A few weeks ago, Democrats and their sounding boards in the
increasingly irrelevant media fired a shot across Republican Presidential
candidate Mario Rubio’s “yacht,” hoping to sink his candidacy. It turned out
the yacht was a fishing boat; but, no matter, Democrats had made a point.
Republicans are rich – therefore insensitive to the vast yachtless middle class.
Republican candidate for Governor Tom Foley suffered the
same scrutiny -- with this difference: Foley really was rich, and his yacht did
not resemble the creaky boats used by Mr. Rubio’s Cuban forbearers to escape the
remorseless tyranny of the Castro brothers, both communists who long ago had declared
war on yacht owners and political opponents and gays and others who opposed
their brutal autocratic regime. Fidel Castro had a yacht. (See the picture above
showing uber-rich Lowell Weicker canoodling with Fidel on his yacht.) Mr. Weicker, Maverick U.S. Senator and Governor of Connecticut, also had a
yacht. The Castro regime is now being given a leg-up by President Barack Obama
who, consulting his Ouija board, has willy-nilly decided to end a blockade
against communist oppression supported by all his presidential predecessors,
some of whom were Democrats.
Now, it so happens that Democrats in Connecticut who wish to
tar Republicans as redundantly rich have a problem, because two members of
Connecticut’s all-Democrat U.S. Congressional delegation are redundantly rich. U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is among the four
or five richest members in Congress. And Representative Rosa DeLauro – Whether
she will retire her seat to progressive heartthrob State Senator Ted Kennedy Jr. is yet
unknown – is also “comfortable,” largely owing to the money grubbing efforts of her husband Stanley Greenberg, pollster and political consultant to Democratic
stars. Ms. DeLauro has a multi-million dollar mansion in Washington DC where the lights of the national Democratic
Party gather from time to time in a salon-like setting to discuss how they might improve their good fortune. No one
knows whether Ms. DeLauro or Mr. Blumenthal keep yachts, but both can well
afford boats larger than Mr. Rubio’s “Old Man In The Sea” fishing boat.
Themis Klarides, the State House Republic Minority Leader, DID
arrive in the General Assembly from the middle class; and, oh yes, she is a
woman. Her father owned a restaurant; her forbearers were Greek proletarians. Perhaps
some of them were fishermen. She is not conspicuously rich, unlike Mr. Weicker,
whose grandfather founded Squib,
the pharmaceutical company that recently decided to bolt Connecticut for more
promising opportunities in other states. Like Mr. Castro’s boat people,
businessmen across Connecticut – from Aetna, Travelers, General Electric, Stanley
Works, Sikorsky, just to mention a few
-- are threatening to leave the state, perhaps in their yachts.
Ms. Klarides recently stumbled into the politically-correct
tar pit when she said of Connecticut prickly governor and his relationship with
Democrats in the General Assembly, “Every Democrat up there distanced himself
from the governor the whole session. And then the governor tried to distance
himself from the legislature. It's like a battered spouse support group."
This “story,” first reported by Neil Vigdor in the Danbury
News Times, has produced a backlash from offended groups such as the Connecticut
Coalition Against Domestic Violence whose chief executive officer Karen Jarmoc remarked,
“To compare a political body that is divisively debating a budget to a domestic
violence support group completely negates the effectiveness of this element of
service, which helps thousands of victims in shelters and communities across
the state.”
Actually, no.
Here is Mrs. Smith, my ninth grade English teacher in
Windsor Locks presiding over the proper understanding of metaphors: “The word
'like' does not signify identity but similarity, and similarity, like love, is
in the eye of the beholder."
What a pity that members of groups attacking Ms. Klarides
did not have Mrs. Smith as one of their teachers. Governor Malloy is a bully;
domestic abusers are bullies, therefore one is LIKE the other in this narrowly stated
respect. One need not be insensitive to domestic abuse victims when pointing
out a similarity between A and B, remembering always that A is NOT B.
Pray tell, when Colin McEnroe compared Mr. Malloy to a porcupine
– bristly, hard to the touch, quick in throwing quills at his largely
inoffensive political opponents, a bully and a political ruffian too – did Mr.
McEnroe intend to say Mr. Malloy WAS a porcupine? Does Mr. McEnroe’s comparison
adversely injure the reputation of porcupines? Should porcupines, resenting the
compassion, have complained bitterly to Mr. Vigdor that Mr. McEnroe had failed
to perceive the usefulness and good works of porcupines? And how – please tell
us how – a reporter in whom a sense of humor is not dead as a doornail could
fail to see the humor in such absurd associations?
Surely the too easily offended among us owe Ms. Klarides an
apology for suggesting, however tenuously, that she favors domestic violence, a
slur one might expect from Malloy the porcupine – but not from groups that have
yet to protest that Mike Lawlor’s Get-Out-Of-Jail-Early program does NOT exempt
from early release convicted rapists and
arsonists.
Along with most other Republicans in the General Assembly, Ms.
Klarides -- a volunteer with The Umbrella Domestic
Violence Group, working to assist victims of domestic violence and providing
volunteer legal assistance to women and children at the shelter for victims of
domestic violence -- has strenuously opposed including convicted rapists among
prisoners awarded early release for having participated in Mr. Lawlor’s seriously flawed program.
It is still not too late for women across the state to add
their voices to that of Ms. Klarides and other Republicans who are courageous
enough to IDENTIFY rape and domestic abuse.
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