For those in need of grim comedy to sustain them during these grim times, there is always the comfort food of cable-news appearances by Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a state most noted for its former toll roads. When he speaks, what emerges is usually a quotidian mishmash of empty rhetorical calories, a plate of disingenuous nonsense whipped up on the quick. What I do give him credit for is that, behind that unassumingly bland rictus forever set on his face, Chris Murphy is also a master chef of a particular sort of gaslighting inanity. Every now and then he serves it up to us in the classic French style: multicourse.
Thus we have yesterday’s appearance on All In with Chris Hayes, with Mehdi Hasan guest-hosting, on the topic of the Supreme Court’s alleged conflict-of-interest problems. Murphy opens with a baldly false assertion, that Harlan Crow intentionally spent decades as one of Clarence Thomas’s closest friends because he has “lots of cases before the Supreme Court” (he has none), but fear not: This is a mere aperitif of the sort Murphy likes to serve up on his way to the hors d’oeuvre, in this case the casually hilarious musing that “it just doesn’t feel like a coincidence that whenever Harlan Crow’s groups [that he donates to] express an opinion, Justice Thomas sides with the guy that he spends vacations with.” (Newsflash: There is another, vastly more likely reason these things line up, which is that Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow are both very conservative and share judicial philosophies.)
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