Dear Mitch McConnell...

Dear Mitch McConnell:

I realize you could not care less what I, an American citizen, think about how things are going in my (our) country right now, but I just wanted to drop you a line and let you know that I am worried about you. In fact, I am so concerned over your mental health that I have taken to turning off the radio and television every time I hear the first few syllables of your soundbite about how the American people deserve a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court Justice. Here's why:

1. The American people already HAVE that voice. We (re-)elected a president 3 years ago, and he is still in office until January of 2017.

2. This is clearly yet another example of your party's sworn pledge to block every single thing our president attempts to do, and then paint HIM as the "obstructionist." I heard you all proclaim that pledge quite loudly and quite often when he was elected the first time, I watched as he tried unsuccessfully to work with you for a while, and then I heard you all pledge that your top priority was to prevent him from gaining a second term--your TOP PRIORITY at a time when the nation that YOU were elected to represent was going through its toughest economic disaster in decades. I should have known back then that you were exhibiting signs of failing mental faculties, but I was blind. I blame myself for not speaking up sooner.

3. Are you by any chance practicing bizarre yoga postures in a misguided effort to solve the problem yourself? I ask because you currently seem to have your head so deep up your ass that you don't realize that your entire party is collapsing around you. Registered Republicans are so angry at the leadership of their party (i.e. you) that they have decided they would like to be governed for the next 4 years by either a reality TV buffoon with no political experience whatsoever or a self-righteous hardline ultraconservative hatemonger who seems to have no personal friends on the planet. These voters, the base of your party, are so blindly upset right now that many of them appear to be violently insane. By all accounts the president's pick for the vacancy is a moderate who is liked by folks all over the political spectrum (except you). Doing the job the Constitution mandates you to do and considering this guy for, oh, an hour or two, could at the very least show the remaining Republicans who have not lost their minds that yours is not solely a party of rabble-rousing TV stars and smug, repellent asswipes.

4. The most baffling thing about your insistence that we wait until we have a new president to pick a new justice is that—and again, you may be so delusional at this point that you haven't realized this—the next president is highly likely to be either the reality TV buffoon, whom you strongly dislike and who seems to like you even less, or Ms. Hillary Clinton, whom you have hated from the day you first met her, long before the current president was even a blip on your radar of revulsion. I'm trying to look out for you here. What the hell, if anything, are you thinking? Have you considered adding a vitamin supplement to your diet, which might help with these apparent lapses in internal logic?

5. Speaking of voices we do and do not deserve, do you realize how much you sound like John Boehner, which is to say, like seven-inch long press-on nails against an extremely old, broken down chalkboard? On another occasion we shall discuss why the voices of so many of your fellow Republicans are equally annoying and have long been so, but my work here is done.

God bless you and God bless Americans,
Ron Ehmke