Kevin McCarthy shredded for 'selling out' the truth and democracy for his own power

Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has so abandoned truth and his responsibilities that he might as well have joined the insurrection, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank slammed Friday.

McCarthy gave away the store in exchange for his own power, Milbank charged. And now he's repeatedly claiming he sees no evil, hears no evil that blossomed from his deal with the most extreme members of his party to become speaker.

McCarthy has claimed he had no knowledge of the explosive revelations in the Dominion defamation case against Fox News that Rupert Murdoch and star hosts like Tucker Carlson never believed Donald Trump's tale of a rigged election — yet continued to spew the lies to viewers.

So McCarthy had no problem turning over some 40,000 hours of videos of the 2021 siege at the U.S. Capitol — to Fox, Milbank pointed out. That was part of his deal with the far-right Republicans.

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When Carlson cherry-picked minutes of those hours to characterize the storming of the building as "peaceful" — despite what millions of Americans witnessed on live TV — again, McCarthy was completely unaware of that, Milbank noted. “I didn’t see what was aired,” McCarthy flatly insisted.

Nor did he "see it" when Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) quoted the Capitol Police chief who scorched Fox's Jan. 6 video "propaganda" as “outrageous,” “false” and “offensive," Millbank noted.

McCarthy is wearing his "obtuseness" like a sheet of armor, the writer implied. But this week, when it came to the twisted Fox video, McCarthy’s "see-no-evil approach was just plain evil," Milbank wrote.

"Given a choice between fact and fiction, between law and anarchy, between democracy and thuggery, the speaker of the House proclaimed his agnosticism," Milbank declared. "In doing so, he threw the power of the speakership behind the insurrectionists and against the constitutional order he swore to uphold."

So McCarthy "sells out democracy to preserve his title" as he "continues to put himself before his country," added Milbank, who quoted Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's comment this week on the Senate floor: McCarthy has “already done more than any party leader in Congress to enable the spread of Donald Trump’s Big Lie,” and has "made our democracy weaker."