Connecticut’s Republican Party Nominating Convention has in
its wisdom nominated Matt Corey to run against U.S. Senator Chris Murphy who,
along with his compatriot in the Senate, Dick Blumenthal, has been "efforting," as the leftists say, during
the entire first year of the Trump presidency, to subvert a national election. To date, they have been far more successful in their efforts than the Russians.The hangman, special counsel Robert Mueller, has been for months braiding a noose
behind the scenes.
Both Murphy, up for re-election this year, and Blumenthal
have pilloried nearly all of Trump’s cabinet appointments, including recently
installed Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, a position once occupied by
Hillary Clinton, whose campaign for the presidency was, we are invited to
believe, torpedoed by Russian spooks in league with Trump.
Thus far, the deposal effort has moved from conspiracy with
Russia to subvert an American election, a crime on the law books, to subversion,
less serious and not a crime, to “cooperation with Russians,” which is a form
of bad manners. Czar of all the Russians Vladimir Putin, everyone will admit,
has for years attempted to disturb democracy at home and abroad. Without
alleging conspiracy between Putin and the efforts of anti-democratic forces
here in the United States to further disturb America’s rickety Republic, Putin’s
subversive acts have proven hugely successful: The attempts to subvert a
national election on the part of the Democrat National Committee (DNC) continue apace.
Blumenthal voted down the Pompeo nomination because, as he
pointed out in one of his ubiquitous media releases,
“Mike Pompeo has no experience in
diplomacy – instead, his experience is in intelligence and as a Member of
Congress, where he took $400,000 from the Koch brothers. He has a record of
standing against reproductive rights both here and abroad. He’s made statements
about the LGBTQ community that are antithetical to American values. I opposed
his nomination because I believe he will only reinforce President Trump’s worst
instincts, but now that he has been confirmed, I certainly hope to be proven
wrong.”
None of Blumenthal’s
objections will be surprising to those in Connecticut who have long regarded him
as “the senator from Planned Parenthood.”
Murphy’s media assault on Pompeo on April 26 shadowed Blumenthal’s: “I acknowledge there are reasons to vote for
Mike Pompeo, but on balance, I simply do not believe he is qualified to become
our nation's chief diplomat,” said Murphy. “He has a disturbing
history of favoring military action over diplomacy, he does not seem to have an
appreciation for the responsibility of Congress to initiate military action
overseas, and he has long associated with and legitimized the radical
anti-Muslim wing of the Republican Party. I hope my fears about Director Pompeo
are wrong, but I could not vote for someone who will likely encourage the worst
instincts and biases of our reckless president.”
Before Trump
seriously embarked on winning the White House, Bill Buckley, then the preeminent
conservative in the United States, tagged him as “a vulgarian.” But Trump is
not quite so vulgar as to suppose that Planned Parenthood, responsible for the
bulk of abortions in the nation, is a moral avatar, or that the selling of aborted
baby parts to doctors is in conformity with any of the Ten Commandments. Indeed,
Senator Blumenthal's consistent operative assumption has been that ANY
restriction on abortion – say, limiting fetal destruction to the point at which
the fetus in the womb cannot feel pain – is the gravest of sins. As Attorney
General in Connecticut for two decades, Blumenthal made his political bones by forcefully imposing restrictions on any business that incurred his displeasure,
which is why he is known in his state as “the consumer protection senator.”
Blumenthal is less interested – far less interested – in restricting onerous
federal or state regulations. That would be bad for progressive political business.
Murphy is Blumenthal’s
Doppelgänger. Like Blumenthal, his moral approbation appears to be unrelated to
reality. It is not the responsibility of
Congress to “initiate military action overseas.” That is the exclusive constitutional prerogative of the president, who is the commander in chief of
the armed forces when they are called into military action. It may be important
to note that the United States is still at war with North Korea, however belligerent
that may appear to Murphy or Blumenthal. Congress may exercise a constitutional
veto of sorts by denying funds for military action, but it is not authorized to
INITIATE military action anywhere in the world. When Hillary Clinton, under
orders from her commander-in-chief Barack Obama, refused to respond rationally to an attack
on an American embassy in Benghazi, she and Obama were operating
under constitutional auspices. Had she ordered American forces to defend its
embassy, she would not have needed Murphy’s permission to do so. There are some
people who believe that the Obama/Hillary “lead from behind” non-defense of its
own ambassador was immoral; among other things unrelated to Russian
interference in American elections, this lapse in moral vigor may in part have cost Hillary
her election to the presidency.
So far, Pompeo has
been fairly successful in his diplomatic mission to North Korea, as has our
vulgarian President. Sometimes in American diplomacy, presidents have to
brandish Teddy Roosevelt’s “Big Stick.” When and how to do so is part of
the art of good governance.
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