They're crawling into infamy

As I got a glimpse of  Mitch McConnell puffily damning and scandalizing  the Democrats on TV yesterday as he insisted he will further delay a vote on Loretta Lynch as attorney general, I keyed on his expression long enough to recall what my nephew  near San Francisco said of the majority leader.

"Mitch  is a turtle," Jack Conway told me matter of factly.    "Yep, a turtle."

Jack is a musician, orchestral arranger, poet, philosopher, existentialist and above all, a free spirit.  He doesn't make  judgments without serious thought.  So when he said Mitch was a turtle, I had to gaze longer at the Republican  leader's face craning out of his  collar. Yes, I can see a resemblance.

It's chilling to know that guys like McConnell and John Boehner are crawling around looking for still one more enterprise to embarrass the president.  McConnell promised that he would do that on the day that Obama entered office.   We are seeing the dreadful evolution of McCarthyism into McConnellism. You may be aware that he says clean-air advocates are "extremists".

But don't turtles have to breathe, too?