When the media is not blaming President Trump for all that is not well in the world, they are blaming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. On her Monday MSNBC show, Andrea Mitchell brought on leftist New Yorker scribe Jane Mayer and the two lamented how, unlike Nancy Pelosi, McConnell has responded to the COVID-19 panic with a lack of seriousness.
Ignoring that just last week Democrats blocked a McConnell proposal to replenish the small business loan pool, Mitchell led off the segment declaring, "Democrats on Capitol Hill have hit a wall in their efforts to expand the emergency aid to states and small businesses. That wall, many report, is Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who is calling for half the spending after blaming impeachment for the lackluster response to COVID-19."
Mitchell then introduced Mayer and her corresponding New Yorker article, which was more of a nearly 12,000-word opposition research brief than a report.
Mayer immediately began spreading fake news. "I think if you look at the record, you can see, is that Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, underestimated this particular problem, this spreading pandemic. He took off early to go down to Louisville for celebratory kind of gathering that he wanted to go to at the time when Nancy Pelosi was trying to put together a package of kind of a relief package, the first one."
The instance Mayer is referring to is the March bill that Democrats and the media blasted McConnell for delaying, despite the fact that the House was still sorting out the technical details. Even the Washington Post was forced to acknowledge that in a correction to a Jen Rubin op-ed.
Mayer then condemned McConnell for criticizing Democrats. "When senators were saying early on, senators like Chris Murphy of Connecticut, that they needed to have more emergency funding, and Chuck Schumer was saying the same thing, Mitch McConnell was defending the Trump Administration's sort of stalling and just mocked the Democrats for asking for more funding by saying that they were just showing performative outrage."
Ironically, as Mitchell and Mayer praised Democrats for their seriousness, later on Monday, House Democrats announced that, absent an emergency, they will not be in session until May 4.
PS: Mitchell wrongly promoted Mayer on air as a "Pulitzer Prize winner." She's won many awards for "social justice" journalism, but Mayer's own bio says she was only nominated twice for a Pulitzer.
Here is a transcript for the April 13 show:
MSNBC
Andrea Mitchell Reports
12:19 PM ET
ANDREA MITCHELL: Meanwhile, Democrats on Capitol Hill have hit a wall in their efforts to expand the emergency aid to states and small businesses. That wall, many report, is Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who is calling for half the spending after blaming impeachment for the lackluster response to COVID-19. The Kentucky senator is also the subject of a new, deeply reported profile in the New Yorker that dubs “Trump's Enabler-in-Chief,” questioning his risky alliance with the president amid a pandemic. Joining me now is the author, Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Jane Mayer, Washington Post [?] correspondent for the New Yorker. Jane, thanks very much for being with us. You go all the way back to a lot of the things that we've seen over these past years with McConnell. But if we focus on the pandemic itself, on the attempt to get things started, to get aid to people, the fact that there is not a four-way negotiation on Capitol Hill is really front and center.
JANE MAYER: It really is, Andrea. And you know, from the start, I think if you look at the record, you can see, is that Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, underestimated this particular problem, this spreading pandemic. He took off early to go down to Louisville for celebratory kind of gathering that he wanted to go to at the time when Nancy Pelosi was trying to put together a package of kind of a relief package, the first one. When senators were saying early on, senators like Chris Murphy of Connecticut, that they needed to have more emergency funding, and Chuck Schumer was saying the same thing, Mitch McConnell was defending the Trump Administration's sort of stalling and just mocked the Democrats for asking for more funding by saying that they were just showing performative outrage and so he really dragged his heals before understanding the size of the threat here and he backed up the Trump Administration which is pretty much what he has been doing as we saw during the impeachment and many other times since Trump has been elected.
