Is there a good reason to vote for Mitch McConnell?

Today, when I read the link trolling article by The Daily Beast’s Ben Jacobs headlined Will Tea Partiers Sink Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky Senate Reelection Bid? Betteridge’s law of headlines came to mind. This axiom states: “Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.“

McConnell will almost certainly win his race. Not because he’s a good campaigner, or a competent Senator, or offers wise counsel to either his caucus or his nation, or because he deserves to, or even because he’s a gentleman but because this is will be a GOP wave year and his opponent, Kentucky Secretary of State Allison Lundergan Grimes is a left-wing radical who is out of step with Kentucky and her followers are unhinged cretins.

Though McConnell has shown a consistent lead of about three points, he remains mired below 50% (around 48%) and libertarian David Patterson is claiming about 8% of the vote. In short, he will win but he will win with less than a majority and he will win ugly.

Which brings us back to the question asked by the Jacobs article:

Scott Hofstra, spokesman for the United Kentucky Tea Party, said he isn’t backing McConnell and “taking the lesser of the two evils approach.” Many conservatives, Hofstra predicted, either will leave the box on the ballot for U.S. Senate empty or will vote for David Patterson, the libertarian candidate. The senator has alienated many Tea Partiers and has yet to reach out to bridge the gap, Hofstra said. The divide was opened further, he added, by McConnell’s open support for Thad Cochran in the Mississippi Senate runoff and McConnell’s association with pro-Cochran ads that many conservatives assailed as race-baiting. “If there were some people on the fence after what happened in Kentucky, the Mississippi incident really put them over the edge,” Hofstra said. Still, he noted that Tea Party dissatisfaction with McConnell wasn’t winning Grimes their votes. “I haven’t talked to anybody who would vote her.”

But the conservative groups in Kentucky seem to be coalescing around McConnell and will, grudgingly, haul his mildewed behind across the finish line:

Yet despite lingering anger over the primary and the potential appeal of Patterson, some Tea Partiers are rallying around McConnell. Frank Simon of the Tea Party of Kentucky said he is “very much for McConnell over Grimes…Politics is always the lesser of two evils. McConnell is always much better than Grimes. Grimes is pro-abortion.” But Simon said he couldn’t “speak for all the Tea Parties.” Instead, his group’s approach is to try “to make friends with people, because that’s the only way we’re going to survive,” he said. “We’re trying to overlook problems that we had before and trying to pull together to survive November.”

Simon said the bulk of his group’s efforts would involve a voter guide that was put out “not under this organization” but through a political action committee and another organization, which would go out to about 30,000 people. He told The Daily Beast that “unless something unforeseen happens, it will endorse McConnell over Grimes.” The bulk of the voter guides will go out through churches, which is allowed, he said, because it “also gives the pro-abortion endorsements, pro-homosexual endorsements, pro-labor endorsements.”

This is what separates conservatives from the GOP establishment that will willingly lose a seat to a Democrat, with whom they have a joint interest in cronyism, rather than support a conservative. We will hold our nose and pull the lever for the Republican.

Let there be no mistake about it. McConnell ran an ugly campaign against Matt Bevin. He was the instigator behind a shameful campaign of character assassination and outright defamatory falsehoods directed against Chris McDaniel in Mississippi against the addled, septuagenarian adulterer (NTTAWWT, his health plan covers Viagra and Cialis) Thad Cochran. He is a detestable human being.

No one in Kentucky should vote for Mitch McConnell for any reason other than they support his policies. If that puts him over the top, that’s fine. If it doesn’t, then good riddance.

In principle it would be nice to have majorities in the House and Senate, but in the main, a Senate majority led by Mitch McConnell will be damned little different from a Senate led by Harry Reid. McConnell has as much as said that if he become majority leader he’ll give Harry Reid the filibuster that Reid took away from him. This will give Reid the ability to filibuster judges if a Republican is elected in 2016 and as we saw from McConnell’s stewardship under Bush, he simply doesn’t have the guts to fight Harry Reid in anything more challenging than a slapfight.

While he has been effectively and comprehensively stump broke by Harry Reid, he obviously detests conservatives and has vowed to crush us. He boasted of this in the New York Times. He loves to spend your money. He’ll just give it to a different set of corporate welfare recipients.

Why should any conservative give this man their vote? I don’t know.

Many years ago, when I was young enough to be excused, I was enamored of the cause of Irish independence. I went Irish bars, left money in the NORAID jar, and learned the lyrics to the new generation of IRA songs. One that stuck in my mind was “The Ballad of Lynch’s Army” which has this couplet: