Skip to main content

A Blumenthal-Schiff Cage Match

A debate card featuring Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, now running for the U.S. Senate seat Chris Dodd intends to vacate at the end of his term, and Peter Schiff, Connecticut’s economic Cassandra, would be far more interesting than the debate concluded March 1 between Blumenthal and incrementalist averse Merrick Alpert.

Debates that include candidates on fire always are spectacles worth our time. Americans, certainly more often than the British, tend to confuse passion with authenticity, and there is little doubt that Alpert was, in his debate with Blumenthal, a man aflame. Perhaps fortunately for the attorney general, Blumenthal may not have to debate Alpert again.

When the Republican debate rolled around at the university a day later, media adepts who had been expecting rhetorical fisticuffs between senatorial hopefuls Linda McMahon and Rob Simmons, both of whom had been peppering each other with e-mails and press releases, were disappointed and deflated. They had been expecting Thermopylae and got instead, as one commentator put it, “a snoozer of a debate.”

It was generally agreed by commentators who had packed away their telltale preferences for the duration of the debates that Alpert won his and Schiff won his, both having been pronounced more authentic than their plasticine opponents. One commentator, an ardent progressive, confessed he found Schiff’s honesty refreshing, though he was anguished by his message.

Schiff is a man on fire. The calculating Blumenthal is very much like Sen. Joe Lieberman, sometimes called the Hamlet of the U.S. Senate. Hamlet was thought to be too thoughtful for his own good. But in the end, not an advocate of incrementalism, he turned out to be a decisive man of action and an accomplished murderer.

In the presence of Schiff, and perhaps some other Republicans, Blumenthal would not be able to get away with asserting, as he did in the Merrick debate, that the litigatory actions of his office “actually create jobs, because businesses actually welcome competition and a level playing field.”

To pick up on just one point, it is folly to think that businesses would appreciate the way Blumenthal has used fatally defective affidavits to secure from judges in ex parte proceedings the authority to seize the business assets of companies that find themselves on the wrong end of Blumenthal’s constitutionally disruptive litigation. While Blumenthal’s senatorial narrative is centered on the black dealings of large, greedy, socially semi-conscious and unscrupulous companies, such as lung damaging tobacco giants, a partial listing of corporations in which the plaintiff has had an AG appearance from January 07 to the present  contains upwards of 900 entrees.

In the Merrick debate, Blumenthal intended to speak over the head of his opponent to an audience that would vote for him the general election. His narrative was carefully crafted to this purpose.

Merrick threw a wrench into the narrative by insisting that Blumenthal’s backing of President Barack Obama’s venture in Afghanistan was a) too expensive at a time when federal dollars might better be devoted to knotty domestic problems, and b) Bush-like in its wrong-headedness.

Blumenthal was flustered by Alpert's charge that he was a prevaricator at a time when the entire country was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, an accusation that easily could be launched at Blumenthal from the Republican side by Schiff, whose solutions to the malingering recession are, Schiff insists, painful but effective and necessary.

Like most regulators and redistributists, Blumenthal has a tough time wrapping his brain around the notion that an increase in distribution levels cannot occur in when the revenue to be distributed is on the downslide, usually the case in recessions and mini-depressions. When there is no soup in the soup kitchen, it is idle to speak of distributing soup to the poor – or to anyone else. Neither does Blumenthal understand that a complex ever changing regulatory apparatus introduces uncertainty into business activity that results in depressed markets, or he would not have insisted, laughably, that his suits have the effect of increasing business in the state.

This is the worst kind of hokum, far more dangerous in its effects than the peculations of politicians like Tammany Hall chief George Washington Plunkett or, coming closer to the heart of the 21st century, his modern equivalent, U.S. Rep. Charlie Rangel, who appears to have received a temporary indulgence from madam Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi.

A cage match between Schiff and Blumenthal might even wake up the commentators in Connecticut’s media who think wrestling matches are real rather than highly scripted staged events.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Obamagod!

My guess is that Barack Obama is a bit too modest to consider himself a Christ figure , but artist will be artists. And over at “ To Wit ,” a blog run by professional blogger, journalist, radio commentator and ex-Hartford Courant religious writer Colin McEnroe, chocolateers will be chocolateers. Nice to have all this attention paid to Christ so near to Easter.

Did Chris Murphy Engage in Private Diplomacy?

Murphy after Zarif blowup -- Getty Images Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, up for reelection this year, had “a secret meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during the Munich Security Conference” in February 2020, according to a posting written by Mollie Hemingway , the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. Was Murphy commissioned by proper authorities to participate in the meeting, or was he freelancing? If the former, there is no problem. If the latter, Murphy was courting political disaster. “Such a meeting,” Hemingway wrote at the time, “would mean Murphy had done the type of secret coordination with foreign leaders to potentially undermine the U.S. government that he accused Trump officials of doing as they prepared for Trump’s administration. In February 2017, Murphy demanded investigations of National Security Advisor Mike Flynn because he had a phone call with his counterpart-to-be in Russia. “’Any effort to undermine our nation’s foreign policy – e