Unless you have been residing under a rock this past year, you know that one of John McCain's signature platform pieces is his pledge to eliminate earmark spending -- a wafer-thin sliver of the Federal budget that won't go very far in diminishing overall discretionary spending but, in the spirit of sausage making, nevertheless contributes some of the mortar that binds larger legislative compromises. McCain rails against this pork, famously calling out funding for bear DNA research. That is, until he realized he voted for that. Lately, McCain's been angry at a Chicago planetarium and the projector that it uses to actually project the stars on the ceiling of the facility -- the device that turns a building into a planetarium -- referring to it as an "overhead projector," because why not mislead voters on every picayune detail?
Well, Senator Mitch McConnell, currently the minority leader of the current Senate, doesn't seem to be all that concerned with what John McCain has to say about pork-barrel spending:
Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell said Thursday that Kentucky voters would make a terrible trade if they replaced him with a Democrat lacking the clout to deliver huge amounts of federal money he took credit for bringing back to the Bluegrass state. [...] McConnell, facing a hard-charging challenge from Democratic businessman Bruce Lunsford, did not mention the nation's sagging economy or his recent vote for a $700 billion rescue of the financial industry during a speech to the chamber of commerce in this Appalachian city.
That's basically McConnell promising to continue the flow of porcine magma to Kentucky in perpetuity. Didn't he hear that John McCain, if elected, is going to Make McConnell Famous? Actually, as Matt Yglesias points out, McConnell's larger worry may be that the voters of Kentucky might end up making McConnell famously unemployed.