Ten years ago, Mick Mulvaney was an obscure conservative congresscritter from South Carolina. He was a rookie representative, and a stalwart Tea Party favorite back when that was the most obvious manifestation of the prion disease afflicting the Republican Party. Of course, the disease broke out in a terrifying new way in 2016, and Mick Mulvaney volunteered to become a leading symptom of this latest variant.
First, he signed on to be the previous administration*’s button man to carry out the contract murder of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the beloved offspring of Senator Professor Warren. The highlight of Mulvaney’s tenure there probably arrived when he met with a group of banking executives and advised them on ways they could escape the scrutiny of the institution he putatively led. From the Washington Post:
“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lending industry officials at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.” At the top of the hierarchy, he added, were his constituents. “If you came from back home and sat in my lobby, I talked to you without exception, regardless of the financial contributions,” said Mr. Mulvaney, who received nearly $63,000 from payday lenders for his congressional campaigns.
Nice.
Anyway, Mulvaney proved an expert in navigating the vicious crosscurrents of the previous administration*. By the end of 2018, he was named the Acting White House Chief of Staff. In that capacity he proved to be as loyal a staffer as there was at Camp Runamuck. He fibbed about the administration*’s healthcare plans. He claimed that the media was exaggerating the threat of COVID-19 in order to hurt the president*. But the high point of his tenure—and the episode most clearly related to current events—probably came when Mulvaney was central to the plan to knuckle Ukraine into helping ratfck Joe Biden’s campaign, the attempted extortion that resulted in Impeachment I. From the Washington Post:
But Mulvaney’s connections to the administration’s troubled interactions with Ukraine are also beginning to surface. Mulvaney’s role in enlisting Sondland and the others to take over relations with Ukraine was revealed Tuesday in testimony by George Kent, the State Department’s Ukraine expert, according to Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who participated in the closed-door hearing before the House Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees…
…Perhaps most significantly, Mulvaney — at the direction of the president — placed a hold on nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine in the weeks before Trump used a July 25 phone call to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to pursue Giuliani’s agenda. The impeachment probe was triggered in August by a whistleblower complaint submitted by a CIA employee to the U.S. intelligence community’s inspector general; the complaint focused in part on the July 25 call.
Now, you might assume that, given this track record, Mulvaney would have a problem getting a job selling auto parts. But you would be wrong, because you would have reckoned without the artist formerly known as the Columbia Broadcasting System. The erstwhile Tiffany Network just hired Mick Mulvaney to be one of its experts on the national economy. I will give you a moment to unsmack your gob.
Everybody OK? Fine. We continue.
As you can imagine, giving a gig to Mick Mulvaney at the height of the bloodletting in Ukraine did not go down well among the more honest souls at CBS. From the Washington Post:
“I know everyone I talked to today was embarrassed about the hiring,” said a CBS News employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment. The frustration, this person said, was less about Mulvaney’s high-ranking role in the Trump administration and more about the inaccuracy of some of his past comments.
That is a baffling paragraph, but not an unexpected one. By now, we should be used to the elite political media’s apparent allergy to calling a lie a lie. Also, it is more than obvious that Mulvaney’s “high-ranking role” at Camp Runamuck consisted of enabling the “inaccuracy” of the former administration*’s every public statement. More distressing, however, is the quote that the Post obtained and attributed to the head of CBS News.
“If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” CBS News’s co-president Neeraj Khemlani told the staff of the network’s morning show, according to a recording of his comments obtained by The Washington Post. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”
When, oh Lord, when will the elite political media treat the current Republican Party as the threat to the republic that it most obviously is? That threat will only intensify if the party succeeds in the coming midterms. It is the single biggest story in American party politics since the Whigs went belly-up—or at least since the GOP gave up on being the Party of Lincoln and assumed the mantle of the Party of Jeff Davis in the mid-1960s. Thus does the Tiffany Network render itself into a broke-ass empty Haffenreffer bottle in a ditch alongside Route 6 on Cape Cod. Cronkite wept.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
