There are two stories in the
Hartford Courant of general interest. The first is a front page, top of the
fold story, “Getting To Know Joe Ganim” the present Democrat Mayor of Bridgeport now running for governor.
The story is what we call in the trade “a puff piece.”
Perhaps all we need to know about Ganim is that he’s not John Rowland, though
the recent past of both are eerily similar. Would a major newspaper in Connecticut
publish a top of the fold, front page puff piece on Rowland if, after his
release from prison, he had run for, say, mayor of Hartford, won, and then
announced his candidacy for governor, as Ganim did in Bridgeport? Unfortunately
for the hapless Rowland, he went into the radio talk show business on his first
release from the hoosegow.
The second front page, top of the fold story, parked next to
the Ganim story, is “Gun Control Hopes
Rise,” reprinted from the Washington Post. Here is the lede: “The school shooting
in Parkland, Florida has sparked an urgent push for gun control, giving activists cautious hope that politicians might be willing to take some type of bipartisan
action – action that has been illusive after previous mass shootings... President Donald Trump said Monday that he is open to improving
the background check system used to screen those who buy firearms, a measure
that has bipartisan support and the backing of the National Rifle Association(NRA).”
The shocking note in the story is that Trump and the NRA, vilified
shamelessly in Connecticut by the state’s all Democrat U.S. Congressional
Delegation and a colluding media – U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris
Murphy taking the lead – have voiced support for the FixNICS Act, a Murphy-John
Cornyn bill. Murphy offered a gloss on all this: “Trump’s support for the
FixNICS Act, my bill with @John Cornyn, is another sign the politics of gun
violence are shifting rapidly.” The paper noted that Murphy added a proviso: “the
bill alone is not an adequate response to mass shootings.”
How should we characterize “the politics of gun violence?”
The data on gun violence have been manipulated by Murphy and
others, whose rhetoric is maddeningly misleading. “First get your facts, then
you can distort them at your leisure," Mark Twain said.
The “recent development” reported in the story – hinting that
Trump has had a Damascus Road conversion on the matter of gun regulation – is
what Twain used to call “a stretcher.” But it should serve as a speed bump for
highly partisan opponents of Trump, including all the Democrat members of
Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation, but most especially rhetorical
flame-throwers Blumenthal and Murphy. Both, for example, have suggested Trump is batty or senile or malevolent. Trump, and anyone associated with him,
however remote the association, have “blood on their hands.” And the caveat in the story, suggesting further unalterable opposition,
indicates that Murphy in the future plans to take that speed bump at ninety
miles an hour: “The bill alone is not an adequate response to mass shootings.”
Approval of the bill allows Murphy to have his cake and eat it too.
And what does that mean?
It means that Murphy and others do not want Trump’s presumed
Damascus Road conversion to kill a promising campaign bludgeon. The same stratagem
shows itself in the highly attenuated Trump-Russian collusion stories. According
to the law, one may be innocent until proven guilty, but process justice can
delay an accounting of innocence or guilt as long as the means of delay are
available.
When I was a sophomore in High School my father, who believed
that idleness was the Devil's playground, got me a job for a summer on
construction. I shoveled dirt near newly installed catch basins and helped with
road curbing. The first day on the job, I was too energetically shoveling dirt,
when I felt a shove from behind, which toppled me in the mud. It was the back-hoe driver nudging me with his shovel. “Hey kid,” he said, very kindly I thought
at the time, “you’re killing the job.”
Murphy, Blumenthal and the rest of the Democrat firing squad
do not want the imitation blood they’ve daubed on Trump’s hands to disappear
until after the upcoming elections, at which point, so they hope, they may be able
to kill -- not with kindness -- all election efforts by Republicans to reform Connecticut
and pull the state from its ditch.
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