McConnell compares Clinton to Saddam Hussein’s ‘Baghdad Bob’
CLEVELAND — Not long ago, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Donald Trump “doesn’t know much about the issues.” The Kentucky lawmaker also pressed the brash entrepreneur to stop his “attacks on various ethnic groups in the country.” And McConnell said Trump should refrain from “outrageous and inappropriate” attacks on a federal judge, calling into question his Mexican heritage.
On Tuesday, shortly after Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination, McConnell publicly banished all doubts about the New Yorker’s readiness for the White House and trained all of his fire on Hillary Clinton. He portrayed the former reality star as the champion of long-thwarted conservative hopes, and Clinton as an untrustworthy vessel of the status quo. At one point, McConnell even compared the former secretary of state to the notoriously unreliable spokesman of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
“Friends, not since Baghdad Bob has there been a public figure with such a tortured relationship with the truth,” McConnell said told the assembled party delegates in Cleveland.
Americans feel government has betrayed them, and “if Hillary Clinton is our president, nothing will change,” he said.
If he is elected, Trump would sign Republican bills to repeal Obamacare, build the Keystone XL pipeline and strip Planned Parenthood of federal money, McConnell promised.
“With Donald Trump in the White House, Senate Republicans will build on the work we’ve done and pass more bills into law than any Senate in years,” he said.
McConnell, whose appearance on the stage at Quicken Loans Arena was met with scattered but unmistakable boos, emphasized that Trump would also fill the Supreme Court seat held by the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia — as a result of McConnell’s unprecedented blockade of President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, nominated 125 days ago.
“Let’s put justices on the Supreme Court who cherish our Constitution,” the senator said.
McConnell, arguably his party’s best political tactician, took pains to attack Clinton’s honesty, at a time when polls show that many Americans consider her untrustworthy. He also played up the prospect that new controversies will follow her if she is elected, like those that dogged her husband, President Bill Clinton, throughout the 1990s — which he referred to as “the scandals that follow the Clintons like flies.”
“There is a clear choice before us,” he said. “And it is not Hillary.”
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