Senator Mitch McConnell had a strange episode at his regular press briefing earlier today.
Via NBC News:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suddenly stopped speaking during a weekly Republican leadership news conference Wednesday afternoon, appearing to freeze, and then went silent and was walked away.
McConnell, R-Ky., had been making his opening remarks about an annual defense policy bill when he stopped talking. He was silent for 19 seconds. His Republican colleagues asked whether he was OK, and a top McConnell deputy, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a physician, escorted McConnell, 81, away from the cameras and reporters.
This is very strange.
McConnell appeared a few minutes later, reciting a line one of his handlers presumably suggested to him to lighten the mood: “The president called to check on me. I told him I got sandbagged.”
The reporter interviewing him asked him what happened, to which he gave a non-answer, saying he was “fine.” “Gotta watch those sandbags,” he added.
Neither McConnell nor his staff thus far have offered any explanation for his odd behavior, so we are left to speculate as to what it might be.
McConnell has had a rough go of things so far this year. Continuing via NBC News:
McConnell tripped and fell March 8 after an event for the Senate Leadership Fund — a Republican super PAC aligned with McConnell and GOP leadership — at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington. He was hospitalized with a concussion and a minor rib fracture and was discharged March 13 before he entered rehab.
He didn’t return to the Senate, however, until mid-April.
Senate minority leader is no inconsequential position.
Age limits for congressional members (and the president) have become more and more appealing over the past few years as the country’s politicians get older and older with seemingly no plans of retirement.
Failing age limits, we need responsible voters and party leaders who don’t run old war horses like McConnell into the ground purely out of political expediency.
Perhaps an 80-year-old here and there might be an outlier capable of functioning at full speed as an elite member of the governing class, but they are called outliers for a reason — the vast majority of their peers cannot.
Washington, D.C., is full of nearly comatose geriatrics who long ago passed their sell-by date yet continue their “service” for years or even decades after. No one in the corporate state media seems overly interested in doing anything about it, presumably because the Deep State doesn’t really need functional members of elected government to run effectively.
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