The Republican Battle In Connecticut: Try Fighting

"The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood." - Otto von Bismarck

A Hartford paper’s Sunday edition crackles with a front page story that asks and answers the tormenting question: Is progressivism dead?

The paper’s emphatic answer is – no, not yet, certainly not in Connecticut.

The paper notes in passing the whupping progressive Democrats took in the off year elections, though the account spares the wounded the most important details.

This year, national Republicans took the U.S. Senate from the jaws of progressive Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the toll-master whose business it was to make sure no worthy Republican bills reached the desk of “Lead From Behind” President Barrack Obama. In this, Reid was successful, and Democrats were permitted to claim, without challenge from the left of center media, that Republicans were obstructionists who had no ideas of their own beyond declaring war on women such as Sandra Fluke, who insisted that Georgetown University, a Catholic institution that requires undergraduates to take theology classes and upholds traditional catholic teaching that forbids contraception, must pay for her birth control pills.

Ms. Fluke ran for election this year and lost by a two to one margin. Apparently, people in the United States -- whom Obamacare adviser and professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Jonathan Gruber thought too infantile to understand and approve the real provisions of the increasingly unaffordable Affordable Care Act -- had turned their faces against the proposition that Republicans were, as Democrats screeched during the election, concerned only with women’s ovaries. The bulk of U.S. Senator Mark Udall’s election effort was centered on the notion that Republicans value women only as unwilling breeding stock. Fifty percent of Mr. Udall’s campaign ads were devoted to tagging his opponent, Cory Gardner, as a foot soldier in the Republican Party’s War On Women. But when the votes were tallied in Colorado, Mr. Udall, whom even pundits in the progressive media referred to dismissively as Senator Uterus, went down to dusty defeat. Mr. Gardner had managed to turn the tables on the hapless Mr. Udall.

Nationally, the war on women fell flat – possibly because Republicans had never declared a war on their mothers, wives and daughters. Mr. Gardner strongly favored an Over The Counter (OTC) provision that would allow women to purchase birth control pills without a doctor’s prescription. Planned Parenthood adamantly opposed the measure because – truth be told – OTC likely would impact their businesses. Owing to a birth control pill closed shop, Planned Parenthood has for decades ferried women into their abortion centers where clients later on could, if they so wished, end the lives of unwanted babies who feel the doctor’s instrumental interventions after they had been safely nestled in the womb longer than three months, the point at which fetuses sense pain. Polls consistently show that women – against whom Republican presumably have declared their war – oppose partial birth abortion by significant numbers; and, following the horrific reports on Kermit Gosnell’s late term abortion chop shop, they also favor by large margins reasonable restrictions on abortion facilities.

The OTC measure supported by Mr. Gardner pulled the fangs from the always false charge that Republicans wished to deny the birth control pill to women – they just don’t want to be forced to pay for other people’s pills -- while at the same time it put Planned Parenthood at a considerable rhetorical disadvantage. How was it possible that an organization that winked at partial birth abortion was so adamantly opposed to a measure that would more cheaply, easily and efficiently provide birth control pills over the counter without a doctor’s prescription? Republicans in other states – possibly even in Connecticut, a progressive backwater -- took notes.

The fictional Republican “War On Women” was not the only ideologically valuable piece of crockery that fell off the Democratic Party shelf in the national elections. Mr. Obama’s feckless foreign policy has been shattered by the traditional enemies of the United States, prominent among them Russian President Vladimir Putin, Europe’s energy Czar.

The United States has had before it, during the presidential tenure of Obama, the opportunity to shatter the oil and natural gas reliant Russian economy. If we would but exploit the abundant natural resources of the North American continent, we could without much fanfare facilitate a severe drop in the price of Russian oil and natural gas -- which, come to think of it, was how former President Ronald Reagan, the vanquisher, along with Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Polish Pope John Paul II, of the former “Evil Empire,” brought the Soviet economy to its knees: Reagan arranged with Saudi Arabia a severe drop on the price of oil, after which the Soviet economy teetered on the brink of collapse.

It has become obvious, though not in Connecticut, that Obama’s accomodationist foreign policy is Reaganism in reverse. Put it this way: If the fragile Russian economy were to be compromised by a sudden drop in energy prices, could Putin afford a hot war in Ukraine? If it were possible for the United States to push ISIS back into Bashir Assad’s Syria, Putin’s client state, would it be possible for Putin to sustain a Ukrainian Anschluss? Realpolitikers ought to be asking themselves at every political turnstile “Which way would Bismarck go?”

Practical geo-political questions of this kind were never raised by any Connecticut Republican battling to recover from Democrats any of the seats in the state’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional Delegation. Iran, yet another of Putin’s client states, is quickly approaching a point at which it will be able to develop a nuclear weapon; Iraq is swarming with terrorists who intend to carve a Caliphate out of northern Iraq and Syria; The U.S. President has declined to supply friendly Kurds in northern Iraq with the weapons they need to repulse terrorists who have cut off the heads of American reporters and rescue workers; Russia is sending tanks onto eastern Ukraine; China is laughing behind its hands at the U.S. President, who has been openly mocked by Putin. In Connecticut, the U.S. Congressional delegation has been captured by Democrat progressives who support Obama’s accomodationist policies. The progressive Democratic president has no coherent foreign policy because he is incapable, along with the Connecticut U.S. Congressional delegation, of distinguishing friends – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is one – from the sworn enemies of the United States. Hint: If a ruler of a country regards you as “The Great Satan,” he is your permanent enemy.

Bismarkian hint: If you don’t fight your opponent, he wins. That is the real lesson of the recently concluded elections in Connecticut. The short answer to the question “Why did Republicans in Connecticut lose elections when so many of their compatriots elsewhere in the nation won unquestioned victories” is –  You have to fight to win.