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| Betsy McCaughey |
Former Republican Mayor of New Britain Erin Stewart has been much in the news lately -- days before the Republican Nominating Convention will convene to choose a candidate to run against incumbent Governor Ned Lamont -- largely owing to the efforts of newly elected Democrat Mayor of New Britain Bobby Sanchez.
Upon leaving office after 12 years of helpful and politically
uneventful service, Sanchez began a formal examination of the former mayor. An accurate
non-politicized examination of her service as mayor, Stewart has said, would
reveal that she had entered office facing a daunting municipal debt of $30
million and left the treasury a surplus of $34 million.
But you can’t take politics out of politics.
Was Sanchez’s close examination of the Democrat perceived
dirt under Stewart’s bed a political hit job designed to rid the gubernatorial
field of a dangerous Republican opponent? That is a question that will not be
resolved within the parameters of the upcoming gubernatorial election.
Democrats know that the wheels of justice thankfully grind slowly. And while
they are grinding, Stewart will remain steadfastly silent on the advice of
lawyers – assuming civil or criminal charges are brought against her. Until a
presumed trial occurs, she will be left “swinging slowly in the wind,” hanged
by a rope of charges assumed to be true.
A Hartford Courant report tells us, “The state police opened
a criminal investigation last month into financial irregularities in the tax
collector’s office in New Britain city hall. But state law enforcement
authorities declined to say Monday whether the investigation could expand to
include questions about Stewart’s use of her city-issued credit card.”
Democrats have not told us whether their examination of
possible malfeasance in office will extend to other Democrat mayors of safe
Democrat cities. There is no danger that the mayor of Bridgeport, a reelected
felon, will any time soon be replaced by a more blameless Republican mayor.
Does Mayor (Joe) Ganim, for instance, have a (P-Card), the state issued credit
card Stewart is thought to have abused? If so, has he abused it? We will never
know – because Democrats are in charge of most large cities in Connecticut, and
knowing such things cannot profit the ruling Democrat Party.
Who has such cards? We know that P-cards are not issued to
Republican contenders for office who do not win elections. We also know that
Connecticut is, and may continue to be well into the future, a Democrat Party
hegemon, a one-party state.
Will the possibility of abuse restrict the use of the card,
legitimate or not, by all Connecticut mayors? Why do any Democrat mayors in
Connecticut need such a card, given the undisputed fact that the Democrat
majority in the General Assembly would gladly assume any debt incurred by
Democrat mayors of all large Connecticut cities? The Democrat dominated General
Assembly, in the face of Republican objections, has routinely paid down debts
incurred by Democrat big-city mayors.
Questions such as these are rarely asked or answered by
Connecticut’s investigative reporters, likely because fewer reporters result in
fewer reportorial investigations, a boon to irreplaceable urban incumbent
Democrat mayors.
When Republican contender for governor of Connecticut Betsy
McCaughey (pronounced McCoy), always aflame, was asked by a reporter recently
to comment on the “accusations” regarding Stewart, she erupted: ”I’m focused on
a much bigger scandal – the fact that the U.S. produced 178,000 jobs last
month, and our state got only 100 of them. Everyone keeps asking me if we
should ax Erin. I am staying focused on axing the state income tax, to bring
companies and jobs back to Connecticut.”
In a rare Republican pre-primary debate in which Ryan Fazio participated,
McCaughey was asked whether she thought the possibility of eliminating
Connecticut fairly recent income tax was doable.
She erupted.
The project has to be sold not to politicians whose lives
are made easier by increasing taxation, but rather to voters whose lives have
been made miserable by ever-increasing taxation. Every tax is an imposition on the
creativity and expansion of the free market. Those who flee to false socialistic/communistic
solutions can offer no political salvation to plundered middleclass taxpayers.
And it is the creativity of a politically unencumbered market – not fanciful profits
stuffed under the pillows of billionaires – that increases the wellbeing of
voters presumably represented by big spending Democrats. If you want to get rid
of billionaires by expropriating their earned profits – Are you listening
AOC? -- by all means do so, and spare us the neo-progressive sermonizing. But the
expropriation can occur only once, after which comes the deluge.
Neo-progressives ae not committed to the survival of the middle class. They are
committed to the survival of neo-progressive snake handlers and sellers of
magic elixirs such as the newly elected mayor of Wall Street in New York City,
Zohran Mamdani.
McCaughey knows a thing or two about the spectacular
failures of quack neo-progressive New York politicians. She was Lieutenant
Governor of New York from 1995 to 1998 under Governor George Pataki and holds a
Ph.D. in U.S. constitutional history from Columbia University. Not at all a
political lightweight, she is the author of over three hundred scholarly and
popular articles and has produced prize-winning studies while at two think
tanks, the Manhattan Institute and later the Hudson Institute. She is currently
a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research.
Her conservative credentials are unimpeachable.
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