Surrounded by ad makers, cartoonists, various temporary –
we hope – politicians who reach for the stars in their attempts to explain the
nature of man and the universe, Americans are used to hyperbole. It surrounds
us like a sometime amusing sea of comic exaggeration and error. Sometimes, you
have to blow a thing up to understand it. It’s OK; hyperbole has long history,
sometimes honorable, sometimes not, in our politics.
Most Americans shrug when President Donald Trump unveils a
stunning hyperbole; as with a window, they see THROUGH the intended
exaggeration to the more modest truth obscured by the hyperbole.
But some hyperboles are opaque; in these, there is nothing
behind the words, no “there” there.
Here is a passage from
a Hartford paper: “After a gunman killed 17 people at a Florida high
school, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said Republicans in Congress and President Donald
Trump ‘have blood on their hands’ for passing a law last year that made it
easier for people with mental illness to buy guns.” One wonders how many people
who have metal illness and guns DID NOT, during the past four decades, burst
into schools and slaughter children with assault weapons. Failing to stop at
the water's edge, Malloy, bitten by the hyperbole bug, dove in, assailing
all legislators who presumed, some for good reasons, to disagree with
Connecticut’s two hyperbolic U.S. Senators, Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy.
“We’ve got a bunch of yellow-bellied senators and congressmen,” Malloy steamed,
“who knew better but are more afraid of the NRA than their children getting
killed. For God’s sake we had a congressman shot on a baseball field, and we
couldn’t bring Congress around to do something about it. So I’ve given up
holding my breath.” The shooter Malloy referenced was stopped by Capitol police
who were armed. Had they not been on the scene, the carnage would have been
much greater. Apparently assault weapons deployed by good guys against bad guys
are good assault weapons. Holding one’s breath does sometimes leave one giddy.
Here is another hyperbolic missile, this
one launched by Mike Lawlor, Governor Dannel Malloy’s “Under
Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning,” a title nearly as long as
Pinocchio’s nose: “Wow,” Lawlor Twittered
in late January, “Connecticut gets its first full-force racist enabler
candidate for Attorney General.” And he cited a CTMirror story, “Susan
Hatfield, a prosecutor, explores GOP campaign for AG.”
“Susan Hatfield,” the lede ran, “a state prosecutor from
eastern Connecticut who was a Donald J. Trump delegate in 2016 and once worked
in Washington as a young policy aide to former U.S. House Speaker Newt
Gingrich, opened an exploratory campaign Monday for the Republican nomination
for attorney general.” A picture of Hatfield without her KKK hood accompanied
the story.
Hatfield is no more a racist enabler than Lawlor. So, why
did Lawlor choose to defame her in this fashion? Well, one guess is
that Lawlor, perhaps too needy a guy, was looking for approval from
the kind of people who thrill to false charges of racism and off-the-wall
exaggeration when launched at people less progressive than Lawlor.
There are dozens of reasons why smart people do and say dumb
things, some of them leading by hidden paths to pathologies that are better
left undiscussed, because they may not apply to the case in hand. Perhaps Lawlor
found this mud ball lying around his office and yielded to an irresistible urge
to hurl it at Hatfield, whose background does not suggest she gets her jollies
by enabling those who intimidate honest people by burning crosses on their
lawns.
The connection between Hatfield and racism is highly tenuous
– because it does not exist at all, except in the fevered imagination of the
Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning. Is the tag just?
Nope. Was the hurling of the dirtball planned? It seems it was. One emerges
from conversations with Lawlor feeling that every word of his is planned. This
can be a good rather than a bad trait. Prosecutors – Lawlor, like Malloy, was a
prosecutor – plan things, sometime obsessively. It is the business of Chairmen
of the Judiciary Committee, a post held by Lawlor from 1995 to 2011, to plan
things, and Lawlor, co-chairman along with then Senator Andrew McDonald,
recently nominated by Malloy to fill a vacancy for Chief Justice of
Connecticut’s Supreme Court, was an artful planner.
For some reason, Lawlor wanted some people to believe that
Hatfield enabled racists. And how did she do this? Pay attention now; the
causal connections are as ghostly as a bad dream – because they have no objective reality outside the sleepy mind of the dreamer.
Hatfield “was a Donald J. Trump delegate in 2016 and once worked in Washington
as a young policy aide to former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich.” The
unstated axiom in Lawlor’s charge is that Trump is a racist – Malloy
thinks he is a murderer of school children, who has "blood
in his hands" following the mass murder of school children in
Florida? -- and Hatfield, by serving as a delegate in 2016, is
therefore a racist enabler. Did Hatfield become a racist because of her
association with Gingrich – also a possible racist enabler because he too,
along with approximately half the country, approved of the nomination of Trump
for president – or did Hatfield catch racism, as one catches a cold, by
indirect exposure to Trump, who is NOT a racist?
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