God bless, Cocaine Mitch. The Republican Senate majority leader had the perfect response to bogus questions on Tuesday about whether or not he would support reparations for African-Americans after an NBC News article pointed out that his great-great-grandfather owned slaves. In short, he told the media that his position on the issue was no different than President Obama's.
"You know, I find myself once again in the same position as President Obama," Sen. McConnell said to a reporter who asked the question. "We both oppose reparations, and we both are the descendants of slaveholders."
The Washington Free Beacon's David Rutz points out that McConnell has already addressed the issue on how to properly remedy the damaging effects of slavery last June.
"We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African American president,"Sen. McConnell said. "I think we’re always a work in progress in this country, but no one currently alive was responsible for that, and I don’t think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it."
McConnell: I Share Obama’s Position on Reparations https://t.co/j2POkLfzcK pic.twitter.com/5GVnWJCbaK
— Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) July 9, 2019
As Beth reported last night, NBC News ran a seemingly politically motivated article that said, "Slavery experts have stressed that descendants of slave owners should not be held personally responsible for the deeds of their forebears. But they have also argued that the families that descended from slave owners, like McConnell’s, are likely to have benefited from the labor of slaves that propped up farm families in earlier generations — a point made by many reparations supporters, who have said that descendants of slaves were never compensated for the economic benefit their forebears made to white families."
As the Free Beacon points out, the timing of the story was peculiar. "NBC reported the story the night before Democrat Amy McGrath announced on MSNBC, NBC's liberal cable news arm, that she was running to challenge McConnell in the 2020 U.S. Senate race," Rutz writes.