Coward McConnell walks back his attack on big business
Well, that didn’t take long.
Just two days after condemning big business for “taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex” and hopping on the woke bandwagon, and a day after a much-mocked plea to corporate America to “stay out of politics,” except for continuing to shovel money into his pockets and those of other republicans’ campaign coffers, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is claiming to have been wildly misunderstood.
With companies like Delta Airlines, Coca-Cola, and Major League Baseball releasing forceful statements condemning the recently passed Georgia law implementing new voting regulations and with Dow, HP, Salesforce, Under Armour, ViacomCBS, Estée Lauder, and others expressing outrage over similarly restrictive laws being considered in Texas and other states, McConnell found himself in the unaccustomed position of harshly criticizing his usual patrons for their wholesale acceptance of what he calls “absurd disinformation” about the voting laws his state-level GOP brethren are railroading through their legislatures.
His addition yesterday of an oxymoronic plea to corporate America to stay out of politics while continuing to keep the firehose of political donations fully open caused astonished disbelief on social media as McConnell joined the brazen breed of Republicans no longer afraid to say the quiet part out loud.
Apparently, that did not go over well with his corporate donors since he was singing a different tune when he spoke today at a press conference in Paducah, Kentucky.
“I didn’t say that very artfully yesterday,” the Senate Minority Leader admitted in what was clearly an understatement. “They’re certainly entitled to be involved in politics. They are. My principal complaint is they didn’t read the darn bill,” he bemoaned.
“My complaint about the CEOs is they ought to read the damn bill. They got intimidated into adopting an interpretation of that given by the Georgia Democrats in order to help get their way,” McConnell tried to clarify today.
“And what did it cost them? Looks like it cost them the All-Star Game, and Major League Baseball made the same mistake. They didn’t read the bill,” he repeated.
Or perhaps they did read the bill — The New York Times analysis of which identified 16 provisions that it said would limit ballot access, potentially confuse voters, and give more power to Republican lawmakers — and realized which way the political winds have been shifting and decided that their reputation with the people who use their products and attend their games is worth more than propping up a corrupt party with no useful plans for rebuilding our country and our infrastructure and with no guiding principles except to oppose any and everything that Democrats offer as solutions to our nation’s most pressing issues.
