obamacare, he can bluster all he wants and spin all he wants, but the result is the same. Mitch McConnell has no will to fight to kill Obamacare. He’s only willing to use its rules and regulations and props to claim we’ll fight on that ground instead of the ground we should be fighting on — defunding Obamacare itself.That McConnell went out of his way to re-spin his well packaged nonsense into something more than it is suggests he is really and truly scared of the Republican base, but is too much a creature of Washington to really fight. All he knows is spin, throw red meat, and then blame someone else for his failures.