McConnell Rips 'Overdone' Capitol Security Measures: 'Reminds Me of My Last Trip to Kabul'
Liberals apparently like the idea of a Capitol under occupation.
When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday joined a chorus of Republican representatives criticizing the razor-wire topped fence surrounding the nation’s Capitol, he was no doubt speaking for millions of Americans who’ve been sickened by the sight of Washington, D.C., looking like some Third World power center.
But judging by the reaction on social media, the left in this country thinks it’s perfectly fine.
According to the Washington Examiner, McConnell called the security measures that have been in place since the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion more reminiscent of Afghanistan than the United States of America.
“I think we’re way overreacting to the current need,” McConnell said. “I’m extremely uncomfortable with the fact that my constituents can’t come to the Capitol with all this razor wire around the complex. It reminds me of my last trip to Kabul.”
McConnell spoke a day after 17 House Republicans wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi demanding to know why a fence around the Capitol is still necessary, seeing as it has been more than two months after the incursion that disrupted sessions of the House and Senate to certify the Electoral College results that made Joe Biden president.
“Two months after the abhorrent violence that occurred in the United States Capitol on January 6th, Members of Congress still have not been briefed on any specific imminent threats to the Capitol complex, nor have any plans been moved forward to return the U.S. Capitol to normal operations,” the Republicans wrote in a letter published by Fox News.
The letter specifically asked Pelosi when the fencing — and the National Guard troops that are still in the District of Columbia — would be removed.
According to Fox, of the 25,000 National Guard troops brought into the District of Columbia for Inauguration Day, about 5,000 are still there. Under current plans, 1,700 will remain.
For the GOP, it’s an overreaction. But the response from Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill amounted to “talk to the hand.”
“We don’t need any lectures on security from House Republicans who fanned the flames of these insurrectionists and overwhelmingly voted to overturn the election result,” Hammill said Tuesday night, according to Fox.
It’s exactly the kind of high-handed, sniping response that could be expected from the spokesman for a high-handed, sniping lawmaker like Pelosi. But it’s the response from presumably more “normal” Americans who weighed in on McConnell’s statement Wednesday that’s more troubling.
A quick survey of comments on Twitter showed a troubling majority claimed the measures were not only necessary, but displayed what amounts to an acceptance that the Capitol grounds should look like a penitentiary, and the seat of American government should be an armed camp for the future of the republic.
Here’s a fair sample:
Tell the incompetent complicit traitor who didn’t do his job we don’t care what he thinks @MitchMcConnell
— Donna Crosby (@DonnaCrosby47) March 10, 2021
When @LeaderMcConnell
And the #GOP radicalized crew–@HawleyMO @RepBoebert @RepMTG @SenTedCruz @RepMattGaetz et al
LEAVE THE DAMN BUILDING–Then we can RELAX the security measures!
AFTER we cleanse our government & OUR buildings of
DOMESTIC TERRORISTS!!#CleanseTheGOP— Trey Tweets (@MsTreyTweets) March 10, 2021
It IS the beacon of democracy NOW!. Leave the fences up, it’s because of their attack on that building that they were erected anyway. Why give trumpsters a second opportunity?
— Ann M Halvorson (@eyez53) March 10, 2021
There were many, many more along those lines.
Now, granted, that’s only Twitter. And Twitter is a platform that’s been largely abandoned by the right since the lords of social media dropped the façade of fairness and declared former President Donald Trump and other prominent voices on the right to be permanently persona non grata.
And it’s far more likely that the majority of sane Americans agree with Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boehbert who posted a video to social media invoking the memory of President Ronald Reagan’s famous 1987 speech in Berlin and demanding that Pelosi “tear down this wall.”
But there’s no denying that far, far too many who call themselves Americans are more than willing to accept the nation’s capital resemble a totalitarian dictatorship out of a misplaced fear of the conservative right.
After months of watching American cities torn apart by leftist rioters (ludicrously described as “mostly peaceful“), after an American election that will be forever suspect thanks to the blatant machinations of social media, the rampant bias of the mainstream media, and dubious (to put it charitably) decisions in mainly Democratic-run states to swing the outcome, activist liberals appear ready to accept an image of the United States that would have disgusted the Founding Fathers 200 years ago — and disgusts their compatriots today.
McConnell might have alienated many Trump supporters with his attack on the former president following the Democrats’ joke of an impeachment trial in February, but on this one, he’s right on the money.
And Democrats are disgracefully wrong.
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