Spring of 2019 and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proudly takes on the mantle of the Grim Reaper when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi uses a prop to show Senate inaction on House bills.
“She’s got it right,” McConnell said about Pelosi. “For the first time in my memory, I’m going to agree with Nancy Pelosi. I am indeed the grim reaper when it comes to the socialist agenda that they’ve been ginning up over in the House with overwhelming Democratic support and sending it over to America, things that would turn us into a country we’ve never been.”
That story from Real Clear Politics.
A month later editorial cartoonist Joel Pett of the Lexington Herald-Leader, from the Senator’s home state, depicts McConnell in a graveyard.
A cartoon the Senator gladly embraced:
Then came the mass killing in El Paso.
Which didn’t stop McConnell supporters from creating, only hours after that horrible massacre, a makeshift graveyard. And didn’t stop Team Mitch from proudly tweeting a picture of it with a photo of their man beside it.
Criticism for their tone-deaf tweet caused the campaign to pin the blame on their supporters and Joel Pett:
The McConnell campaign, in response, defended the photo by claiming the graveyard display was put up by supporters as an “homage” to a cartoon in the Louisville Courier Journal (emphasis added). “Amy McGrath has tweeted this very cartoon several times and it’s shameful that she’s pretending not to know exactly what it is referencing in order to politicize a tragedy,” Kevin Golden, McConnell’s campaign manager, said in a statement.
Of course it was only Team Mitch and their supporters that used such imagery hours after such a horrible event. Imagery that remains on their Twitter feed three days later.