I understand the bind Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell finds himself in. He’s got a competitive primary, he mood of the country is sour, and he doesn’t have a record — other than the usual earmarks he’s brought home like the $3 billion lock and dam project included in the bill to re-open the government — to run on. He’s woofs about some three dozen ridiculous and ineffectual votes that have been taken to defund Obamacare but behind the scenes he has collaborated to torpedo real efforts to fight that law.

Now he’s doing what any garden variety thug would do in similar circumstances. Losing the argument on its merits, he’s going after the political consulting firm that is working with the Senate Conservatives Fund to hold McConnell accountability to the GOP voters in Kentucky.

In a warning shot to outside conservative groups, the National Republican Senatorial Committee this week informed a prominent Republican advertising firm that it would not receive any contracts with the campaign committee because of its work with a group that targets incumbent Senate Republicans.

Even more striking, a senior official at the committee called individual Republican Senate campaigns and other party organizations this week and urged them not to hire the firm, Jamestown Associates, in an effort to punish them for working for the Senate Conservatives Fund, a group founded by Jim DeMint, then a South Carolina senator, that is trying to unseat Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, and some other incumbents up for re-election next year whom it finds insufficiently conservative.

“We’re not going to do business with people who profit off of attacking Republicans,” said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for the committee. “Purity for profit is a disease that threatens the Republican Party.”

This is not the action of a leader. It isn’t even the action of a man of quality. It is the action of a spoiled brat and a man, and I use the term loosely, who is in love with the perks of his position, not with the good that he could be accomplishing. The reason Mitch McConnell is facing a primary challenge is because he has been complicit in creating most of the problems we are facing today. He has no one to blame but himself. That he would have his Kmart mafiosi threaten a consulting firm just indicates how useless he and the National Republican Senatorial Committee are. They have time to attack conservatives but none to fight Harry Reid.

Mitch McConnell needs to go. Yesterday.