Connecticut’s Junior U.S. Senator Chris Murphy is not up for
reelection this election cycle. In two years, an eternity away, anything may
happen. Or as T.S. Eliot put it in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
To be sure, indecisions, visions and revisions have become
more problematic in the Internet Age. Just ask Democratic Presidential
contender Hillary Clinton, who sought to safeguard her privacy rights – which,
the U.S. Supreme Court tells us, are to be found in the “aura of rights”
surrounding the Constitution – by installing a private server as a hedge
against appropriate disclosure to monitoring agencies. Transparency is all very
well – for thee, but not for me. The seasoned politician prefers opacity in
thought, word and deed.
It is common for Presidential nominees to receive
intelligence briefings. Last May, Mr.Murphy raised concerns about Donald Trump’s accesses to customary intelligence briefings because, he
told Buzz Feed, Mr. Trump “wouldn’t think twice of taking classified
information and putting it out in the public realm if he thought it served his
political purposes.” This although Mr. Trump is not a seasoned politician such as
Mrs. Clinton who, come to think of it, did in fact put top secret information
on her private server, which was not at all secure. The classified information
was then hacked and shared with the world.
A public response from Mr. Murphy condemning Mrs. Clinton’s audacity
might fill a thimble, maybe. Although Mr. Murphy is much in the habit of
mounting political stumps at every opportunity to pump his own political
prospects, he has yet to condemn Mrs. Clinton for not thinking twice – or even
once -- before putting classified information out in the public realm.
Mr. Murphy’s courageous effusions have propelled him
elsewhere. Last week, we are told by the Connecticut Post,
“U.S. Sen. Chris
Murphy on Thursday took a deep dive into the interwoven worlds of the
gun-rights movement and gunmakers, saying anti-government ‘neo-anarchist’
Republicans are aligned with a firearms industry desperate to sell more guns to
a shrinking customer base.”
The overheated rhetoric – “neo-anarchist Republicans” –
leaves law abiding gun owners wondering if Mr. Murphy knows what an anarchist
is, or what a Republican is, or what “is” is.
Mr. Murphy’s anti-gun obsession has carried him far beyond
the restraints of reason. Are workers in Connecticut’s once flourishing gun
industry, some driven out of state by the boiling rhetoric of politicians on
the make, neo-anarchists? Connecticut used to be known as the “provision state”
because Mr. Murphy’s anarchists have provided the U.S. government since its
founding with munitions and guns, not to mention frightening nuclear submarines.
Is Connecticut an anarchic state? Are people who presume to quibble with
government – that would be Mr. Murphy – concerning the imprescriptible rights
and immunities declared in the Declaration of Independence or the Amendments to
the U.S. Constitution anarchists with bombs in their teeth?
Was Judge St. George Tucker an anarchist? Known among his
contemporaries as the Montesquieu of America at the time the country was
founded and later appointed by President James Madison as U.S. District Judge
for Virginia, Judge Tucker regarded the Second Amendment as “the
palladium of liberty,” that is a bulwark guarding a natural law, a
right of nature, upon which all other rights
depend: “This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty. . . . The
right of self-defense is the first law of nature: in most governments it has
been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits
possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to
keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited,
liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”
Prior to the adoption of the Second Amendment in the United
States, St. George noted, the right to bear arms In England was reserved to the
moneyed interests through provisions in the law that kept the lower orders in
their proper places, unarmed and defenseless against their tyrannical betters.
The deprivation of the right of all to bear arms for the purpose of thwarting
the tyranny of aristocrats or home-bred potentates was achieved through
hunting laws.
Is Mrs. Clinton an anarchist? When current President Barack
Obama disparaged the lower orders in America as “bitter, they cling to guns or
religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” it
was Mrs. Clinton, then running for President in a Democratic Party primary, who
rose to their defense. Mr. Obama was an “elitist” she said and as such found it
impossible to understand the struggles of “hard-working Americans, white
Americans."
White Americans – OMG! Now here is something that should inflate
Mr. Murphy’s political sails. Is it possible that Mr. Murphy’s choice for
President is a racist? Perish the thought.
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