Last Tuesday Vice President Joe Biden swore in Senator Thad Cochran for a 7th term. Upon seeing his old friend from his decades in the US Senate, Biden enthusiastically remarked, “Thaddeus!6374807_G Best guy in the US Senate right here. I can say that now because it can’t hurt him.” How wonderful!
This is yet another high-profile Democrat who has admiration for Thad Cochran. Remember, it was Harry Reid who praised Cochran on the Senate floor as a “wonderful man.”
It is a fair question that we have asked here at MCD for more than a year: Why do Democrats love Thad Cochran so much?
Even the state media in Mississippi, including the liberals, fawn all over Thaddeus the Great and rip any true conservative who opposes him. Bill Minor’s end-of-the-year column in the Clarion Ledger is a case-in-point, a piece he pathetically titled “Cochran endured a lifetime of adversity in 2014.” Minor believes Thaddeus deserves the “tragic figure of the year” award, if we had one that is.
Although Cochran’s appalling (and tragic) race-baiting and smear campaign is conspicuously absent from Minor’s piece. But what is present is flat-out lying. He writes: “Though in recent years voting more along Republican party lines [as opposed to his many Democratic votes, I guess], Cochran is still regarded as far more patrician than the hell-raising young Republicans [Like Chris McDaniel, I presume?] who have come along in recent years. Despite the fact he comes from the Deep South with a tradition of sending Bilbo-style racial demagogues to Congress, Cochran is noted for having never played racial politics,” which is why “erstwhile black Democrats crossed party lines to give him critical votes in the Republican Senatorial primary last summer.”
Hmmm, Mr. Minor is either a bald-faced liar, naive as hell, or he must have had his head in the sand from June 3 until June 24, as well as the months afterward. Or, smearing your opponent for seeking to hurt blacks, with hateful robocalls and radio ads in black neighborhoods, and using food stamps and welfare to bribe them to vote Republican is not racial politics in Bill Minor’s twisted opinion.
But, we are told, Thaddeus is incalculably valuable “to a poor, rural state like Mississippi,” Minor writes, for “his 42 years of Senate seniority (plus six years in the House) serve the state exceedingly well because he brings to the table a currency equal to a much larger state.” Why we are still economically in last place after Thaddeus’s years of service, Minor does not say.
Aside from praising Thaddeus for his gentlemanly ways and his wonderful refrain from divisive politics, Minor takes his own divisive shots at Chris McDaniel, calling him a “green horn,” and “an untested upstart from the piney woods, who … had links to the state’s dark Confederate past,” who came “from far out in right field with the organized back of the nut-fringed tea party, which to the surprise of veteran political observers, had ties to some deep-pocketed national right-wing special interest groups.” I guess Thaddeus had no ties to any special interest groups, like say Haley Barbour’s corrupt machine or the leftist Chamber of Commerce perhaps?
It is a crying shame that Mississippians are still subjected to this shameful drivel spewed from the mouth of Bill Minor and his ilk at the Clarion Ledger. At least his readership is exceedingly small, at least among the state’s conservative majority.
It’s also a crying shame that rather than have a genuine conservative in Chris McDaniel as a US Senator, a man who would embark on a true reform agenda and actually fight the Democrats rather than befriend and compromise with them, Mississippi is stuck with ole Thad, who showed his true colors in the recent lame duck session.
In two important votes in December, Thaddeus sided with Harry Reid and the Democrats – on the Ted Cruz constitutional point of order on Obama’s executive order on amnesty and the spendthrift “cromnibus” appropriations bill, which he unsurprisingly voted in favor, points that Minor ignored.
Now remember, during the campaign against McDaniel, Thaddeus tried to convince the state that he was really a conservative fighting for conservative principles, a remark MCD called the political “lie of the year.” But when he had two chances to prove his conservative bona fides during the lame duck, he went right back to his old ways – turning his back on the Constitution and spending money in an irresponsible fashion that has gotten us more than $18.1 trillion in debt.
So is that why two of the nation’s worst Democrats – Harry Reid and Joe Biden – love Cochran so much, because they can count on his continual support? You betcha!
Thanks for the breaks