Washington has a body it can’t locate and a spokesman who’s never met a crisis he couldn’t flatten into a press release. That’s the state of play as Mitch McConnell enters week four of a hospitalization nobody in his orbit will explain, while his wife took a diplomatic photo op in Beijing and his party quietly does the succession math.
Let’s start with what we actually know, because the confirmed facts are almost more damning than the rumor.
June 14, before nine in the morning: an EMS call goes out from McConnell’s Capitol Hill address. Cardiac arrest. CPR in progress. The tape exists. It was obtained not by CNN’s crack Washington bureau, but by an independent reporter named Desirée Townsend, who beat the networks by the better part of a week, the kind of scoop that used to end careers at the majors and now just gets a “developing story” tag slapped on it three news cycles later. (hint hint - independent journalism matters)
McConnell’s office, meanwhile, has offered the press all the tra…
